Since April of 2003, a group of students from Concordia University and Université de Montréal has been preparing their entry to the Second Solar Decathlon competition to be held in September 2005. Their goal is to design, build and operate the most attractive and effective solar-powered house that also sets a considerable standard in sustainable design. Some of the technologies to be integrated into the architectural design include solar electricity (photovoltaics), advanced windows, solar domestic hot water and battery storage; at the same time, other less high tech concepts (such as buffer zone spaces, Trombe wall, thermal mass, and natural daylighting) are to be transparently incorporated. Additional ecological strategies include the attempt to reduce embodied energy, recuperate and recycle rainwater, and design for growth and change. This paper will present the experience from the first year design process. The complexity of bringing together students from totally different backgrounds and institutions is not unlike the situation of some architect-engineer forced-relationships found in practice, and the interaction process will be described and analyzed.
Engaging Engineering and Architectural Students in the Integrated Design Process (IDP) for a Competition Entry Demonstration House – the Solar Decathlon
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“In town without my car!”: a new urban soundscape
In order to promote a more sustainable mobility society, the French government initiated a few years ago a “Car free day” (In town without my car!). Since the year 2000 this initiative has become an overall European action. In the framework of this policy the city of Bordeaux has made the choice to ban the cars from its centre area every first Sunday of the month. Besides a decrease of the air pollution during this period, acoustic measurements show a big change in the noise environment. To verify this effect, we made a comparison between the audio recordings of the soundscape, of the first Sunday and the normal Sunday of the month. The “sound walk” followed a trajectory with different urban forms. It started on the Place des Quinconces (a very large square), passed the Place de la Comédie, followed the Cours de l’Intendance (a broad avenue), rue Vital Carles (a narrow street) and finished in front of the St André cathedral. We used for the recordings a “dummy” head with Digital Audio Tape recorder. In order to compare the different acoustical ambiances of the first Sunday and the normal ones, we analysed them on sound level.
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Passive Downdraught Cooling: hybrid cooling in the Malta Stock Exchange
The use of cooling in buildings is continuing to increase in Europe. This is raising concern that it will undermine the European Community’s drive toward reducing CO2 emissions. To counter this trend, there is increasing interest in evaporative cooling in general and passive downdraught evaporative cooling (PDEC) in particular. However, there are many locations in southern Europe where the relative humidity is sometimes too high for evaporative cooling to be viable. This in turn has led to the proposal for energy efficient hybrid cooling systems. This paper will present a case study of a hybrid downdraught cooling system within the new Malta Stock Exchange.
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Analyzing the microclimatic influence of urban canyon geometry with an open-air scale model
A novel approach is developed for modeling the influence of street canyon geometry on microclimatic conditions within the urban canopy. A physical scale-model of an urban roughness array was constructed in open-air conditions to enable the measurement of climatic parameters with natural turbulence effects, potentially overcoming some of the limitations common to more conventional research techniques. Energy balance in the urban canopy is quantified using a pedestrian-centered model which allows for the computation of energy exchange between a hypothetical human body and the urban environment, based on data measured within the scale-modeled street canyons and taking into account the effects of dimensional scaling. The proposed technique is demonstrated under typical hot-arid summer conditions in a desert region, and relative pedestrian energy exchanges are compared with previous findings from full-scale measurements in a climatically-similar actual urban setting. Results show that a compact street canyon geometry may reduce pedestrian heat gain during most summer hours, if attention is paid to design aspects such as street axis orientation. The model shows the ability to reproduce patterns observed in full-scale, and to reveal distinctions which are impractical to quantify using field studies alone.
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Switchable Façade Technology in Environmental Design
The topic is focused on the conception of the building envelope considered not only as a protecting barrier against atmospheric agents, but rather as an open membrane, permeable, selective and in active interaction with the climatic external factors, so as to better reply to the exigencies of comfort in build spaces and to the questions imposed by a “sustainable development”. Through an interdisciplinary approach, the research tries to optimise the integration between the architectural, physical and environmental dimensions, in the field of switchable façade technologies including transparent innovating materials. In fact, with novel daylight components in the building envelope, it is possible to improve both the dailight quantity and quality in the rooms and to control the solar energy transmittance, either with a passive or active product (chromogenic materials), and/or with selective properties with respect to the different parts of the solar spectrum (daylight versus solar heat). The overall objective is to develop an “holistic”, relevant, reliable, user-oriented and comprehensive knowledge basis, including detailed daylight product information, on the application of systems who may allow to obtain effective advantages under the different points of view considered (lighting, energetic, thermal aspects and expressive value).
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Assessing Environmental Comfort – Towards a systemic quantitative and qualitative approach
This paper presents the preliminary results of the first stage of a research grant from SSHRCC (Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada) on the control of physical ambiences and the nature of internal-external transactions in a Nordic climate. The main objective of this research is to investigate the impact of environmental step-changes on the sensation of comfort in order to diminish the thermal gradient between indoor and outdoor in Nordic climate without sacrificing comfort. This, in parallel with the recent adaptive model for thermal comfort, could serve reducing further the energy consumption in buildings. The first stage of research consisted in the development of the combined quantitative and qualitative method for the assessment of global environmental comfort in transient conditions based on previous work by the author. The quantitative measurement of ambient conditions is assessed by a portable array whilst the qualitative aspects of comfort are assessed via an extensive WEB based questionnaire. The theoretical background behind that research and the development of the portable array and electronic questionnaires are the main subject of this paper.
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Building envelope design for natural ventilation
The aim of this paper is the architectural analysis of natural ventilation devices developed by architects. The technical solutions adopted are exposed through some examples of naturally ventilated buildings. The natural ventilation principles and design challenges are discussed. The necessity of taking into account simultaneously both the natural ventilation strategy and the design of the building in order to improve the natural ventilation is underlined. The morphological analysis of a corpus of naturally ventilated buildings allows us to define various space organisations in adequacy with specific natural ventilation strategies. In conclusion, this study proposes a conceptual data model to support the integration of natural ventilation concept in the building envelope design.
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Environmental comfort in self-constructed houses
Our overall intention was to analyze the environmental comfort (thermal, natural lighting, ventilation and sound levels) performance of self-constructed houses in Apucarana, in Santo André city, situated in the metropolitan area of São Paulo. Typical examples of housing were selected and evaluation of comfort and energy use undertaken. The analysis have been based on the Post Occupancy Evaluation methods and computer simulations using Arquitrop 3.0 software. Based on this study, potential solutions according to the available materials and technology were proposed to the community to achieve a satisfactory level of indoor climate comfort. Conference Topic: 3.2 Modelling and Simulation.
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An evolutionary model for sustainable design
This paper presents a new Generative Design System to be used by architects in early to intermediate stages of design, to help improving the environmental performance of buildings. Both thermal and lighting analysis are included in the system, together with methods to incorporate architectural design intentions into the generative process. The Generative System was applied to a building by Alvaro Siza in Oporto (Portugal), to test its capability to handle complex architectural designs and to generate solutions within given language restrictions, while still reducing energy consumption levels of the building. Variables studied were fenestration design, shading systems and building shape (roof geometry). The advantages of using Rapid Prototyping technologies coupled with this Generative System are discussed, and an example of the application of a FDM (Fuse Deposition Modeling) 3D Modeler to this specific study is presented.
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Morphological parameters for urban dispersion models
A method to calculate geometrical input parameters for urban dispersion models is presented. Two cases are considered according to the relative size of the pollutant plume compared to the building size. Applying image processing techniques to urban Digital Elevation Models (DEMs, 3-D urgan databases), simple geometrical parameters over extensive urgan areas are calculated. Some preliminary results are shown for a case study in central London. It is envisaged that the technique will be developed to support urban designers and planners to assess the performance of different urban developments in terms of pollutant dispersion.
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