Design with Climate

Deep porches shade the living spaces and capture prevailing breezes, while a heat-shedding metal roof captures rainwater. The thermal chimney behind the trees passively cools the house.

We are all aware of the importance of conserving energy and natural resources, due to their growing scarcity, rising costs and the potential for permanent environmental harm to our world. Many people are surprised to discover that buildings are responsible for 40% of energy use in the U.S.—more than industry or transportation. That’s just for operating buildings; the number jumps to 50% when we count construction.

Book

BIM in Small-Scale Sustainable Design

My book, BIM in Small-Scale Sustainable Design, recently became available at Amazon, and should be out in late November. I discuss in detail how building information modeling can effectively be used by small and medium-sized architecture firms to design more sustainable buildings.

The Sublime

Kant contrasts the sublime (in whose presence the fundamental human response is awe) with the beautiful (which elicits attraction). For Kant, to be confronted with the sublime is to be made aware of one’s insignificance; it is a tonic to ego.

Teaching

For Spring 2010, I’m teaching graduate-level Environmental Controls II (thermal controls, passive systems) at UT Austin, as well as two undergraduate sections of Building Technology V (lighting, daylighting, acoustics) at UTSA.

Measuring Cost

[Note: this is a lengthier version of an article of mine which first appeared in Matthew Devries' legal blog, Best Practices Construction Law back in July]

As an architect and a concerned citizen, I frequently am required to evaluate the cost of a particular technology or artifact, and then voice my opinion or advise a client as to its value. In order to shed some light on some of the implicit difficulties in measuring cost, let’s take the seemingly innocuous case of weighing the merits of maintaining existing overhead power lines as opposed to running them underground (the grammatically unpalatable “undergrounding”).

Review: 3D Modeling in Vectorworks 2009

I’m an advocate of the strategic use of Building Information Modeling (BIM) in architectural design, I’ve trained professionals in the use of Vectorworks (a BIM product) for over a decade, and I’ve taught Vectorworks in universities. So, I have both a practitioner’s and teacher’s interest in what’s available for 3D users of Vectorworks. Lately, I’ve been reading Jonathan Pickup’s new training manual, 3D Modeling in Vectorworks 2009.

The price of progress

In Hubris and Hybrids, Hard and Jamison adopt a posture which on the face of it attempts to mediate between unbridled technological enthusiasm and reactionary distrust of science. The former, heroic view of science and technology is one which casts all advances in knowledge as inherently salubrious to humanity, while the latter sees all such knowledge as inherently exploitative.

Who owns saving the world?

In Schatzberg’s critique of Lovins et al.’s Natural Capitalism (2002), the reviewer claims the authors are naïve in enthusiastically and uncritically embracing technology as the solution to environmental problems. This emphasis on technology seems contradictory to the thrust of Lovins’ argument in his 1992 paper (“Energy-Efficient Buildings: Institutional Barriers and Opportunities”, hereafter “EEB”, and which I’ve mentioned previously in this forum), which points to economic inherencies (fee structures, typical project financing, business models, and legal liabilities) as formalized barriers to environmentally sound buildings.

Space 2009

Lunar Regolith Particles in Outposts, a paper for which I’m the lead author, was accepted at the AIAA Space 2009 Conference in Pasadena in September.

Teaching and press

I am teaching Environmental Controls II to graduate students and Technical Communication at the UT School of Architecture in the Spring 2009 semester. There’s also a profile of me in the Fall 2008 issue of St Johns’ College Magazine.

Engineering

I have completed my Master of Science in Architectural Engineering at UT. My Master’s report was entitled Indoor Air Quality Engineering Challenges in Lunar Habitats.

Teaching and design

I have accepted a teaching position at the Cockrell School of Engineering in the department of Civil, Architectural, and Environmental Engineering at UT, as well as teaching in the School of Humanities at St Edward’s University. I am also designing sustainable projects as a sole practitioner.

Water quality and development

The tap, it could be said, is where the environment meets the house. As the fundamental infrastructure of community (at any scale), water is the first requirement for habitation, prior even to shelter. Drainage is a primary concern of Vitruvius when siting a city. Poor sanitation and water quality was in the West and is now in the developing world the greatest cause of disease; decreases in infant mortality (indeed most mortality rates) due to proper sanitation far exceed mortality decreases due to medical advances.

BIM presentation movie

Nemetschek NA has kindly posted a recording of my presentation I did at the AIA National Convention. You can view it here.

‘And’, not ‘Either/Or’

I have argued elsewhere that Carter did the sustainability movement a great disservice, even with the best of intentions, when he admonished the American public to turn down the thermostat and put on a sweater. In so doing, he immediately framed the discussion of sustainability as one of choosing between comfort (or quality of life) and survival. The subtext was (and in some quarters still is): either sacrifice and save the world or be comfortable and the planet goes to hell.

Imagination

In Last Man on the Moon, Gene Cernan writes (page 344):

“Sometimes it seems that Apollo came before its time. President Kennedy reached far into the twenty-first century, grabbed a decade of time and slipped it neatly into the 1960s and 1970s … after Mercury and Gemini, we should have proceeded to build the shuttle, then an orbiting space station, and only then sought the Moon. As it was, we accomplished the impossible, then started over again. It was as if our young nation had chosen never again to cross the Mississippi River after Lewis and Clark … ”

Technology, place and community

Andrew Light argues convincingly that the foundation of environmentalism is a primary concern for one’s relationship to one’s fellow humans (“The Moral Journey of Environmentalism: From Wilderness to Place,” in Adaptive Design: Tools for Sustainability, Steven A. Moore, editor). That is, the context for concern for the environment is framed in relationships and human community. In the process, he casts serious doubts on the effectiveness, if not the validity, of the experience of environmentalism as being a quasi-spiritual one, to the point of mockery.

Space Race 2.0

There’s been an increase in the public discussion in the last six months on the establishment of lunar settlements, ever since the 2nd Space Exploration Conference in Houston in December 2006. Gregg Easterbrook wrote an article on NASA’s plans for a lunar base for Wired nearly two weeks ago, then was interviewed on NPR, where he repeated some of his assertions and made some new egregious ones. While Mr. Easterbrook’s priorities for NASA are only some among many valid possible goals for the agency, he makes incorrect and uninformed statements, unfair characterizations, and I believe misses the significance of manned space exploration. Click here and scroll down and read my comments.

Revisting the Brundtland Report

The overarching thesis of the 1987 United Nations report, Our Common Future: The World Commission on Environment and Development, could be thus summarized:

“The human misery due to the poverty of the developing world, paired with the excessive consumption of natural resources by the developed world, begets a menagerie of social, economic, and environmental ills, and these in turn beget more human misery.”

BIM, small sustainable projects, and Vectorworks

While at the AIA National Convention, I gave presentations of a project of mine at the Nemetschek North America booth. They are the makers of Vectorworks, an outstanding design application for Mac and Windows. A buzzword these day in the practice of architecture (and other building professions) is BIM: building information modeling.