Designers’ actions are high-level mechanisms based on heuristics and assumptions learned from professional experience. Significant research has been devoted to understanding these actions as well as finding ways to aid, automate, or augment them with computational support. However, representing and manipulating such tacit knowledge in computational environments remains an open area of research. In this... Read more »
Design exploration in architectural space planning is often constrained by tight deadlines and a need to apply necessary expertise at the right time. We hypothesize that a system that can computationally generate vast numbers of design options, respect project constraints, and analyze for client goals, can assist the design team and client to make better... Read more »
Built upon theories of the built environment’s effect on public health outcome and addressing the importance of cultural sensitivity in urban design and planning, this article gives an introductory account of the urban context of contemporary Chinese cities in relationship to it current public health issues. It also reviews the recent healthcare reform in China... Read more »
09Existing buildings tend to undergo performance degradations, change in use, and unexpected faults or malfunctions over time. These events often result in significant deterioration of the overall system performance, inefficient operation and unacceptable thermal comfort conditions. However, a building does not have to be new to be efficient. Today’s leading building owners are retrofitting buildings,... Read more »
Tall wood buildings are becoming increasingly prevalent around the world, and yet, they are conspicuously missing from the U.S. skyline. Antiquated building code restrictions have put the United States behind its Canadian and European counterparts, preventing the U.S. from even considering the use of wood as the primary structure in a tall building. Recent initiatives... Read more »
The goal of this research project was to evaluate the relationship between resilient design strategies and their impact on the mental health of building occupants during a crisis event. We hypothesized that certain resilient design strategies were better suited to mitigate the negative effects on mental health, and, through analysis of this potential, be ranked... Read more »
Cleanrooms almost always have the largest impact on cost and schedule in terms of construction and operation for a lab project. New standards such as ISO 14644 will be voted on soon. If passed these standards may increase the impacts of both existing and new cleanrooms on laboratory facilities. This article outlines some key planning... Read more »
Why does no digital platform attempt to present all performance and sustainability characteristics for building materials in a way that side by side comparison is possible? Is the breadth of data too difficult to model? If the data could be visualized, what would it reveal? This article describes a digital platform with criteria that represents:... Read more »
The challenges of a warm climate on urban buildings’ energy needs for space conditioning are discussed by assessing the impact of intra-urban microclimatic changes, also called urban heat islands (UHI). This article analyzes the results of a simulation study on the energy consumption required for heating and cooling a small office building within five intra-urban microclimatic conditions of... Read more »
This article describes research on using local interactions to generate intricate global patterns and emergent urban forms. An agent-based system (ABS) is used to optimize an urban network and construct the micro-level complexity within a simulated urban environment. The author focuses on how agent-driven emergent patterns can evolve during the simulation in response to the “hidden hand” of... Read more »
This article documents the use of Grasshopper and Galapagos (Rhino plugins) as analytical tools to graphically represent and optimize the adjacency requirements in programmatic spaces. The resulting three-dimensional spatial diagrams are evaluated based on evolutionary fitness, which within this research context is defined as minimizing the numerical value of the total distance of all interconnected programmatic elements. This... Read more »
