frontstepdesign

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.

Bjarke Ingels - listening to the client is the way to good design

Terrific TED Talks video by star-chitect Bjarke Ingels.  

I'm very encouraged (and jealous! I want to learn how to make movies, too!) to see this sort of presentation.  I don't think that the conventional magazine can really do the job, in comparison to a good video.  And now that we have the web - it's really easy to share.

Some outtakes I really like:

"Yes is More" - that solutions come more usefully from listening and brainstorming and 'breeding' of different good ideas, than by establishing rules to exclude solutions.

"Sustainability seems to be this neo-Protestant idea that it has to hurt to do good" - what about examples that improve quality of life?

I also like his humility...

"we didn't think that (our proposal) looked like anything in the north of Sweden...the Swedish jury didn't think so either, so we lost."  But they recycled the idea for China, given the resemblance to the Chinese character meaning 'people', which came from a Chinese businessman who saw the scheme.  So after "scaling the building up three times to Chinese proportions"...

Shanghai mayor Chen Liangyu called the scheme "a way to bridge the gap between the ancient wisdom of China" (as symbolized by the broad connection at base) and its high-reaching future.  "We obviously profoundly agree with him..."

See, listening to how people interpret your work is really important.  What you intend is not as important as what they experience.