The public teaching buildings of universities have a large flow of people, high lighting requirements, and large energy consumption, which present significant potential for energy saving. The greatest opportunity for integrating “green” architectural design strategies lies in the design phase, especially the early stage of architectural design. However, current designers often rely on experience or qualitative judgment for decision-making. Thus, there is a pressing need for rational and quantitative green architectural design theories and techniques to guide and support decision-making for the design parameters of teaching buildings. This study, based on field surveys of 40 teaching buildings, constructs building archetypes regarding energy consumption including 28 typical values. Based on the “Rectangle”, “L”, “U”, and “Courtyard” archetypes, through batch energy consumption simulation and multiple regression methods, the influence mechanisms of nine energy consumption influencing factors on four types of building energy consumptions were explored, and energy consumption prediction models were derived. The findings of this research can serve as factor evaluation and selection in the early stage of architectural design for public teaching buildings at universities, and the prediction model can assist in the early estimation of energy consumption. This aims to enrich and supplement green architectural design methods by supporting the design of green public teaching buildings and providing reference and application for relevant engineering practices.

Over the past two decades, Building-Integrated Photovoltaics (BIPV) has become a core technology in the green building sector, driven by global carbon-neutrality goals and the growing demand for sustainable design. This review adopts a scalability-oriented perspective and systematically examines 82 peer-reviewed articles published between 2001 and 2025. The results indicate that existing research is dominated by studies on electrical and thermal performance, with East Asia and Europe—particularly China, Japan, and Germany—emerging as the most active regions. This dominance matters for scalability because real projects must satisfy comfort, compliance, buildability, and operation/maintenance constraints alongside energy yield; limited evidence in these dimensions increases delivery risk when transferring solutions across regions and building types. Accordingly, we interpret the observed distribution as an evidence-maturity pattern: performance gains are increasingly well characterized, whereas deployment-relevant uncertainties (e.g., boundary-condition sensitivity and validation depth) remain less consistently reported. Multidimensional integration of thermal, optical, and electrical functions is gaining momentum; however, user-centered performance dimensions remain underexplored. Simulation-based approaches still prevail, whereas large-scale empirical studies are limited. The review also reveals extensive interdisciplinary collaboration but also identifies a notable lack of architectural perspectives. Using Biblioshiny, this study maps co-authorship networks and research structures. Based on the evidence, we propose future research directions to enhance the practical scalability of BIPV, including strengthening interdisciplinary integration, expanding empirical validation, and developing product-level design strategies.

To meet the comfort and health needs of the elderly in daily activity environments, a refined temporal and zonal thermal environment design across diverse spaces must align with dynamic changes in their daily activity spatiotemporal trajectories. This constitutes a research gap in the existing literature. This study focused on elderly individuals in rural Xi’an, integrating on-site subjective daily activity questionnaires, thermal comfort field surveys, and continuous thermal environment monitoring to evaluate summer thermal environments based on spatiotemporal activity differentiation. The key conclusions are as follows: (1) Elderly people primarily engage in activities in indoor and outdoor spaces, with considerably fewer activities occurring in semi-outdoor areas. Summer outdoor activities occur between 6:00 and 9:00 and 17:00–21:00, while indoor activities dominate other times. (2) The established adaptive thermal response models indicate indoor and outdoor neutral temperatures are 23.8 °C (Operative temperature) and 28.8 °C (UTCI). Indoor 80% acceptability upper limit is 27.5 °C and outdoor 80% acceptability upper limit is 34.1 °C. These results exhibit distinct differences from those observed in alternative climate zones and urban areas in the same climate zone. (3) The thermal environment of outdoor shaded areas remains within the acceptable range for a longer duration than that of indoors, and kitchens have the worst indoor thermal quality. This evaluation provides supplementary insights into current spatiotemporal thermal environment research.

This study aims to investigate the perturbation mechanisms of street tree morphological characteristics on the near-surface carbon monoxide (CO) concentration distribution at the micro-scale. Based on the L16(45) orthogonal experimental design and numerical simulations, the impacts of four morphological parameters—tree height, branching height, crown spread, and canopy edge distance—on CO concentration were systematically quantified. Range and variance contribution analysis indicate that branching height is the absolute dominant factor governing CO dispersion with a contribution rate of 49.97%, which significantly promotes the dissipation of bottom-level pollutants by expanding the under-canopy clearance. Crown spread, with a contribution rate of 25.58%, exhibits a marginally significant positive correlation with CO concentration due to enhanced aerodynamic resistance, whereas the effect of tree height does not reach statistical significance. Furthermore, by eliminating redundant variables through stepwise regression analysis, a multivariate empirical prediction model for CO concentration (R2 = 0.77) was established, incorporating branching height, crown spread, and canopy edge distance as independent variables. This study reveals the decisive role of under-canopy spatial permeability in regulating the microclimate environment, and provides a solid quantitative basis for the topological optimization of urban green spaces targeting low pollutant retention and the precise selection of street trees.

This study aims to evaluate the comprehensive potential of cooling strategies in an old urban block in Xi’an, China, where the outdoor environment requires significant improvement. The Luomashi block is chosen as a case study. The strategies include cool pavement (CP) and facade (CF), green facade (GF) and roof (GR), tree-planting (TP), water fountain (WF) and mist (MR), and their combinations. The results show that most of the individual strategies can reduce the canyon air temperature and the physiological equivalent temperature (PET) at the pedestrian height of 1.5 m throughout the day. The combination of CP, CF, CR, TP, WF, and MR (CC1) can reduce the daily N–S and E–W canyon air temperatures by 1.4 °C and 1.0 °C, respectively. For the combination of CP, GF, GR, TP, WF, and MR (CC2), the reductions are 1.4 °C and 1.1 °C. Meanwhile, these two combination scenarios can reduce the daily mean PET by 2.71 °C and 2.87 °C, and reduce the daily cooling energy demand by 8.4% and 8.9%. The exploratory findings reveal the site-specific cooling potential of these particular mitigation configurations within the historical fabric of the Luomashi block, highlighting that the performance is highly dependent on the chosen baseline parameters and local morphological constraints.