frontstepdesign

Google Search box added

I've added a Google search box, which is supposed to search just this site when Google's crawlers get around to find it, or perhaps my code is wrong somehow.  I'm giving it a week, and if it doesn't work by then I'll try again.

Retooling

8 million jobs lost in the recession, that are never coming back.

As one of those "construction" jobs in a severe bubble state, I've decided that I, as an architect, am superfluous to the general market.  Furthermore, since I didn't get the sort of career opportunities that it turns out to be of interest to the new economy, it's time to retool myself.

So this blog needs to change again, to help me.  I'm heading into information systems, attracted by databases.  I've been known to tell people, "we really need a database to keep track of all this, and if we could get this other source of data, and cross it with our stuff, then maybe it could tell us X..."  I want to learn how to do that better, and find a place to use my skills.

I've been accepted into UAH's business school, where I'm thinking I'm going to pursue a MS-IS.  I've been collecting old textbooks for some of the prerequisite courses I need to make up:

• One semester of graduate or two semesters undergraduate accounting
• One semester of computer programming (any language)
• One semester of economics which includes microeconomics
• One semester of statistics
• One semester of calculus
• One semester of business communications

I'd taken a statistics course as part of my psychology certificate, but it was targeted to experiment design.  Later I read The Four-Hour Work Week, and was intrigued by Tim Ferriss' use of regressions to usefully crunch data.  I've just had a great time reading Super Crunchers, and wonder how I can try some of these methods myself.

I've done some real-world accounting, and always felt I was constructing a jigsaw puzzle of the larger picture.  Taking a training course in Quickbooks helped, but I never really did enough of it to feel that I could control the system.  The old textbooks I've picked up are "managerial" accounting, which are already orienting me.

For computer programming, I'm not sure how to proceed.  In Reality Check, Guy Kawasaki advocates MySQL as the way to go for databases these days.  People who have been in programming for the last couple of decades advocate Pascal.  I think I want to work through my Information Technology and Society textbook first, though I'll probably do both and more.

Regional Priority - According to LEED, what needs fixing in your neck of the woods?

So I'm playing around on the USGBC site as part of my study prep for the LEEDv3.0 exam, and I find the Regional Priority Credits lookup tables.

Oooh.  These are the extra points your project can get by making sure to address generally good issues that the experts think need special attention in your project's location.  Since I'm a "think global, act local" sort of person, I'm particularly intrigued.  Let's plug in some places that I know pretty well, or am curious about, and see what needs fixing.

Fort Walton Beach, Florida.  32548. I graduated from high school here, did my internship and ran my own architectural practice here.

SSc3 - Sustainable Sites, Brownfield Redevelopment.  Somebody thinks that FWB has industrial pollution...which it does, being a low-density, car-dependent, minimally-managed-until-recently sort of place, with serious military munitions testing.

SSc5.1 - Sustainable Sites, Habitat.  FWB has a sound, and a beautiful bay, with lots of wildlife...but they are threatened by everyone wanting to have lawns and pools and azaleas.

WEc1 Option 2 - Water Efficient Landscaping, No Potable Water Use or Irrigation.  In a place that primarily uses shallow wells that draw down the aquifer for most landscape irrigation, to keep lawns planted in nutrient-poor sand green and pretty, despite scorching solar incidence....yeah.

EAc1 28% - Optimize Energy Performance (28% Improvement Over Baseline Modeling).  Most energy in FWB is used for air conditioning, and there is unfortunately NOT a culture of white roofs.  Or enough attic insulation.  Winter conditions are ideal for passive solar, except that buildings usually aren't designed for it. This 28% is pretty low-hanging fruit.

EAc2 13% - On-Site Renewable Energy.  At a place with the solar incidence of Cairo, Egypt, this probably means solar.  Which again, almost nobody has, and only five years ago I was begging the utility to not hang up on me as I re-pronounced "photo-voltaic".

WEc2 - Innovative Wastewater Technologies.  Again, it's a beach, there's a huge number of pools and other tourist facilities...why aren't there waterless urinals everywhere?  And rainwater cisterns?  I was so impressed when I went to Australia with the rainwater collection cisterns everywhere one turned.

Just for contrast, let's try same latitude, same state, different soil condition, history, and market:

Tallahassee, Florida.  32301. I attended graduate school here, and have family living here.

SSc2 - Community Density Development.  Tally has about 50,000 students, and then there's the state legislature and workers, in a fairly small city, that suffers from no natural density limits.

SS4.1 - Public Transportation.  I actually know a couple who have two cars, and don't use them on a regular basis.  But they are the exception.  I've never ridden the bus here.

WEc2 - Innovative Wastewater Technologies.  Lots of dorms, lots of restaurants...again, nice to see the toilets, urinals and showers go low-flow.  Tally gets significant rainfall, so rainwater cistern design would be driven by success, rather than scarcity.

EAc1 (28%) - Optimize Energy Performance (28% Improvement Over Baseline Modeling).  It's an air conditioning climate, with good passive solar potential (though still needing some humidity control at nearly all times).  Many buildings are not well-insulated, and there's no culture of white roofs here, either.

EAc2 (13%) - On-Site Renewable Energy.  Same latitude as Fort Walton, so sun is a great resource.

MRc5 (20%) - Regionally Produced Materials.  This piques my curiosity - I know that Tally is in the middle of an agricultural area, but I wonder what other than timber is made locally.

EAc4(3%/25%) - Enhanced Refrigerant Management.  Well, it's an air-conditioning climate, not just for temperature, but also humidity, and there are a lot of restaurants...am I missing something?

And finally, a place I'd like to know more about, since I'd really like to move there...

Huntsville, Alabama.  35801.

SSc4 (25%) - Alternative Transportation (in general, reduce by 25%).  There must be lots of single-person commuters.

SSc6 - Stormwater Design (quantity and quality).  Much rain, and nowhere for it to go?  Also a river basin to protect.

WEc2(20%) - Innovative Wastewater Technologies.  Again, this sounds like population density, and old plumbing that needs replacement.

EAc1 (75 rating/25 percentile)  Optimize Energy Performance.  This 'rating' seems to be from Appendix G, in ASHRAE's 90.1-2007, but I don't have that in the LEED Reference Guide.  I'd like to get my hands on this, to understand it better.

EAc4(3%/25%)  Enhanced Refrigerant Management.  I'm wondering if every zipcode south of the Mason-Dixon line with any population density has this listed.  I'd like to be more educated on the horrible things happening because we haven't been properly managing refrigerant.

IEQc2.3 - Increased Ventilation.  Bit of a puzzle here, since c2 doesn't have a c2.1 or a c2.2, let alone a ~.3 showing in my copy of the LEED Reference Guide...but let's see.  Is this commentary on goverment and other buildings that have no way to operate windows?

I'm really grateful that USGBC chapters have added this feature, because it's impossible for each of us to know every place intimately enough to make good design decisions about it.

Maas Coffee House packs an espresso punch of space usability in a tiny frugal package.

Four hundred square feet, the heart of a rapidly revitalizing downtown, a clientele that includes some of the best local area restaurants as well as local business owners, and roasting beans on-site.

It's an ambitious organizational punch, but Jim Maas manages it.  Check out how well he's used space:

 

Here's the view just coming in the door.  It looks at this on the other long wall:

 

That mirror increases the spaciousness and convivial nature (because Jim is the prototypical Neighborhood Friendly Coffee Guy) of the shop considerably.  Products for sale, with supplies stored above general eye range.  Just to the right, behind the glass storefront door, is a bulletin board full of neighborhood doings...

 

Wireless internet access is also a draw.  For more seating, especially for groups, there's the back garden...

The neighboring buildings do a good job of keeping the summer heat off.  Here's a view back at the front door...

Thanks, Jim!  See you soon!

*disclaimer: I feature Maas in appreciation, and had nothing to do with designing this space.  I think there are a lot of clever ideas here, and applaud his ingenuity.

Today's Awesome Sandwich - Turkey Club Swiss on Pumper with GuacSunSpin

(it is turkey + bacon that makes a Turkey Club, right?)

Turkey breast, deli slices
Bacon
Swiss
Pumpernickel
Guacamole
Sundried tomato paste
Spinach

Still studying LEED, still learning Revit.  Amazing how hungry one gets, studying.

Autodesk Sustainability Webcast Archive

More archived webcasts, though probably not with CEUs attached.

AUTODESK

• Energy Efficiency in High Performance Building Design 
• The Importance of Design Visualization for Creating Renewable Designs
• Bridging Environmental and Architectural Design to Nurture Renewability
• Trends in Constructability and Waste Reduction: The Architect & General Contractor Partnership
• Going Paperless and the Environmental Impact of Architectural Practices
• Revit Architecture and Design Visualization for Sustainable Design
• Revit and Sustainable Designs

Continuing Ed opportunities from Autodesk

Places to find continuing ed:

Online Continuing Education: Revit Architecture, Creating and Modifying Schedules

Online Continuing Education: Bridging Environmental & Architectural Design to Nurture Renewability

Revit - Daylight studies for inside the building? UPDATE

As if the universe was listening to me...after posting about wanting a way for Revit to help me decide what sort of energy optimization design moves to make, I stumbled upon a webcast that happened today about that very thing.

The answer might have been predicted:  Yes, and No.  Yes, there's a way to see the effects of a light shelf.  No, it's not within Revit.

There's two other wonderful tools needed for useful modeling and reporting:

Green Building Studio and Ecotect.  Both of these are from Autodesk, and both work well with the models that Revit produces.

In the webcast, staff showed how Green Building Studio can produce a detailed report on an "eggshell model" of an existing building, complete with estimated costs and payback periods!  And then, without making changes to the model, calculate the effects of various improvements.  Examples included a under-floor heating/cooling system and a rainscreen.

Ecotect was even more detailed in its investigation potential.  With this tool, one area of the building was isolated, cut into wireframe section, and various light shelves were calculated for optimum size and location.  These shelves then were assigned reflective values and the resulting sunshine vectors were hugely illuminating, pun intended!

The webcast should be posted onto this archive of past webcasts in this series; I intend to watch the others, too.

Places to find continuing ed:

Online Continuing Education: Revit Architecture, Creating and Modifying Schedules

Online Continuing Education: Bridging Environmental & Architectural Design to Nurture Renewability

Revit - Daylight studies for inside the building?

I saw this blog post at Green Building: Jetson Green, with a nice summary of all energy use in the US, broken down by place of use, and then type of use.

 Residential Energy Use (22% of total US use):

• 1%  - Computers
• 5%  - Cooking
• 5%  - Wet clean
• 7%  - Electronics
• 8%  - Refrigeration
• 11% - Lights
• 12% - Cooling
• 12% - Water heat
• 31% - Heating

Commercial Energy Use (18% of total US use):

• 2%  - Cooking
• 3%  - Computers
• 4%  - Refrigeration
• 6%  - Office equipment
• 6%  - Ventilation
• 7%  - Water heat
• 13% - Cooling
• 14% - Heating
• 26% - Lighting

I really like to get these numbers into total relative terms.  Let's look at the top offenders, Lighting, Water Heat, Cooling, and Heating, and multiply them out to see what piece of the total US pie they are...

• Residential Lights - 2.4% of all energy used in US, even counting industry and transportation
• Residential Cooling - 2.6% of all energy used
• Residential Water Heat - 2.6% of all energy used
• Residential Heating - 6.8% of all energy used
• Commercial Water Heat - 1.3% of all energy used
• Commercial Cooling - 2.3% of all energy used
• Commercial Heating - 2.5% of all energy used
• Commercial Lighting - 4.7% of all energy used

Okay, so Residential Heating and Commercial Lighting are the low-hanging fruit here.

Residential Heating would seem to be an insulation issue?  Must find out more about this - I've practiced the last decade in a cooling climate, and the electric bill in the winter in Florida is *far* lower than the summer.  What about airlocks for houses - older houses up north all seem to have them, but the newer condos and such don't.  Obviously efforts to upgrade windows and make sure envelopes are sealed would pay off.

(On the topic of cooling climates: What is the proportion of population in heating climates vs cooling climates?  It's hard to sell superwindows in a cooling climate - they don't seem to make enough difference - would something else, like a white/cool roof?)

Commercial Lighting - Can Revit run daylight studies for inside the building?  Will it report footcandles delivered to a desk?  I'm wondering about daylight shelves bouncing more light inside.  As I learn more about what Revit can help predict, I'm more and more excited about it.

Fire concerns for green roofs

So, apparently green roofs will burn.  (Here's a video of a green roof on fire, from the wonderful Green Building Law Update.)

This makes a lot of sense - I know someone who let a trash burning take over a meadow, so why would an artificial meadow be different?

What concerns me more is:

1) How resistant to heat/damage are the underlying parts of the assembly, which seem to feature plastics?

2) What does one do to the owner's insurance rates when one chooses a green roof?

3) How do the firefighters feel about their ability to do their job when a green-roofed building is on fire...I've heard that some firefighters don't like metal roofs, as they're harder to get through to access a burning attic.  Even though the insurance rates are lower, for metal roofs.

I'm sure more data will come to light on this notion soon.