Course Description

This class will seek to provide students with experience integrating and assessing the success of various green building strategies while navigating other issues that architects face in the effort to create good buildings.

Discussion will begin with an examination of the strengths and weaknesses of various modeling techniques and decision-support tools. Students will each be assigned a simple volume to model in at least three simulation programs so that results may be compared. Analysis of the results will address possible variations in assumptions built into the program, data entered by the user, and different modeling techniques used by the simulation engine. An attempt to correlate results produced by the various programs across all of the simulations run by the students will conclude the exercise.

The majority of the semester will be dedicated to an ongoing exploration of a particular project. Each student will select a building to examine for the duration of the semester. This project may either be one designed by the student or by others, but must be in an urban context. Another version of the same building "idealized" in terms of its energy use and which is not bound by an urban context will be generated as a control case by a simulation program.

Students will each "remodel" the original design to improve its sustainability while still satisfying other considerations critical to the creation of successful architecture. A central focus of the course will be on the rigorous analysis of techniques to reduce energy use, improve human health and comfort, and reduce resource consumption. The two building cases will provide the opportunity to draw both broad conclusions based on the results from the idealized building and gain experience with the vagaries of attempting to implement such strategies in combination and in "the real world." For example, how to balance the need for windows for daylighting with the desire to minimize windows to reduce heat transfer would be a question with which each student would have to grapple. This conundrum is complicated enough under idealized conditions. Set it in an urban context where ideal solar orientation may not be possible, among surrounding buildings that create periodic shade and aesthetic context, overlay demands such as building program, and consider the unpredictable nature of those pesky building occupants and the problem gets really interesting. Rather than providing a formula for green building, students will likely be left with more questions than they arrived with. The objective of the course will be to provide tools and a framework from which students can start to rigorously model and assess the performance of their proposals while openly acknowledging the value systems involved in striking a balance between competing concerns.

The goal for each project will be to meet an energy budget 60% lower than that mandated in the International Energy Code, address other relevant social and green building issues, and make successful architecture. In most cases, these aggressive goals will pit decisions with regard to one issue against the demands of others, sometimes even against the larger goal of sustainability. Student evaluation will be based, not on the achievement of any specific goal, but on the overall quality of analysis and synthesis of these various concerns.

Each week, students will perform successive experiments or evaluations on both buildings in an effort to improve the primary building's performance with regard to specific topics covered in class. Several students will be selected each week to present their results. Each student will select one of the strategies modeled and incorporate it into the design so that it will be accounted for accurately in later exploration. At the end of the semester, each student will compile a final design and write a report critiquing the process and results. If these projects prove sufficiently enlightening, they may be collected as case studies for reference by future students.

Discussion topics

• History of design approaches.
• Human comfort/Bioclimatic design.
• Assessment and evaluation methods.
• Hueristics- hand methods.
• Computer simulation
• Evaluating evaluation methods
• Role of values
• Energy conservation v. energy generation
• Thermal performance
• Passive approaches
• Daylighting/lighting
• Material/resource use
• Mechanical systems
• Energy codes

Software

EcoTect will be the primary energy simulation software tool to be used for the course. Energy 10 and Paco's Muses would be used for the first exercise comparing alternative simulation results.