With the right tools at their disposal, project teams can gain important insight into the performance of their buildings, even at the earliest stages of design. This insight can radically improve energy efficiency, reduce duplicative work, and save time and money. We use and develop advanced technologies to help teams discover these insights early on so they can design buildings with optimal performance.
This article focuses on sustainable design considerations and strategies for achieving a high-performance retrofit of an existing higher-education laboratory building, located in a cold climate. The primary objective was to evaluate the present state and potential retrofit strategies to improve building performance. Research methods included analysis of archival data and empirical data, and computational software... Read more »
This research project proposes a Framework and Toolkit to create a holistic, incremental approach to gas station adaptation & transformation. Given the current policy timeline of phasing out production of combustible-engine vehicles by 2035 in California and transition to a carbon-free economy nation-wide by 2050, the adaptation scenarios focus on tangible strategies for a near-term... Read more »
The COVID-19 public health crisis has affected many aspects of daily living and working behavior, impacting carbon footprint. This research aims to explore adaptive working behavior and its direct and quantifiable environmental impacts. It studies various working and commuting behavior scenarios on energy consumption and the carbon footprint of commuting and building operations. The paper... Read more »
Passive House design requires users to create a complete building model to determine the energy performance of both the whole building and its individual elements. It makes traditional PHPP modeling a dilemma at the initial design stage when design decision making through optimization is necessary, without feeding too much design details. This research explores an... Read more »
In response to the current climate crisis, we must establish widespread familiarity with carbon and its cumulative impacts, elevate our critique of sustainable design, and embrace our part in balancing the carbon budget. We set out to understand a project’s global warming potential by looking at inflows and outflows of carbon, and identified key contributors... Read more »
The project is an energy & carbon‐oriented study focusing on human behavior change due to short‐term COVID‐19 epidemic and potential adoption of remote work (telework) policies in the future. By using dynamic percentage of working‐from‐home ratio, a workflow is developed in order to predict the impacts of behavior change on both energy and carbon patterns... Read more »
Perkins and Will is at the forefront of innovation and technology in Architecture, and to keep this trajectory we must look forward into market innovations and emerging technologies. This project analyzes a patent-pending shading technology for its ability to increase performance of buildings in multiple locations in comparison to standard shading strategies. This patent-pending technology... Read more »
Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) incites innovation by re-framing our understanding of building materials within the context of their ecological sources and impacts. Of these impacts, embodied carbon is a primary contributor to global warming. Most building materials’ embodied carbon emissions occur before a product leaves its manufacturer’s gate. These emissions can be measured and reduced... Read more »
Building simulation tools can empower architects to evaluate and optimize the performance of their designs. Thus, it is essential to integrate building performance simulation modeling from an early design stage. A critical piece of the simulated environment is the weather file. It is a compilation of 20- 30 years of historical weather and hourly data... Read more »
Arenas are large, expensive, non-continuously-used, energy-intensive luxuries. To date, there have been no arenas built that meet any definition of “zero net energy building.” How do we move beyond the AIA 2030 Challenge, and design ecologically sustainable Net Zero energy Arenas? While Perkins and Will has generally made great progress towards meeting the 2030 goals,... Read more »
Energy analysis at the early stage of building design is a critical, yet difficult task in performance-based design. The difficulty arises from the complex, iterative, and uncertain nature of building design and the challenges of integration with well-posed energy assessment tools. The purpose of this article is to first review characteristics of performance-based design and... Read more »
