Curiosity drives creativity. Precision takes practice. We are working everyday to find new and inventive ways to make the world a better place through design.
While working together with Gensler on a senior living campus-wide sustainability plan, we engaged residents in two workshops. The purpose of the workshops was to get resident feedback/opinion on which areas of sustainability could provide the most benefit. We found this to be helpful both in educating residents and understanding the broader range of priorities within this unique senior living community.
Utilizing a 3D printer, we can quickly produce multiple iterations of a project massing that can be directly compared with one another. These physical models introduce a new level of workability into design and client meetings. Moving, flipping, and shifting elements of a model provides valuable insight into a vast range of alternative configurations. This tactile experience fosters a deeper understanding of the project and ensures that every voice is heard, promoting more informed and collaborative decision-making.
By performing daylight modeling early in the design process, we can quickly understand the impact of aperture configurations on spatial daylight autonomy. Cove.Tool is a great resource for quickly performing these analyses. In this exercise, we are maintaining the aperture dimensions while playing with their frequency and location. We found that two windows leave us far from the LEED 50% sDA goal. These studies provide a baseline for further experimentation and design development.
sDA (Spatial Daylight Autonomy): How much of a space receives sufficient daylight (the percentage of floor area that receives at least 300 lux for at least 50% of the occupied hours).
ASE (Annual Sunlight Exposure): The percentage of space receiving too much direct sun (1000 lux of more for at least 250 occupied hours per year), causing glare and increase cooling loads.
