Air Conditioning

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.

Casa da Musica: Rem Koolhaas building in Porto

VRMAG - VIRTUAL TOUR OF REM KOOLHAAS’ CASA DA MUSICA, PORTO

I visited this building in 2005. My photographs however do not compare to these 15 x 360 panoramas. These do give a good feel for what i might be like to be in / visiting the building.

It is to me a building that demonstrates the power of careful thought and analysis to achieve the best building science as well as architectural outcome. However, given the delays and cost increases, it is also a building that appears yet again to give a bad name to this type of architecture - architecture that tries to push the boundaries.


Technorati Tags: auditorium, architecture, koolhaas, acoustics,

Information Modelling In Action

The Freedom Tower: Information Modelling In Action - CBRonline.com Computer Business Review online writes about BIM! Quote from Paul Seletsky of SOM: "...Autodesk Revit Building 3D modelling gives the architects the ability not only to visualise their models in 3D, but have those models tied to 2D plans too: if a value is changed in the model, it is reflected in the plans and vice versa. It also enables simulations such as likely building temperatures, pedestrian flow (including in a potential emergency), the lighting as the sun moves across the sky, and so on." I guess this is BIM in action ...

But it all seems a little too pat. The details are sketchy in a general business magazine like this of course. But the details are where the problems arise. Did the HVAC consultants and the fire engineers really use the 3D model? Did they make modifications and send them back to the central model? What were the SOM resources required to make this all happen?

My experience so far is that using the collaboration features of the software (ArchiCAD/Revit?ADT/Microstation) requires a major support effort from technicians running the network and servers to the users rejigging their manner of working to recognise who has control of what parts of the 'model' they are working on. And that's just with the 3D model in-house... well in my class. What about adding in several other software users, their ways of working and their program interfaces...

What is the reality?

Postopolis - blogs about architecture collide in NYC

Check this event Postopolis. out. (May 29 - June 2, 2007) The home blog pages of the organisers are (almost) all in the useful links in the sidebar at the right. After today I will be adding Inhabitat. At this early stage, the following links are really interesting:

• City of Sound review of Postopolis presentation by Paul Seletsky of SOM
• City of Sound review of Postopolis presentation by Matt Clark of Arup
• Inhabit's Jill Fehrenbacher's presentation in Pecha Kucha style
• I could not bring myself to listen to Lebbeus Woods yet again after wondering at the level of pretension in hearing him live in San Francisco some years ago... but if you have not encountered him, this could be of curiosity value - if only a la Derrida to hear the background to the person in order to (perhaps) understand his work?
  

I fully expect these links to grow and become more interesting as the diarists who are not as fast as City of Sound reflect on the event.

Cool idea? Or another hyped toy?

There is a cool video referenced by Autodesk's '"It's alive in the lab!" blog and available on youtube:



They note that the technology idea was used in the Minority Report movie.

There is also this REALLY cool video about the same technology toy at Fastcompany.com


Looking at it, I can't help wondering what it really shows.

• Of course, I'd love a screen that big! And I'd discover many uses for it.
  
• And one with that many video feeds that work simultaneously...
• It has been clear to me for a long time that the mouse is only a poor substitute for the hand in interactivity terms. But do I want to have to wear white gloves or spend ages with some cleaning fluid each week keeping the screen-as-mouse operaional?
• An interaction work space the size of two offices - that's great for spreading out the work so one can walk up and down and survey more of a whole set of data
• And wouldn't the wii be a better interface (see Google Reader via wii below)?

What I am not sure about is whether this particular interactive screen technology from this bloke 'solves' the problem.

As yet there seem only to be positive reviews:

• "It's alive in the labs"
• "RobiNZ"

I am not convinced. Given the choice, and the budget to play with such toys, I'd like an immersive wrap around wall first. Then this technology for working with it.

lecture topic - May 29 2007 - handin ideas - assignment 1

Visual Styles in Autocad - there is a video on how to do them a a pdf on how to set up a style on the R:\BBSC\Course_Material\BBSC303\autodesk_adt drive - another way of doing the CAd program render and exploring possibilities...

Rendering softer images like this is also possible in Archicad - there are help files and tips on the use of Archicad on the R:\BBSC\Course_Material\BBSC303\archicad drive

Quicktime movie sun studies in Archicad / Viz are easy / Revit - and count as one render

Right Hemisphere 3D insert files in pdf (v5 will be installed very soon)





Warn people about impact of your choices:

• Right Hemisphere Deep Publish files ONLY Load in Internet Explorer
• Big files take a long time to download
• Link to adobe for acrobat reader
• Format of page may work best ('be optimised for') IE

Light Studio rpict NOT rview images should be produced... (i.e. Saving an rview 'simple', fuzzy, low res. light studio file will be marked down)

High Quality Images from Light Studio (once the geometry issues are sorted) are easy to produce - for examples: Irena Pratley's work from 2002:










NB: focus in Thursday's tutorial on getting textures like brick sorted...

• we looked at brick as a light studio material - this has a dirt modifier for better 'realism'
• we mentioned that the English version of the light studio material file library is on the P:\drive
• we noted that there are many light texture material files (so-called) cal files in the materials\library directory - these can be used to create corrugations or water via a formula
• we noted that rendering efficiency is improved in Light Studio by looking carefully at the material definitions

There are two new Revit user tutorials provided by Autodesk that are on the R:\BBSC\Course_Material\BBSC303\revit\autodesk_BIM_curriculum drive. In the metric_datasets folder is a 323 page pdf format workbook on the use of Revit! In the files_metric folder there is a guide, also in pdf, on the use of Revit files in 3ds max /viz... Whilst the 323 page book is something I have written about before as incredibly boring, it is worth mining for some gems of information, such as how to key colours on a plan / sectional model to data such as room names or areas:





NOTE: tehre is a simple blog here that describes how to create the space labels that are used for this style of presentation.

"Guns Germs and Steel" author Jared Diamond

Great title! The follow-up, Collapse is an even better read, but far less memorable title. Can't help thinking there are so many intuitive leaps with little supporting documentation that Diamond is a little like the 'von Daniken' of the noughties.

Still, a challenge is laid down to think and to react and form an opinion as to what to do/ how to react.

Most interesting part of the book? Again, not the mainstream ideas, but rather the process hinted at: Diamond thanks his graduate classes for their participation in reviewing the content of the book chapters. A way of combining teaching in a challenging manner with book writing?

A headline I couldn't resist: The Hippies Were Right! /

The Hippies Were Right! / Green homes? Organic food? Nature is good? Time to give the ol' tie-dyers some respect
The whole of the Bay Area is full of people who write and think like this. They still sell tie-dyed T-shirts and other clothing in the Saturday markets in Berkeley around Telegraph / Bancroft.

Scratch the surface of most of those comfortable homes in the quiet streets surrounding the University of California - Berkeley - and you will find people who have done quite well for themselves as hippies who grew up. They are still passionate about the whales / spiritual values / improving the planet neighbourhood by neighbourhood.

But, they have had the resources to do this. I keep wondering where the wealth has come from to make this happen. After all the Prius is (in my terms) a rich person's car. These quiet suburban homes cost a bomb in international terms. Of course, there are squillionaires who I am ignoring, and even more dangerous to the environment those people building 1200 sq m mansions by the thousand. But I am left wondering how we can learn from these lessons if they continue to cost as much to implement that only those hippies who live in the readership area of the San Francisco Chronicle can afford to do them well...

Still: love the ironic tone and writing style. This is what large populations do deliver: quality writing that is good to read.

Thom Mayne: Architecture is a new way to connect to the world

Given that Mayne is leading a firm that regularly uses GC to generate form / explore ideas; that gets involved with LBNL in projects that push the boundaries of what is possible from an environmental performance point of view; that has a 3D printer in-house for constructing models of staff ideas; and that has been adulated / emulated by architecture students in the past for the complexity of its hybrid drawings - it was interesting to see what was focused on here in a TED lecture: the drawings and the environmental performance somehow intertwined. Not quite what I had expected.

My only problem is that having visited the CalTrans building in LA, it seems very much in need of a few emperor's-new-clothes question or two. It is exciting and intersting when you knwo what the parts are supposed to do. However, it feels very much like a New Brutalism - as powerful in its ugliness as much modern classical music. Hard to see it being popular - in the sense of being liked by people who have to walk past it - cannot comment about the worker experience inside.

William McDonough: does Larry Lessig

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.

lecture topic - May 23 2007 - Rendering issues and ideas

Today Justin presented his Light Flow meter research with a request that one of your Light Studio renders is run with the light flow meter (see above from Kit Cuttle's book on Lighting) inserted into the picture taking up 30% of the view... AND the RTRACE render commands are followed to calculate the light intensity on each of 6 cardinal points of the white sphere.

Educational Curriculum in CAD - why is it the teaching materials have to be boring?

Scanning quickly through the new curriculum workbook for Revit to ascertain how it might replace our now creaky, because five years old, Villa Savoye tutorial I can see that the workbook is comprehensive.

That my students might want to dip into it to find out particular things I have no doubt. That I would / should subject them to the whole thing - no way.





Reviewing the "Harrison Fraker video" about BIM it seems to me that there is some confusion encouraged by that video to see BIM as somehow computational geometries. In addition whilst my students would find the ideas in that video of interest they would immediately notice the great gap between the hype of the video and the mundane reality of the worksheet:











Students in my experience like to be challenged. They like to work on stuff that is interesting and real and pushes boundaries. We had success years ago now with the Villa Savoye as a basis for an introductory tutorial because it was interesting challenging and real .

I still use it as a two x 2 hour tutorial session with homework in a modelling course that experience shows works well. But I believe it needs updating and extending into construction more than we can do in the one course. I hoped at first glance that this might be the case with the workbook - but no.

What I really want is a structured set of exercises where I am sketching in sketchup - say - Falling Water.

Then I am importing it and modelling it properly.

Then I am exporting it to Viz and rendering it and walking through it and creating interactive views (dwf / QTVR mov / 3D pdf)

Finally, I am going back into revit and building drawing documentation - construction details showing on the sheet rendered views of what it looks like alongside sections of how it is constructed and then exporting the whole to a set of pdf's that include 3D interactive views.

Falling Water this year; Guggenheim New York in the future; Guggenheim Bilbao in the future?

Death by Architecture - Architecture Competitions

Death by Architecture
How specialist can you get? This site focuses on publicising architectural competitions. Sort by deadlines - type of participant - region etc. Find (at present) claims for 'First Design Competition for Second Architecture' - yet another take on using second life. Interesting but ultimately as with much of SL - vaguely ho-hum.

This web site really ought to have an RSS feed. Who wants to browse it every second day? What I want is to enter some search terms and be kept up-to-date... Apart from this easily fixed problem - a useful source/site.

lecture topic - May 16 2007 - Preparing final hand-in

The topic was examining images from the past to develop a plan to present well.

We talked about:

Ensuring that the images presented in the final render set developed a theme about the building. The goal was to try to focus on presenting in images some form of narrative that enhanced your reader/viewer's knowledge of the building or of the process of modelling or of the process of rendering... Examples that were presented of acceptable foci for a themed page were:

• comparison of the Light Studio and the Mental Ray renderers (e.g. time vs quality)
  
• an analysis of the way(s) in which daylight reaches the interior through sections and other views
• an analysis of the architect's writing about his/her building is revealed in the form /light interplay
• an examination of the role of light in the progression one makes through the building from outside to in or from gallery to gallery ...
• representation / revealing of the qualities of light in the major spaces in early morning / late afternoon - summer / winter - night / day - sun / overcast conditions
  
• interrogation of the design principles - formal / rhythmic / organic / asymmetric - affect the flow of light

We noted yet again that there is a requirement in the assignment to include the following (NOTE again, that both renderers must be used):

Assignment One - Part B

• Minimum
  The fifteen rendered images should be visible on the website in thumbnail form. Appropriate background image(s) to represent the view out from the building, or appropriate "textures" applied to art works in an art gallery or similar contextual information will be required.The web page should also contain appropriate text documenting: your name, the name of the architect, the course, the date and the name of the modeling and rendering packages used to produce each image.
• Below Average
  All above, plus: at least ten renderings using Autodesk Viz to simulate realistic lighting conditions in the space(s) in a minimum of two different ways using Global Illumination and not (7 of one approach: 3 of the alternate is the maximum deviation from the desired 5:5 split in pictures).
• Acceptable
  All above, plus: documentation of the image differences and the settings used and time taken to render between the two Viz renderings approaches.
• Average
  All above, plus: all fifteen renderings using AutoDesk Viz/Lightscape AND Rayfront/Radiance to simulate realistic lighting conditions in the space(s) NOTE: with the arrival of the LightStudio plugin, it is important to recognise that the split here is between the (Mental Ray) PHOTON MAPPING rendering approach and the (RADIANCE) BACKWARDS RAY TRACE approach. Thus the different renders are Global Illumination within the Mental Ray Renderer in Viz and Radiance with the Lightstudio renderer in Viz.
• Good
  All above, plus: use of AutoDesk Viz/Lightscape AND Rayfront/Radiance/LightStudio to simulate realistic lighting conditions in the space(s) with some additional images at night (say 6 daylight rendered with one program and 9 daylight with the other, plus 3-6 with artificial lighting); and all thumbnails link to larger minimum 1280x1024 images on your personal web site.
• Above Average
  All above, plus: association of the idea, concept or theme being communicated with a critical idea, concept or theme: e.g. analysis of relationship between this building and others by the same architect or others from same era; or analysis of natural lighting via sky and sunlighting; or examination of systems of circulation through buildings and demonstration of which system this building belongs to ....
• Very Good
  All above, plus: use of Autodesk Viz/Lightscape and Rayfront/Lightstudio for four of the views showing how the natural lighting models compare between the two rendering programs.
• Excellent
  All above, plus: ... you tell me (the possibilities are endless)?

I also noted that the software for hdrshop is available for use on the Course Information directory. This allows one to import a series of identical images of different exposure level and amalgamate them into ONE High Dynamic range Image. (i.e. to take a series of photographs of a sky and thus use it as a light source for ones scene as explained in this online tutorial)









hdrview is available on the same R:\esources directory if one wants to view the hdr image. There are plenty available online - just check FLICKR.

Also we examined the role of procedural materials in making more interesting images than can be achieved with materials which are merely pictures pasted onto surfaces... This work from Irena a couple of years ago is an illustration of a procedural texture in Radiance - the underlying render engine to Light Studio:













And finally, a couple of words of caution:

1. bringing files into Viz successfully is only part I of the render process. Make sure also that you can render in Light Studio and in Mental Ray. If your object names are very long because of the manner in which you have brought the model into Viz, then the Light Studio renderer will not work. You must fix this somehow by altering the layer / object names in the export process, or by importing the file into Deep Exploration and then re-exporting in the simpler form...
2. As noted at the beginning of the year, Light Studio only work in Viz - if you have exported to Max for mental ray, then be aware that you will be competing for a much smaller number of licenses than with Viz come crunch render time AND you will still have to export that model and read it back into Viz to use Light Studio
3. There is a major flaw in the Viz 'section' tool that stops it from producing sections that are orthogonal to the building - because sections are created by setting 'cutting planes' in Viz/Max camera definitions. The work around is that one can create the files in Viz and with the mental ray renderer run the 'render to texture' option. Then save the file out as a 3ds format - with named camera views. THEN within Deep Exploration (DE) one can set up the section plane (+X) rotated and placed where it shows off the interior best and from within DE... Witness this simple B&W model rendered with a cutting plane:

Footnote: link to hdr render and good caustics for water in same tutorial when compiling this blog.

lecture topic - May 15 2007 - narrative

More video watching - this time extracts from Kirby Dick and Amy Ziering's documentary about Jacques Derrida.

Specifically:

• you call this verite?
• Echo and Narcissus
• the sex lives of philosophers
• without even an ash

As a means of understanding narrative and film - try to get inside the mind of the authors (whom Derrida addresses often on the subject of whose story is being told by their editing decisions). Try to ask -

• when did the quotes get assembled? before or after the filming?
  
• why two cameras?
• what were the other people shown in the video at the end of the movie doing and why?
• would the narrative of the episodes we watched change if played in another order than the movie (ref Eisenstein etc)
  

Review: Paris Rive Gauche development

Paris Rive Gauche - Architecture - New York Times no new museums that I can find - in the general discussion. However, this does sound like a really interesting debate. I'd have to say if it ends up like la Defense - then its yet more destruction of a city's fabric in the hope of some innovative freedom for individual designers to express themselves. The wonder of the older parts of Paris is that the anonymity of the similar height / facade / fenestration architecture is enlivened by the life in the streets - the corner cafes and the odd ball petrol stations and cafes jostling for space with the parked cars and bikes and the people wandering and bustling through the streets, occupying the ground floor. It is a revelation and a great pleasure to cram one's luggage into one of the tiny 'hotel' rooms in one of these buildings, where the hotel is merely a couple of floors of the whole apartment complex, with a cafe / bar on the ground floor. This review does not promise that type of 'life'. However, in all these discussions, I wonder where are the voices of the people who have to live in these buildings. Do people actually like / prefer to live / work at la Defense instead of in the hearts of some of the older arrondissements? Will they want to / do they already want to move into this new Rive Gauche? Sounds like a research project?

(Photo illustrates Sunday morning in la Defense 'neighbourhood')

lecture topic - May 8 2007

Favicon - How To Create A Favicon.ico | PhotoshopSupport.com

This is one of the topics we covered briefly in the lecture on Tuesday: how to create one of those favicons that appear in the navigation bar of IE7 and Firefox?

The explanation here is of using a Photoshop plugin to create an icon in the correct format - so far so good. But then, most usefully, there is a discussion of how to handle the html to make that icon appear in the place(s) it should...

A conference on the web and the museum

I was directed to an interesting blog today: the NZlive.com Blog written by one Sarah Jones. That blog in istelf promises a lot. Meanwhile, there is a link there on the topic of blogging that points to the following:

Archives & Museum Informatics: Museums and the Web 2007: Speakers: "April 11-14, 2007 San Francisco, California"

Those people interested in the nature of the museum - what it might look like would do well to browse the papers presented at this conference. These papers expand on the content of the lively and interesting debate at the digital symposium at the Museums Aotearoa Conference earlier this year showed me some interesting aspects of 'the digital museum'. The cliche idea of the VR environment which is generating so much hype and hot air in our journalistic airwaves and print media at present gets looked at. And the much more interesting real world applications that the likes of Paul Reynolds writes from Auckland about gets the similarly cliche Web 2.0 treatment.

Museums in Second Life - someone has investigated it. Speculative and not very conclusive, rather suggestive of the fact they suspect there is a potential ...

Web 2.0 advocating change, rather than reporting results of research or implementation.

"The next billion"?

McGOVERN ONLINE
This is what is going to make the world tick in the future - opinions! Paul Reynolds from the first appearances of this blog has a sweet life. Trips every which way - the most recent to China courtesy of Microsoft, following on from Korea courtesy of IBM. However, given the distance NZ is from everywhere - even the West Island is 3 hours by plane - this is not the junket it seems.

What is worth reading here is some speculation about the future of information - increasingly such discussions are are housed in anonymous architecture. Anonymous because the buildings do not seem to be important part of the equation. Also of interest, as I allude to in the title of this blog is: apparently 1 billion people are now online. Microsoft are interested in being an important part of getting the next billion online. They are developing their own competitor to the One Laptop per child scheme. Check out the strategies and links on Paul's blog.

Yet another US Museum - SAM in Seattle

A paean to art, not the architect - ARCHITECTURE REVIEW - Los Angeles Times - calendarlive.com

Interesting to see the art vs architecture debate continuing...

This however looks awfully (choosing my words carefully) like an office building from the outside. So of course one praises the verticality...