Climate-Responsive Façade Strategies for School Buildings in India’s Composite and Transitional Climates: A Systematic Review

Abstract

School facades control solar gain, daylighting, ventilation and noise in crowded classrooms. Most Indian classrooms are naturally ventilated, yet school façade guidance is generic and rarely considers embodied impacts. This review examines 2015-2026 evidence on climate-responsive school facades relevant to India's composite and transitional climates and identifies gaps limiting their implementation in Pune. This PRISMA 2020 systematic review used fourteen search strings in Consensus, an AI-assisted academic search engine indexing Semantic Scholar, Scopus, PubMed and arXiv, along with a preliminary bibliography. Of 336 records, 314 were screened after de-duplication and 94 studies were included. The evidence is voluminous but poorly aligned with the problem: 44 studies concern educational buildings, 33 concern India, and only 12 concern both; none combines façade design with life-cycle assessment (LCA). Simulation dominates (46%), and no Indian school façade study is field-validated. Fixed shading and window-to-wall ratio (WWR) optimisation reduced energy or cooling demand by 2–36% compared with study baselines, but the optimal WWR ranged from 10% to 60% and was not transferable between sites. Students in naturally ventilated Indian classrooms accepted operative temperatures of 15-34 °C, much wider than the National Building Code range of 21-26 °C, indicating that code-based façade optimisation overestimates cooling requirements. LCA studies show that reducing operational energy may increase whole-life carbon, depending on grid carbon intensity; this trade-off is untested in Indian schools. The review proposes a four-stage approach for school facades in Pune and similar climates, encompassing façade variables, daylight and adaptive-comfort metrics, whole-life carbon and multi-criteria decision-making.