I have taught and observed enclosure and building physics courses at several universities. Excellent courses were usually taught by specialists with broad backgrounds, while fragmented and mediocre courses were taught by instructors with narrow backgrounds. It is no surprise that whatever name is used for this domain of engineering, it is a multidisciplinary field.

Building physics started from observed non-structural failures. In the 1970s, some real-time risk assessment became possible with heat and mass transfer modeling. Yet the fragmented nature of analysis prevented a holistic understanding of building performance. One generation later, the field of building physics became holistic and complex. A simplistic introduction to physics was replaced by a focus on different factors affecting indoor environments and their multi-disciplinary interactions, occupants’ comfort or durability of materials, use of combined monitoring and modeling, and limitations of artificial intelligence. It is necessary because the next generation of building physics will deal with people more than technology.

Today, despite progress in technology and the fact that the passive house approach, combined with the energy supply method discussed elsewhere, may save 70 to 80% of building energy, we cannot change the role of buildings in climate change. The Canadian demonstration of a passive house in 1978 failed because the gap between building science and construction practice was, and still is, too large. Canada, the USA, and Japan responded by instituting public-private, high-impact national programs, which changed the design focus from improving building materials to designing the whole building and selecting materials for specific contributions to the assembly.

It is of paramount significance that building science (physics) courses continue this trend, addressing the future indoor environment and energy solutions, considering the integration of heating-cooling and ventilation technologies, integration with smart technologies, and designing buildings as part of building clusters.

Generally speaking, the performance paradigm concerns quality assessment of entities and processes. As applied to buildings, the performance paradigm encompasses the definition of criteria and variables relevant to the specification, prediction, measurement, and validation of buildings' quality. The performance-based approach to the building delivery process, given its outcome-centric nature, arguably offers certain advantages, including flexibility in design decision-making. However, viewed from a broader sustainability perspective, the current practices regarding the implementation of the building performance paradigm display certain limitations. These pertain primarily to issues of scale (e.g., individual building units versus whole urban neighborhoods), agency (e.g., individual stakeholders versus communal entities, public institutions, commercial conglomerates, as well as national and international organizations), and impact (e.g., local optimization of narrowly conceived factors versus high-level spatio-temporal performance targets). This keynote presentation explores these limitations and their multifaceted implications for the sustainability discourse. Moreover, the potential and prospects of a distinctly integrative stance toward the performance paradigm are discussed.