City built-form guidelines act as durable constraints on building design decisions. Such guidelines directly impact energy, comfort and other performance conditions. Existing urban design and planning methods only consider a narrow range of potential design scenarios, with rudimentary performance criteria, resulting in suboptimal urban designs. Bibil is a software plugin for the Rhinoceros3D/Grasshopper3D CAD modeler... Read more »
As computational design space exploration methods become more common, designers need increasingly faster ways to accurately explore increasing vaster design spaces. Surrogate models, often constructed with Neural Networks (NN) are statistical approximations of domains that can return accurate enough answers at a fraction of the time needed to run simulation models. However, existing neural network... Read more »
Traditional mentorship can bridge the gap between industry experts and newcomers, however, time and commitment can be barriers to forming these relationships. In this article, we introduce an alternative approach to mentorship that links growing professionals with firm leaders for short-term shadowing opportunities that occur on an ongoing basis. Through observing the mentors’ actions, thought processes and decisions... Read more »
Although the benefits of nature exposure to human health are well documented, less is known about the psychological benefits of exposure to nature indoors. This study observed whether the addition of greenery to a workplace setting improved psychological well-being and performance of employees. A crossover study among 63 adults examined perceived psychological well-being and objective memory task performance... Read more »
Material health is important for every designer, no matter if we specify construction and building materials, finishes for interiors, or ancillary items like furniture and equipment. Information about products and various types of material properties, including their impacts on health, is becoming more prominent. However, lack of guidelines and potential tools that could help us access this... Read more »
Today’s workforce understands that sitting all day is not healthy. As a result, employees are increasingly requesting more opportunities for movement throughout the workday. Workplace design has evolved to address sedentary behavior through active workstations, which allow individuals to experience the benefits of movement and posture change while engaging in productive work. Research on the health impacts of... Read more »
From Curbed’s article, “Proposed 80-story wooden skyscraper may be a preview of tall timber future”: “In a city lined with pathbreaking towers and skyscrapers, the River Beech project, if it comes to fruition, may earn its own chapter in the history of Chicago architectural marvels. That’s because this proposed 80-story tower, a joint research project between Cambridge... Read more »
To learn more about how mass-timber construction will scale up, as well as to define what’s currently included in the purview of mass-timber construction for low-, mid- and high-rise projects, Construction Dive spoke with Andrew Tsay Jacobs, director of the Building Technology Lab at Perkins+Will and a member of the International Code Council’s Ad Hoc Committee on Tall... Read more »
Most skyscrapers are behemoths of steel, glass, and reinforced concrete. As part of an ongoing project, researchers at Cambridge University, architects at Perkins+Will, and engineers at Thornton Tomasetti are proposing a timber skyscraper, called the River Beech Tower, in Chicago, Illinois. The team sees the wooden tower concept as an especially sustainable type of architecture since... Read more »
Flame retardants (FRs) are a group of additives that include toxic chemicals shown to be harmful to human and environmental health in many ways. With the enactment of California’s TB117-2013 for furniture fire safety and The Chicago Tribune’s scathing investigative report about FR manufacturers’ misleading marketing efforts, we learned that toxic chemicals are not the... Read more »
This article presents a study of a Pitt River Middle School (built in 2013) and, analyzes how close the project comes to achieving the International Passive House standard and what changes would need to be made to achieve the standard. The article reviews the target metrics associated with the Passive House Standard and processes involved... Read more »
