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The Green Studio Handbook: Environmental Strategies for Schematic Design
Full text linkIn design studio projects we often see schemes with inspired, yet unvalidated, gestural sketches related to wishful green strategies. Yellow and blue magic arrows represent hypotheses about the behavior of daylight and/or air flow in and about buildings. This paper provides an overview of The Green Studio Handbook, recently published as a resource for designers seeking clear guidelines for integrating green design strategies into the conceptual and schematic phases of design. The book contains a discussion of the integration of green strategies and how building form, orientation, and spatial layout are critical to the proper performance of certain green strategies; 40 green design strategies in six broad topic areas, each providing acatalog of information for common strategies that must be implemented at the schematic design phase; and nine case studies that show how various green strategies work together in a finished building. This paper provides excerpts of several design strategies and one case study and suggests a variety of ways that the book may be used.Keywords: green design, case studies, education, schematic desig
Transparent Façade Panel Typologies Based on Recyclable Polymer Materials
Full text linkBuildings are large consumers of energy. In the United States of America; they constitute over 33% of the total annual energy consumption, produce 35% of the total carbon dioxide emissions and attribute 40% of landfill wastes. The building industry is also a large consumer of non-renewable materials and this trend has escalated dramatically over the past century. It is essential that we find ways to save on energy consumption through the use of solar energy, improved thermal insulation, and alternative efficient glazed façade systems. In this paper, we demonstrate how alternative typologies of transparent and translucent load-bearing façade systems based on biocomposite and recyclable materials, are structurally and thermally efficient at the same time they contribute towards reduced pollutant emissions and non-renewable material uses.Composite insulated panel systems are used extensively in the engineering and building industry, owing to their structural and thermal efficiency. However, these systems are generally opaque and offer little flexibility in building applications. As an alternative, we demonstrate how building products comprised of hybrid material typologie scan be made to perform efficiently as load-bearing façade systems that substitute for current glazing systems with adequate thermal and structural performance, which also possess good light transmission characteristics and integral shading capability. The materials are configured to work as composite panel systems made from a combination of biocomposite and recyclable polymer materials. These materials are environmentally sustainable, because they either originate from naturally grown renewable resources or are recyclable. Our research program includes the design and development of prototype panel systems; the evaluation of structural and thermal performance, together with their role in reducing energy consumption and pollution emission through life cycle analysis. The paper describes relevant applications and related current research activities, being carried out by the authors, under an EPA/NSF funded grant project, titled People, Prosperity and Planet, in relation to prototypical composite panel systems. Our current area of investigation relates totypologies that use thermoplastic polymers (as skin material) and biocomposites (as a core material). Our evaluations have demonstrated viable applications and improved performance compared to conventional single and double glazing systems in buildings. The paper also discusses the fundamentals of the research investigations and predicts good energy efficiency, making the product a sustainable alternative when used in building applications. The paper highlights areas of ongoing research and applications for hybrid composite façade systems, which will make the approach a viable option for the building industry, in the future
Four Ways of Knowing: A Multidisciplinary Approach to Teaching Community-based Design
Full text linkDesign education, especially in an undergraduate course of study, seeks to prepare students for professions and for citizenship in a world they hardly know. The studio typically provides only a surrogate experience in addressing formal and spatial problems, and is limited by time, by its geographic space, and by a dialogue that is more often than not, self-referential. It very rarely engages systemic questions of public policy, or the specific challenges of implementing at full scale ideas that are conceived through representational means. The constrained intellectual context is most poignantly seen in the urban design studios where problems are situated in the real world, and where issues outside the purview of design are found embedded in a place. Form-focused studio exercises that are necessarily a part of beginning architecture education are inadequate for exploring the indeterminacy of urban space and the complexity of human environments. When students enter an urban design studio, especially when they undertake community-based projects, they must take up the mantle of citizenship and engage in an enterprise that is fundamentally relational and grounded in experience. They need more information and more ways of knowing the world than traditionally the design disciplines can offer. This paper presents the outcomes of an experimental neighborhood-based teaching project undertaken as a collaboration among classes in architecture, landscape architecture, urban geography and the fine arts at Temple University. Although initiated through the architecture faculty's desire to enrich its own undergraduate urban design studio, all the collaborators shared our concern about the narrowing effects of disciplinary bracketing on student learning, especially when the goal was to address real world situations. Each discipline brought to the project its particular disciplinary culture -- its language, methodology and areas of concern -- and a shared aspiration to puzzle together these diverse perspectives around questions of making places that are meaningful, humane and sustainable. The struggles and synergies among disciplines were alternatively inspiring, annoying, challenging, rich and imperfect. But intense engagement with a community re-centered the dialogue from inside the academic context to outside, and framed a multidisciplinary way of thought. The community itself proved to be a powerful coalescing agent; the inherent layering of issues in the real-world context made it virtually impossible to remain insensible to interdependencies in life that transcend disciplinary boundaries. Here Richard Sennett's definition of what constitutes a democratic urbanity was applicable. The Greek term for "public”, synkoikismos, means "to bring together in the same place people that need each other but worship different household gods.” (47) This deceptively simple public-making concept became the basis for a process of learning, and a vehicle for working with the larger truths about how cities are formed and experienced
Mapping of Brain Functions and Spatial Luminance Distributions as Innovative Tools for Assessing Discomfort Glare in the Built Environment
Full text linkA series of "proof-of-concept" projects are set out aimed at bringing together built environment researchers attempting to understand what constitutes ‘comfortable' space and neuroscientists investigating the functional characteristics of the human brain. The long-term goal is to address the question of whether there are regions of the brain that are specifically engaged when people experience spaces they consider to be comfortable, pleasing or even beautiful. Glare is an area of research that has been recognised as a problem in both interior and exterior lighting. Recent advances in technology make it an ideal candidate for the proposed "proof-of-concept” study. The mapping of brain functions through functional magnetic resonance imaging, the mapping of luminance distributionsin a visual scene, and the study of distraction and its influence on discomfort glare can be combined to form the basis of an innovative tool box for new research
Ceci n'est pas une pipe. The architectural drawing between representation and function
Full text linkIn The Sciences of the Artificial Herbert A. Simon reflects that "Engineering, medicine, business, architecture, and painting are concerned not with the necessary but with the contingent – not with how things are but with how they might be – in short, with design.” The reflection serves as an introduction to Simon's attempt at developing a design theory: A theory about the conception of that which differs from what we already know. A theory in a challenged dialog with the contingent. Simon is aware that traditionally, design theory has been orientated towards the establishment of an understanding of the canonized and typical, and that the theory as such should serve as a guideline for what was to be created. Traditionally, the theory has been a reflected list of answers. By way of example, consider how the Neo-Platonic architecture treaties of the Renaissance sought to establish abstract and ideal rules and frameworks to secure any future works. Through repetition of the regular, the work becomes an example of a presumed eternal and essentially true idea. Or consider the ambitions of the modernist town planning, as they were expressed in the resolutions of CIAM as well as in concrete town planning proposals, in which the specific purpose was to transform the town's quantitative environment into qualitative by means of ‘abstraction and repetition'. The architects of modernism and the Renaissance shared a confidence in the possibilities of the abstraction to establish a template for the individual example. Consequently, both lines of thinking demonstrate confidence that by means of mathematics and the Euclidian geometry, an essential world structure is found which may justify the qualitative validity of abstract rules. And that is precisely why the repetition of the structures and types of the abstraction becomes a design-theoretical imperative. Whilst the Renaissance treaties gave the impression of being carried by an insight into the world's eternal – divine – structure, the modernists were orientated towards the technological or the natural. However, to some extent the rules were the same, as Colin Rowe pointed out in his famous article, ‘The Mathematics of the Ideal Villa'. Rowe compares– in continuation of Rudolf Wittkower's Renaissance studies – Palladio's and Le Corbusier's basic plans for villas and demonstrates remarkable similarities between the syntactic geometric organizational principles of the plans. To a certain degree, modernism naturalizes the divinely founded rules of the Renaissance. And because of this, it gives rise to expectations that, as is the case with the Renaissance treatises, architectural theory should develop ideas and rules that are valid for the concrete assignment, notwithstanding that they – the rules – are developed in abstract independence of any contingent situation.Those are the types of expectations to the theory that Simon argues against when insisting that the work is contingent. He claims that the individual work differs unpredictably from the rules and typologies that existed prior to the work. However, Simon's skepticism towards normative design theories does not imply that he finds theoretical work irrelevant for the creation of the contingent. On the contrary, Simon's ambition is to establish a mutual experimental relation between theory and practice
Community Design Parameters and the Performance of Residential Cogeneration Systems
Full text linkThe integration of cogeneration systems in residential and mixed-use communities has the potential of reducing their energy demand and harmful emissions and can thus play asignificant role in increasing their environmental sustainability. This study investigated the impact of selected planning and architectural design parameters on the environmental and economic performances of centralized cogeneration systems integrated into residential communities in U.S.cold climates. Parameters investigated include: 1) density, 2) use mix, 3) street configuration, 4) housing typology, 5) envelope and building systems' efficiencies, and 6) passive solar energyutilization. The study integrated several simulation tools into a procedure to assess the impact of each design parameter on the cogeneration system performance. This assessment procedure included: developing a base-line model representing typical design characteristics of U.S. residential communities; assessing the cogeneration system's performance within this model using three performance indicators: percentage of reduction in primary energy use, percentage of reduction in CO2 emissions; and internal rate of return; assessing the impact of each parameter on the system performance through developing 46 design variations of the base-line model representing potential changes in each parameter and calculating the three indicators for each variation; and finally, using a multi-attribute decision analysis methodology to evaluate the relative impact of each parameter on the cogeneration system performance. The study results show that planning parameters had a higher impact on the cogeneration system performance than architectural ones. Also, a significant correlation was found between design characteristics identified as favorable for the cogeneration system performance and those of sustainable residential communities. These include high densities, high use mix, interconnected street networks, and mixing of housing typologies. This indicates a higher potential for integrating cogeneration systems in sustainable communities.Keywords: cogeneration; residential & mixed use communities; energy efficiency; district heatin
What Went Wrong? Reflections on the Condition of Architecture and Urbanism in Lebanon
Full text linkIn a short article presented at a conference in New York City two years ago, Joan Ockman lucidly diagnosed the contemporary dilemma faced by architecture, i.e. how to insert itself between a pessimistic discourse that warns of the end of time, and an uncritical surrender to globalization. This dilemma is now universal(i). It applies to New York City, where in the same context Kenneth Frampton commented on the dystopia of an "oddly paranoid, rather ruthless, instrumental and resentful landscape”(ii), as well as to other cities around the world, especially in the Third World, where more difficult conditions permeate architectural practice, resulting in even more devastated landscapes. This article will discuss issues that relate to architectural practice and pedagogy, drawing on specific examples in the context of Beirut, Lebanon, and reflecting on the impact of‘architectural education' and the transformations within the architectural profession in this context. One can no longer deny the negative impact of economics on a profession that has been, for the most part, idealistic in its approach to the built environment, but the responsibility of architects and architectural education, can no longer beminimized in assessing the problems that cities like Beirut face today. i The conference was organized at Columbia University, andpublished as The State of Architecture at the Beginning of the21st Century, New York: Monacelli Press, 2003. See JoanOckman's "Criticism in the Age of Globalization” [78-9]ii "Brief Reflections on the Predicament of Urbanism” , ibidem[13