Environmental Technologies in Buildings

The objective of the game is to redesign your class project, with the lowest possible operational Source Energy Use Intensity (Source EUI, kWh/m²) as simulated in DIVA/Archsim/EnergyPlus. Starting off with an approximate thermal model of your latest design from Assignment 6, your task is to create a version of your building with the lowest Source EUI and a purchasing budget at or under $50 MIT dollars. The team with the largest proportional EUI reduction vis-à-vis their baseline design wins. Follow all rules below. When time is up (after 80 minutes), your team must save all of your files and submit them along with a detailed description of your final designs and how you arrived at your best performing iteration.

Now that you have a well daylit, visually comfortable building with an electric lighting design in place, we are turning our attention towards evaluating and improving the energy performance of your design. In this assignment you will first create a baseline energy model of your building and then explore various energy updates.

The goal of this assignment is check your final daylighting design from Assignment 5 for potential areas of glare and remedy them as well as to design an electric lighting concept for your design. As a target level, the electric lighting should provide around 300lux on all key working surfaces and around 150lux in all circulation areas.

In this assignment you will start working in groups on your final course project which is the development of an environmental design concept for an about 3500m² innovation/startup space located in either Chicago, Houston or Seattle, depending on which city you previously signed up for. Your building should accommodate work spaces for around 250 workers, a reception area, lavatory, two seminar rooms and a cafe (optional). It is up to you to define the final program. You may pick any available site within your city and should also consider external factors such as a site’s walkscore etc. Remember to include neighboring buildings in your shading and daylighting analysis. The goal of this first assignment is to develop and evaluate a series of massing options and façade designs that you will then further refine in future assignments.

During assignment 1 you determined how much electricity you have used at some point in your life living in an apartment or house. In this assignment you are going to design a PV system that yields the same amount of electricity over the course of a year and calculate the simple payback time required to get your investment back. The assignment is broken into three parts. 

The objective of this assignment is to validate the results of direct shading studies provided by DIVA/Radiance and other tools. To do so, you are asked to take a photo of an object of your choice outside at least twice at different times of day under clear sky conditions. You are then asked to model the object in Rhino and generate two clear sky visualizations under the same sky conditions from about the same perspective as the photo.