Free-cooling is understood as a means to store outdoors coolness during the night, to supply indoors cooling during the day in summer, while free-heating is understood as a means to store the solar radiation during daytime, to supply indoors heating during the night in winter. In principle, free-cooling or free-heating can make the indoor air temperature in the comfortable region all the year if the thermophysical properties of building envelope material are in the desired range (defined as ideal thermophysical properties in this paper). Those properties are obviously related to the outdoor climate condition, internal heat source intensity, building configuration, ventilation mode etc. For a given region and a given building, the critical values of those ideal thermal physical properties can be determined through modeling and simulation. Two parameters, I-win and I-sum, are defined to describe the overcool degree in winter and the overheat degree in summer, respectively. To illustrate, the critical values of thermophysical properties of building envelope of a building located in Beijing are obtained through modeling and simulation. The simulated results are validated with experiments. The model, the methodology and the results are helpful for selection of suitable building envelope materials and for design of energy efficient buildings. (C) 2006 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.