Taking it to the Streets
October 9th, 2008 | by Nicole |
I had the great pleasure of launching what might be best termed a “Green Blitzkrieg” last month as we landed in 9 US and Canadian cities and over 70 design firms from coast to coast. Many thanks to all those who hosted us – we hope you stay tuned via this blog and through our support lines. A big shout-out also goes to the 5 members of the Google SketchUp team who allied with our troops on numerous stops along the tour de force to engage and support our mutual mission to bring sustainable design mainstream.
The objective was to demonstrate the powerful, early-stage simulations now available with the push of a few buttons, quite literally, to inform designers on building performance with respect to the Architecture 2030 challenge, energy, carbon, solar shading, daylighting, even the potential for natural ventilation – all from one model created in either SketchUp or Revit (or indeed anything that exports gbXML). What we observed was extremely positive on several fronts.
So what did we learn?
1) The word is out. Building Performance Analysis (BPA) is in. This is no longer exclusively an engineering function and many in the architectural community are ready to don the hat of early-stage energy analyst. This trend is yet fledgling but absolutely essential (see last week’s entry by Chien Si- “An International Challenge”)! Awareness of the 2030 Challenge is now pervading the community and architects are past the “what” and onto the “how”. We delight in having a great answer for that in VE-Ware (freeware)! I encourage you all to stay tuned to the news section of the Architecture 2030 site for very interesting developments in key areas of the country. “Initiative” is becoming legislation…
2) While many architectural firms have “sustainability experts” on their teams, the majority of them lack access to a comprehensive toolset to effectively quantify the complex trade-offs between passive solar design or “lean design” strategies commonly employed by experienced designers. Early-stage, integrated analysis to assess the net effects of these strategies is the gateway to reducing energy costs and achieving carbon neutrality. Though this seems to be well understood, the need has not yet been met, until now.
3) We at IES have now turned a hard corner toward our goal to make analysis tools for lean environmental design accessible to the masses. Whereas IES tools may have previously been characterized as “robust, but complicated and expensive” for early stage design, we are now building up a reputation of “powerful and accessible” in terms of cost and complexity. Rest assured, we have just begun down this new road we call “from analysis to understanding”. Stay tuned for much more to come in the remainder of this year and next
Can’t sit still too long so we will be hitting the road again soon and visiting many more cities in the coming months. See you around!
Nicole
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