Perception of importance and performance of the indoor environmental quality of high-rise residential buildings

The quality of buildings, including their performance in a range of indoor environmental attributes, is influential to the living quality of habitants. Many studies on appropriate importance weights for the attributes have been reported but few embraced both human perception of the importance of such attributes and the related performance of buildings. Focusing on typical public and private high-rise residential buildings in Hong Kong, users’ perceived importance of four key attributes, namely thermal comfort, air cleanliness, odour and noise, and their perceived performance of the buildings in these attributes were studied. Perceptions collected from 563 respondents were processed through an analytical hierarchy process to generate importance weights for the attributes. Correlation analyses corroborate that perceived importance may vary among buildings of different types and between residents and visitors. Thermal comfort was perceived by the vast majority as the most important. Using a performance-importance plot, it is shown how the gaps between perceived performance and perceived importance can be identified. The results can help determine the areas for improvement in new building designs and facilitate prioritization of limited resources for upgrading building performance.