With the current issues concerning the potential savings in the building sector, reducing building energy consumption is a key point. Up to now, efforts have been focused on insulation to separate the inner ambiance from the fluctuation of the outside air temperature. However, insulating a building from its environment deprives it from the renewable free energy sources which exchange with the envelope, either they are heating or cooling sources. Using the building envelope to exploit these resources is the very principle of the bioclimatic architecture. But bioclimatic systems have never been evaluated regarding the amount of available energy they could use, partly because the energy exchanges between the resources and the building have never been really qualified regarding to the building needs, neither quantified in terms of available energy capacity to meet these needs. The aim of this thesis is thus to propose a method to assess both: - the capacity of the environmental resources to cover the building needs, - the ability of the building to exploit the available energy resources. The method is mainly based on energy simulation and the basic data is a comparison of the behaviour of a building with and without a given environmental resource. The building energy needs without the resource can be compared to the resource potential and this comparison give the useful potential of the resource. Moreover, by comparing the building energy needs in the simulation with and without resource, we can get the amount of energy actually used by the building. From these two quantities, the useful and the exploited potential, a set of indicators can be defined and adapted to thermal comfort (heating and cooling needs) and three resources (sun, sky and air). The indicators are then applied to a study case and the results are analysed not only at the scale of the building, but also at the scale of each part of the envelope. A first analysis of the global results over the year is performed to get a first understanding of the state of the resources and the building performances. In a second step, the values are analysed at each time step, to characterize the behaviour of the building towards the environment. Finally, the indicators can be used to design buildings, in several ways. We performed a parametric analysis of the insulation level over the potential and performance indicators. Then, we used them to assess the bioclimatic performances of existing solar technologies. In a final step, the indicators have been used as criteria to optimize the building envelope parameters. Thus, the envelope parameters are optimized according to the minimization of the energy need, but also according to the maximization of the exploited potential.
