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.
Glare can cause annoyance and discomfort when it becomes the source of vision problem. Although discomfort glare has been studied extensively as an academic topic, evaluating the risk of glare and its mitigation strategies are limited in the architectural design process due to the lack of an established workflow. From building design perspective, architects tend... Read more »
This Innovation Incubator focuses on the role of Thermal Bridging in the performance of the building envelope and its mitigation through good detailing. The trend towards performance-based standards means an increased focus on the building envelope. This in turn places an increased focus on the effects of thermal bridging in the performance of the building... Read more »
This research article focuses on one of the potential gaps in energy simulations, static occupancy schedules. Static occupancy schedules bring uncertainties to energy models and impact the accuracy of energy modeling outputs. In order to generate reliable dynamic schedules, a new workflow is proposed that integrates measured occupancy behaviors and improved occupancy schedules. This workflow was tested... Read more »
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 »
The paper discusses the use of a script to present an informative web-based platform as a design process for achieving net zero site energy projects. The script can collect, for electricity connect, and integrate data from utilities, for electricity and hot-water heating systems with financial incentives. Technical information can provide solutions for understanding the design,... Read more »
ABSTRACT: Available energy analysis and optimization methods do not produce fast and accurate enough results to provide guidance to professional design teams making massing and technology decisions. This paper proposes two methods using the reduced-order Energy Performance Calculation (EPC) toolkit with parametric building models and optimizers in Rhinoceros, Grasshopper and MATLAB to provide rapid feedback... Read more »
ABSTRACT: The paper will discuss the design of a bi-directional thermo-hygroscopic façade as a dedicated outdoor air system to cool and dehumidify outside air. The system is a variant of dedicated outdoor air systems to separate dehumidification and cooling in air-conditioning equipment and locates components within the building envelope. The integrated hybrid-building envelope relies on... Read more »
Perkins +Will's Process Lab taught a workshop in Design Space Construction at ACADIA in Ann Arbor Michigan.
The facade is one of the most significant contributors to the energy budget and the comfort parameters of any building. Control of environmental factors must be considered during the design process. High-performance facades need to block adverse external environmental effects and maintain internal comfort conditions with minimum energy consumption. The purpose of this research was... Read more »
Climate change adaptation means being prepared for a changing climate by taking action today to reduce the potential impacts of climate change to people, buildings, and infrastructure. While the District does its part to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, it is already seeing the impacts of climate change due to historic carbon emissions. Climate Ready DC is... Read more »
This research focuses on investigation of context based design for double skin facades, particularly focusing on climatic considerations during the design process. Double skin envelopes are gaining popularity as a successful methodology for controlling thermal building performance and energy loads. However, their performance in different climates is an important design consideration. If properly designed, they... Read more »
