University dormitories in cold climate regions face the dual challenges of high heating energy consumption and poor outdoor pedestrian comfort during winter. Existing studies on university dormitories have primarily focused on individual building performance optimization, while insufficient attention has been paid to the optimization of dormitory cluster layouts and their multi-objective performance. To address this gap, this study establishes a parametric multi-objective optimization framework to simultaneously minimize building energy use intensity, minimize wind speed at pedestrian height, and maximize outdoor thermal comfort. Based on three floor area ratio scenarios, 24 dormitory prototypes are extracted from three building typologies: row-type buildings, detached buildings, and enclosed buildings. The optimization process was implemented on the Grasshopper platform using the NSGA-II algorithm. Cluster analysis is conducted on the Pareto front, and Pearson correlation analysis is applied to investigate the relationships between six urban morphological parameters and the three optimization objectives. The results indicate that: (1) enclosed buildings (E-1 type) and detached buildings (D-1 type) dominate the Pareto-optimal solution set; (2) high-FAR buildings are predominantly distributed in the northeastern part of the site, while public spaces are concentrated in the central-southern area; (3) correlation analysis indicates that shape coefficient (SC) exhibits the strongest correlations with the three objectives; and (4) compared with dominated solutions, Pareto-optimal solutions reduce WS by 10.46% and EUI by 6.57%, while improving UTCI by 0.05 °C. This study provides quantitative decision-making support for efficient planning and low-carbon design of university dormitory clusters in cold climate regions.

Outdoor comfort is influenced by thermal, visual, and acoustic stimuli, whose relative roles may vary across functional spaces. This study compared multisensory comfort characteristics across five frequently used public outdoor functional spaces in the main built-up area of Dalian, China, during the autumn transition season and examined their associations with overall comfort. Rotational fixed-point monitoring and synchronous questionnaire surveys were conducted in residential, cultural, educational, commercial, and green spaces, yielding 1497 valid responses. The results showed that: (1) Among the five investigated public outdoor spaces, the residential space had the highest proportion of positive overall comfort votes, whereas the educational space showed more thermal discomfort and negative acoustic evaluations. (2) Thermal and acoustic sensations changed linearly with corresponding exposures, while visual comfort first increased and then decreased with illuminance. (3) Thermal comfort had the largest main effect on overall comfort, visual comfort was also significant, and thermal–acoustic interaction was observed. (4) SEM indicated distinct association pathways. The thermal pathway showed a significant serial indirect effect through thermal sensation and thermal comfort, while the visual pathway contained indirect effects in opposite directions and the acoustic pathway was characterized mainly by a direct negative association between LAeq and overall comfort. These findings support function-sensitive multisensory assessment and targeted outdoor environmental optimization.