Curved mirrors and the sun. As one newspaper noted, the old saw about what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas seems not true in this case. Love to know more detail however as stories of melted plastic bags and singed hair are quite extreme, even given the intensity of the Vegas sun.
This post is about two things - a talk on Passive Cooling in Malaysia and this extract from an email that i received today:
Attire
Conference attire is business casual. We recommend bringing a jacket or sweater (the conference rooms are air-conditioned) and comfortable shoes for the walk between the [conference hotel name] Hotel and the Conference Center.
At the presentation by a visiting colleague from Malaysia on alternatives to air conditioning in large buildings in Malaysia, it was noted that for passive cooling to work one needs reliable air movement and this is not available in much of urban Malaysia. Even in areas where breezes occur, one needs tallish buildings to rise above the shelter provided by other structures to be exposed to the wind. This suggest some issues of privilege where passive cooling is only for those rich enough to be able to afford to live at a high level. However, what interested me was the temperature set points and comfort in Malaysia: questions of persuading people to lift the set points of their chiller to 24C instead of 22C! In the temperature measurement studies, with passive cooling the spaces being cooled were at 26-28C! This would suggest that passive cooling is an impossible goal - never achieving 'comfort'. Or perhaps - using the the adaptive comfort model [Brager and de Dear (DOI: doi:10.1016/S0378-7788(97)00053-4 Energy and Buildings Volume 27, Issue 1, February 1998, Pages 83-96) ] - we behave differently in air conditioned as opposed to naturally ventilated buildings.
So, coming back to the conference email, someone like myself who has very little day to day experience of air conditioning, and is therefore adapting to my hotel room internal climate needs this type of warning because in my experience the conference seminar room air con is freezing. What these people are saying is that it is so cold in the conference seminar rooms you will need to wear a jacket to stay comfortable! I cannot help but think we might be able to develop a huge window of energy availability by altering thermostat settings on chillers in cold climates. I have recently in China experienced the awfulness of air con: walk the streets and suffer in high humidity and 35+C temperatures. Walk into a shop - though the wide open door and feel so cold that a jersey is needed. This is just plain insanity.
On a rough calculation: if the temperature outside is averaging 34C and inside is set to 22C - then the savings of a 28C set point are around 50%! And I believe that the adaptive temperature studies suggest that people would not be less comfortable - they might even be less stressed, not having to cope with such extremes of temperature inside and out.
Came across this entitled "The wisdom of designing Cradle to Cradle" whilst looking for other stuff - as you do. What struck me about this was the presentation approach. We have heard all this before over the last 30 years in one form or other.
What seems to be unique here (apart from the obvious - that WM is hugely successful in terms of the work his firm is doing) is the Powerpoint owes more than a little debt to a style I blogged about earlier this year. It is a style of presentation used by Dick Hardt in his Identity 2.0 presentation but named after Larry Lessig - the internet copyright guru.
BSEE - Building Services and Environmental Engineer: University improves practical skills
Read this carefully: this is documentation of a grant to the "Faculty of Art, Design and Architecture at Kingston University" to install a heliodon, an artifical sky and other 'advanced' equipment such as has been used by architecture and building science students at Victoria for the past 30 years.
The Director of the new 'ArchiLab' is quoted as saying: "The days in which architecture students focused predominantly on the visual impact of buildings were long gone, Dr Pretlove said. “They are now required to give just as much thought to the wider specifications of a site and the environmental factors that might affect a final design." What is unclear is how the lab is supposed to take these tools and transfer their use from the educational environment into practice. This is an aspect of the use of these tools that is troubling: if they are genuinely to be incorporated into design on a regular basis in the educational process, what happens when a student moves into a practice 1000km away? Are they to fly in for each project? And this is ignoring the fact that an artificial sky is a cloudy climate device, and does not deal well with the mixed / dynamic skies of most temperate countries...
What about new developments in architects' and lighting professionals' understanding of dynamic daylight modelling? Where might programs like Ecotect or Energy+ or ESP-r fit in this mix?
A load of rubbish - otherwise known as the eco-friendly homes of the future | Expat Living | Global | Telegraph
Great headline - but how long have these been around? Old news...
Still an Earthship in France could (just) be considered news.
About the Open Architecture Network | Open Architecture Network
Check out this web site. An attempt to re-write the rules on architecture / community / professionalism. Cannot yet see the shape of what might / might not be from this web site. Like many such efforts - it looks good - the idea has an underlying strength (facilitating sharing of resources to overcome adversity - improving the quality / sustainability of housing). But - you can hear the but in my writing? - but, I cannot see how a web site of this type can yet do anything useful? An idea - an app - in search of a use?
Now the organisation behind OAN - Architecture for Humanity - that's a different thing altogether. Check them out and the good ideas and intentions seem to be getting somewhere.
TOWERING EXPECTATIONS / S.F.'s new federal building challenges ideas of what a government high-rise should look like -- its humane design is green, dazzling One of the interesting architectural design questions people have tackled over the last 30 years has been the idea that green buildings might define a new aesthetic.
Back in the late 70's, the question was would a passive solar non-residential building define a new aesthetic. There was even some speculation about the inclusion of some of our other senses in the definition of aesthetics. Could a definition of the spiritual values of a welcoming warmth in winter and 'coolth' in summer; a calm quietness; become a new aesthetic?
Now, however we have a corporate architecture that is allegedly more comfortable because it is naturally lit and naturally ventilated. However, looking at the illustrations, I wonder whether the future of this brave new idea is to be similar to the critical acclaim / popular opprobrium of that wonder of mid last century the new brutalism...?
Convenient Truth Contest: How to Enter An opportunity to make a statement - a video about what could be done to deal with the issues in 'An Inconvenient Truth'
Architectural Record News | AIA, Harris Interactive Poll: Empire State Building Tops the List of Beloved U.S. Buildings Yet another example of how surveys have all sorts of in-built biases. One might at first glance be tempted to rate this list as demonstrating that old is better in the eyes of the average punter. Top 10 includes a bridge and three sculpture / memorials. But recognition factor and exposure might be more telling here. The USA being so large that people from the East will often never have travelled all the way out west and may even take great pride in the fact... Nationally known monumental buildings become the only possibility at this point.
If one wanted to get really disappointed, one might look at the Las Vegas Bellagio appearing at number 22 as being a much more disappointing result. My reaction to that building when I walked through it last December was: fun fountain; great Christmas decorations; facarditecture was even more anonymous than expected. In this case instead of gilding the lily we seem to have the designers (one hesitates to call them architects) gilding a thorn bush.
To return to the theme: that Taliesin West and the Robie house by Frank Lloyd Wright appear after the San Francisco International Airport seems to me to highlight the recall factor and the status and experience of the people who voted, more than the genuine worth of the buildings listed in the eyes of the voters.
People talk about chart junk invading graphs and destroying our understanding of the underlying data by decorating the graphs rather than contributing to understanding. This to me is much worse: pseudo-systematic 'surveys' of a group of people whose characteristics and preferences are unknown and representing their vaguely gathered opinions as a genuine viewpoint...
| Natural Frequency | environmental design journal to encourage, inspire and assist every building designers... If this were not Andrew Marsh - the developer of Ecotect I might be tempted to see this as a vanity project. It is an obviously new digital journal with 8 articles all written by Andrew. The topics of his articles make interesting reading. More sensible writing on the theme of building performance simulation and CAD is needed in the industry. The articles on smart modelling and CAD analysis in particular make interesting reading. At present they appear more like informative Ecotect tutorials than fully independent analyses. Nevertheless they do make most interesting reading.
Jonathan Glancey on a Cornish housing development powered by the elements | Art story | Guardian Unlimited Arts
Yet more green architecture from the designers of the BedZED flats...
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