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 »
Perhaps the most prevalent workplace theme today is employee health and well-being, addressed by such design considerations as clean air, access to light and views, amenities, social spaces, and choice. Intersecting this trend is the continual rise of a dispersed, mobile workforce. This project proposes a new workplace model: The city, our client, becomes a... Read more »
Personal objects in the workplace have a proven positive impact on morale, productivity, and creativity. But in the ‘free address’ workplace, real estate is at a premium, and design teams are challenged to find a personal storage solution that feels personal. We believe new tools should complement this new work style, so we developed an... 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 »
In order to stay innovative, it is crucial that we keep asking ourselves the disruptive questions, which form the basis of great architecture. The more we share knowledge, talk about and discuss architecture on a daily basis, the more likely we are to remain critical, come up with innovative solutions, create social engagement and bring... 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 »
Urban designers, architects, and planners are well versed in understanding how to shape, form, and adapt cities, but is there more to understand in how those cities are shaping their residents? Could lifespans be the best new urban design metric? This report summarizes a high-level urban analysis on the world’s longest-lived communities, commonly known as... Read more »
The human crowd simulator tool is a way for designers to measure, track and formulate understandings behind human crowd patterns and relationships. It maps and generates human movement patterns based on a series of parameters given to the tool via the script. The script parameters run on behavioral movement and science analysis, these parameters have... Read more »
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 »
The past 30 years has produced growing documentation of the numerous health benefits of nature. While this has reduced the demand for “proof” of the value of green space in healthcare settings, there remains a critical need for research that focuses on the design elements that can best serve specific patient populations. In the United... Read more »
Before stepping into the virtual world we needed to start in the physical world. This Incubator began by experimenting with different types of models and different methods of photographing these models. We discovered several things which would be usual to know for future photogrammetry work: Less is more – more photos do NOT give you... Read more »
