In April 2017, Rebecca Holt was featured by the AIA California Council with a by-line entitled “Reconciling Planetary Health in City Building.” Click here to learn more about the Lab’s initial engagement with urban ecologist Dr. Alex Felson, Registered Landscape Architect, Associate Professor at the Yale School of Architecture and Director of the Urban Ecology and Design... Read more »
The well-being, productivity and engagement of employees in commercial buildings are important for creating contemporary working environments. This research article explores different working environments by applying two research methods to evaluate space use—motivational and spatial programming. Five case studies were used to explore the commonality and differences of spatial design and goals based on different industries.The... Read more »
This article discusses methods for integrating parametric design methods with building performance analysis procedures, suitable for whole building design. In this research, an ideal framework was developed and tested using existing software applications, including Building Information Modeling (BIM), non-BIM, parametric design and building performance analysis applications. Current software programs that can integrate some form of building performance simulation with... 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 »
Eve Edelstein was one of three experts invited to address the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) regarding the impact of architecture and design on the brain. As part of the Neuroscience and Society lecture series, a collaboration between the Dana Foundation and AAAS, Eve spoke of translating research on the effects of... Read more »
Eve Edelstein and Ruchi Masand spoke to UCSF Students, Postdocs, and Faculty about “Neuro-Architecture” and how they can apply the scientific method and their scientific training to develop disruptive design solutions.
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 »
