The paper places the extensive body of knowledge on adaptive building components in the context of providing and maintaining a lasting performance robustness for integrated building systems. It furthermore differentiates three stochastic variables which potentially endanger a robust building performance: climate change, occupant’s behavior and HVAC system performance degradation. The literature reviewed and case studies discussed reveal that the available data for introducing the HVAC system performance degradation phenomena into the robustness assessment is very limited. The paper concludes that evaluating the performance of adaptive building components purely on annually saved energy misses to address its potential to enhance the longitudinal effect on strengthening the performance robustness also in response to HVAC system degradation.