In the context of building a sustainable human homeland today, the development direction of green buildings in developed countries has shifted from new buildings to the transformation and reuse of existing buildings. Taking the architectural design elements in the green retrofitting of the existing buildings in Guangzhou as the research object, this paper takes the literature review and the participatory observation as the research method to explore the key factors in the architectural design elements that affect the effect of green retrofitting. In the study, the multi-criterion decision analysis method in management was used, and on the basis of expert interview and questionnaire survey, eight key factors of architectural design in the green retrofitting of existing buildings were obtained by DANP (DEMATEL based ANP) method, and then through IPA analysis, The performance value and importance of each key element are obtained, and the factors such as urgent improvement, continuous maintenance, rethinking and possible excessive attention in the evaluation elements of architectural design are analyzed. The results are as follows: 1. Constructing eight key factors affecting green retrofitting and drawing network Diagram; 2. Among the non-key factors affecting green retrofitting, five pointers were found to be less important than other elements, reflecting the insufficient importance of the pointer in the green retrofitting process; 3. Fire protection design as an important component of safety, although it could not be included the key elements of green retrofitting evaluation, but its low performance value, shows that there is a need for further improvement and promotion. The research results of this thesis are helpful for architects to master the key elements and correlations of green retrofitting architectural design specialty, which is beneficial to improve the design prescription, and can be used as a reference for perfecting the evaluation standard of " green retrofitting of existing buildings" in the future.