Lukas Lauss honored with the City of Munich´s Hochschulpreis

How can buildings be prevented from consuming significantly more energy in operation than their design intended? This question lies at the heart of Dr.-Ing. Lukas Lauss's dissertation “Optimizing Building Performance and Minimizing Performance Gaps through Robust Buildings” at the Chair of Building Technology and Climate Responsive Design led by Prof. Thomas Auer. For his research on optimizing building performance, he was awarded the City of Munich's 2026 Hochschulpreis.

The research focuses on the so-called “performance gap”—the discrepancy between a building’s intended performance and its actual performance in operation. Using newly developed simulation and optimization methods, Lauss analyzed the causes of these performance deficiencies and developed strategies to reduce them. His findings demonstrate that eliminating performance gaps and optimizing building operation can lead to significant energy savings. The research thus provides valuable insights for achieving a climate-neutral building stock and for the successful implementation of the energy transition in the building sector.

A building's energy and renovation needs, and consequently its CO₂ emissions, are determined using standardized calculations that, as a rule, deviate from reality. What is new about the work is the level of detail with which the effects of individual factors – building technology and its monitoring, as well as the behavior of building occupants – on this so-called performance gap are analyzed.

For the City of Munich, the work is valuable in two respects. First, alongside renovation and heat planning, efficient building operation is a key lever that can now be fine-tuned more precisely thanks to this research. Second, the findings can also be applied to the city's own building stock, helping to increase efficiency across municipal properties.

The City of Munich's Hochschulpreis is awarded annually at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität Munich, Munich University of Applied Sciences, and Technical University of Munich (TUM) for outstanding theses and research projects addressing current urban challenges. Each award carries prize money of €5,000. The awards were presented by Mayor Verena Dietl together with the Head of the Department of Labor and Economic Development, Dr. Christian Scharpf, and representatives of Munich's universities.

The full dissertation is available via mediaTUM.