Abstract The sustainability of the built environment largely depends on its energy and environmental performances. The overall objective, across the different phases of the building life cycle, is to improve building and system performances in terms of economics, comfort, environmental impact and durability. Several modelling methodologies have been developed in order to evaluate the energy performance of buildings. Generally, every modelling methodology responds effectively to some specific tasks, but there exists a lack of integration in particular with respect to the cross-disciplinary role of data. Given the multi-scale and multi-objective nature of the problem of optimization of the energy and environmental performances of the built environment, an appropriate synthesis and integration process in modelling methodologies has to be identified, addressing realistically the uncertainties inherently present in modelling strategies. Visualization and data analysis techniques are successfully used in a wide variety of applications, both in theoretical and applied domains, but questions remains about their robustness, efficiency and applicability to the problems introduced before. The paper aims to analyze critically these topics by means of case studies, showing a possible path to create a multi-scale methodology able to synthesize all the relevant aspects.