Changing the Relationship of Form and Performance: The Conceptual Integration of Quantitative Performance Evaluations into Design Pedagogy

Architecture plays a significant role in building a sustainable world, but itspedagogy has to change. Due to diminishing resources and a rapidly changingclimate sustainable design requires a thorough understanding of energyperformance as a design parameter. Urgent demand for carbon and energyneutral buildings challenges conventional design and programming and theway we teach it. Purely conceptual or formal approaches to the design ofspatial composition and building envelope no longer provide adequate solutionsfor buildings and neighborhoods, which need to be energy, water andmaterial self-sustained. Additionally it is no longer sufficient to build for onelocal climate. Instead with the building lifespan, design concepts also needto integrate the ability for buildings to adapt to future climate scenarios.A thorough understanding of thermodynamics, the physics of air movementand of technologies to utilize natural forces and solar energy has to beintegrated into design concepts and parameters. Architectural skills haveto change from the ability to develop static forms to the ability to developdynamically changing spatial scenarios. The question is how to educate studentsto creatively address those challenges, when especially natural ventilationand day-lighting are extremely complex and ever changing dynamicphenomena and already the movement of the sun across the day is hardto grasp. Architects need to be equipped during the early and later designphase with knowledge and design tools to integrate and predict dynamicperformances of natural light, solar energy and air movement to achievethese sustainable high performance buildings.This paper will examine the approach to two design studios, which integratedsustainable design principles and environmental performance modelingtools. The first studio was an experimental summer program in Berlin, jointlydeveloped between a US and a German architecture program with the goalto integrate dynamic performance evaluation software tools into conceptualdesign. The projects used a building footprint given by a master plan for anurban brown-field rehabilitation site and developed strategies for adaptablemixed-use typologies and concentrated on the envelope as an interface forlight, solar radiation and air. The second approach was tested in a semesterlong graduate studio, where students developed medium scale mixed usenet zero infill project alongside a classic US automobile strip and addressedall stages from programming to energy balance and details.In both cases, students gained an elevated understanding of energy performancein the urban context and visualized the specific energy flow patterns for wind,light and solar radiation as they are dynamically shaped and manipulated in thedense urban context. These new performance oriented design studios lead toprojects that not only reevaluated the relationship between architecture, culturallandscapes and environmental issues, but also reshaped the iterative process ofdesign as it integrated quantitative with the qualitative parameters. The paperwill compare the pedagogical approaches which used parametric performanceevaluation tools as well as thermal calculation spreadsheets in support of aestheticspeculation and enhanced experiential quality in order to understand theirinfluence on sustainable design concepts and spatial strategies.

Volume Editors
Martha Thorne & Xavier Costa

ISBN
978-0-935502-83-1