Established in 2009, the Perkins&Will Research Journal is a twice-a-year, peer-reviewed publication dedicated to documenting and presenting practice-related research associated with buildings and their environments.
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 »
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 »
The growing demand for high-performance buildings has pushed the architectural discipline to confront building performance as an integral part of design delivery, while increasing the necessity of collaboration between designers, building science experts, engineers, and manufacturers to find the best solutions to building performance challenges. At Kansas State University, a year-long research studio worked with professionals, consultants, and a... Read more »
As the Earth’s climate changes and sea waters rise, the world’s many coastal cities must get creative to stay afloat. Levees, floodwalls, and other man-made infrastructure are enormous cost burdens that continue to be overpowered by super storms and severe flooding. Planners and designers around the country are exploring methods to make coastal cities more resilient to these... Read more »
This article outlines the use of operational planning and simulation modeling as a lean tool within Perkins+Will, to determine the room utilization and staffing for a large trauma center, based on current and projected volumes and turnaround times. A specific area of focus was the Resuscitation Rooms and their location within the emergency department (ED). In its most... Read more »
The focus of this article is the open building concept in multi-family residential architecture. The article analyzes and examines two specific projects: the Solid Oud West in Amsterdam (2010) and the Plus Home experience in Helsinki (2005). By the analysis of these projects, the article seeks to define the state-of-the-art in open building practice, and aims to expose... Read more »
