Building environment is a course with a wide range of contents and a large amount of information. The key issue of this course is to make students clarify the relationship between occupants and building environments. With reconsideration of knowledge points in textbooks, we proposed a novel teaching approach from the perspective of occupants' demand and the function of buildings. Heat and humidity, air quality, and sound and light were focused on as three major parts in this course. From a view of occupants' demand for environment, we analyzed control parameter, evaluation index, and the influence of the environment on human beings, and the novel teaching approach was based on a people-oriented and environment construction idea to stimulate students' learning enthusiasm and interests, which provided a new way to strengthen the course teaching.