The paper presents a comparative study of three strategies in the design of the building envelope of multistory residential buildings combining enhanced energy performance and architectural innovation. The first strategy, serving as base case, employs a high performance flat facade, applied to a building of square layout. The second strategy introduces multifaceted facade geometries, comprising plates of varying tilt angles, to the same building layout, in order to assess the impact of envelope geometry on energy performance. The third approach investigates the impact on energy performance of varying building layouts as applied to flat and multifaceted facades. British Columbia (Canada) serves as location of the study, representing northern climate conditions. For all three design approaches, the most important stage towards achieving high performance is to design an energy efficient building envelope. Comparison of energy performance of complex facade geometries to the base case, indicates that these geometrical patterns do not significantly compromise the thermal performance of the building, while enabling a considerable increase in the electricity generation potential by integrated photovoltaic systems. In folded-plate facade systems, this increase in PV potential is observed on per unit area basis as well as per total facade area. In addition, some of these facade patterns allow time spread of useful electricity generation of the BIPV systems. Combining folded facade geometry with building layouts that allow large south and near south exposure has the potential of enabling energy positive status. While the paper focuses on residential buildings, the methodology can be applied to any type of high-rise building.