The environmental performance of buildings needs to be considered in the early stages of the design process. Therefore, emphasis is nowadays placed in integrating the teaching of building performance with the design studios at schools of architecture. Preparing students for the complex role of an architect as a coordinator of all the aspects of a building design is gaining more and more importance. This article describes and compares the methods of teaching building performance to architecture students at several universities in Europe and in the USA. It identifies the main tendencies in the syllabuses of building physics courses and is especially targeted to the relevance of these courses to the design studios at those schools. It also reviews some of the learning materials, recommended or accessible to students of those courses. To achieve a relevant comparison, each of the countries where these schools are located is described in terms of the specific conditions of building physics design and the resulting problematics for an architect. These conditions include technical standards and requirements, the methods of building performance evaluation used and the climate.