As the dust settles from the recent US presidential elections, the US emerges with Barack Obama as the President Elect. He will be officially taking office on January 20th, 2009 and will start to move ahead on some of his objectives that he supported during his campaign road. One objective in particular is to focus on how the US can work towards a more sustainable environment. The USGBC has taken this objective and started to structure and push forward an agenda for Washington.
The Business Week article, Obama’s Green Building Agenda, gives a brief overview of the plan which is based on four major targets and has an aggressive edge that I think will help push the US forward to the goal of a more sustainable environment and lifestyle.
Posted: November 18, 2008 by Kaye, Category:sketchup
Our friends at SketchUp have just launched SketchUp 7 – and the great news is our IES VE plug-in is compatible with this brand new version. Plus our latest version of the plug-in, which can now take SketchUp groups and components in account, is due out later this week.
SketchUp 7 is even more intuitive and includes tools for power users, plus it’s easier to find and share models with the world. Learn more and download at sketchup.google.com or view the great What’s New in SketchUp 7 video below:
Also this Thursday at 12.30 Chris Cronin of SketchUp fame will be presenting with us at GreenBuild at stand #1447.
Last time I wrote about 4 major initiatives that the entire building industry needs to come to grips with, and quickly. Al Gore has famously modified that African proverb:
“if you want to go quickly, go alone. If you want to go far, go together. We have to go far quickly.”
I stated in my last blog that there are four different areas that our industry needs to focus on quickly and together – understanding passive design, bringing energy modelling into the earliest stages of design, understanding the world around us, and smart grid technology. Right now, most firms are still dealing with the first two issues…but the next two are around the corner for many engineers and architects.
People are moving quickly to tackle good sustainable design, but there is the “together” issue still looming large for many firms. What happens if you have designed a great passive building, then you go to submit it for building permit and it is denied? This is a big problem, and points more at the “together” issue that Al Gore mentions in the proverb. Many governments still have not caught up yet, and are giving inadequate guidance to help people get to big-time energy savings in buildings.
It turns out that permits get denied all of the time, primarily because of unfamiliarity with techniques and design principles for passive design. Even in California, arguably the most progressive government in the United States when it comes to energy efficiency, the California Energy Commission admits that it does not have standard processes in place to submit a permit for passive buildings designed with little or no cooling systems, or passively heated buildings. So even though you can analyze and predict passive design performance using our software, California may not accept it? Seems counterintuitive, given the urgent need right now for good buildings.
Currently California does have something that can help. California Title 24 (the name of the California building energy code) does allow architects and designers to receive permits for unique or novel buildings that are out of their normal field of vision…which includes naturally ventilated buildings, passive solar design, and mixed-mode hybrid designs.The design team simply needs to submit an Alternative Materials and Methods of Construction (AMMC) application, as outlined in section 10-104 of Part 1 of California Title 24. Our consulting arm has been involved with the successful submittal of an AMMC to the State of California and received permitting for non-standard designed. It can be a longer process, but you have to go down the path to receive the rewards of lower energy consumption.
Many local building code officials don’t see good passive design everyday. So what do you do when you want to build something unfamiliar? This is a big problem that our office has to address on a regular basis in San Francisco. If we are taking this whole green business seriously, and we believe the proverb, then both architects, engineers, and building officials all need to be a part of the solution. It doesn’t stop on the drafting table.
How are you addressing this issue in your hometown? What are the other avenues that local codes take to allow designs that don’t fit the mold, but in reality, are far more efficient? If your building officials don’t have a process, then how can you make sure they have one? (Kind of a grassroots question.) We are lucky here in California to have this process, and ASHRAE 90.1 also has a process in place. It would be really cool for other people to give responses sharing their stories about how they got around the building permitting issue for sustainable design. I think it goes to the heart of our problems and our quest for solutions. The development staff at IES feels that we’ve developed great tools to convince building officials of non-standard designs. It answers all of the thermodynamic questions that most good building officials would ask, and it helps to visualize the answers in more intuitive ways.
As an employee of IES who is looking at sustainability from the architecture and design point of view, I know how important it is to think of the energy consumption of a building before you finalize, or even start, a design. Thinking ahead to a green mechanical system is not something engineers are solely responsible for, nor is it something that can be achieved by adding a single solar panel. Green design is a holistic approach, viewing all aspects of the building as potential problems or solutions that could reduce the energy loads on the building. As a student as well as an employee, I am putting these ideas to use for a competition that my college will be involved in.
The 2009 Solar Decathlon takes place in Washington DC as a bi-annual event, hosted by the U.S. Department of Energy. Twenty schools have been chosen to participate in this event. As a Masters of Architecture student of the Boston Architectural College, I am deeply involved with the project. Our architecture and interior design focused college partnered with engineering and policy students of Tufts University and entered the competition that will take place October 9-18, 2009. IES software is an invaluable tool for us to use throughout the design process.
IESVE has provided both time and resources for the Boston Architectural College/Tuft’s Team to analyze/gain real-time feedback on the design, and offers the team an advanced tool to tune their design to a point where it is ready to compete, and hopefully win this competition. This experience is teaching architects to work closely with the engineers throughout the design process by showing how important this is, instilling skills for the future. The team also has to work together to construct the design on the National Mall in Washington DC.
What I’d like to do in my blog is provide some basic guidance with some simple hints and tips for taking your sexy SketchUp model one step further and running the likes of detailed energy consumption, Architecture 2030 Challenge benckmarking and LEED daylighting compliance analysis. Now, I’ve had a bit of experience using SketchUp over the last couple of months but not even close to some of you “super users” so please forgive me if some of this is old hat to you. However, and this is the point, there is a difference between the conventional way of drawing a SketchUp model, purely concerning the shell of the building and its aesthetics, and having individual rooms acknowledged for analysis eligibility.
Now, I am going to assume that you already know about the SketchUp plug-in and the room finding icons and so on and so forth (if not, please go to the SketchUp link on this website or go to www.youtube.com/IESVE). All I’d like to do is help you to get your model ready quickly and efficiently to streamline the process of analysing your building design.
Right, let’s cover the basics first, and then we can apply it to something relevant. You may have seen some of this in the literature, but I’ll assume you haven’t.
The first movie clip shows the basics of room creation and how the room finding algorithm finds spaces based on surfaces.
Once the 2nd room is extruded, you will see there is no floor. The fundamental rule for “rooms” to be acknowledged is they must be enclosed volumes. These have no floor, hence no rooms are found.
Drawing a line across the floor will then bound these spaces with the floor and also a partition wall. 2 rooms are found.
I don’t want a partition wall, so I’ll delete the surface. Woops! Only 1 room is found now.
I’ll draw the surface back in by adding a diagonal line to bound it, then delete the diagonal line.
This time, instead of deleting the surface, I’ll make the surface 0% opacity and it will be picked up as a partition, albeit an invisible one, but at least light, heat and air can pass through it. Ah ha! Now I have 2 rooms again.
Ok, so that fundamental rule is that to divide spaces into separate rooms, there must be a surface connecting them, then the levels of opacity will determine whether they are walls, windows, or holes.
0% hole
1-99% window
100% wall
Ok, let’s take that rule and apply it to my design.
1. We shall assume we have the floor plate but no individual spaces. If you want to know what the heating and cooling loads are for each of the rooms, not the whole floor because they have 1. Varying space usage and 2. Different orientations and hence varying solar penetration.
2. One of the spaces is in an open plan office but it’s very large so we want to split the space into perimeter and core, but maintain the space as open plan for solar tracking and heat/air transfer purposes.
3. So the steps shown in the 2nd movie are as follows.
a. Floorplate with no floor, no room found
b. Floor drawn, room found
c. Partition walls drawn to define enclosed office spaces.
d. Core and perimeter spaces drawn
e. Partition walls modified to have 0% opacity therefore in any subsequent analysis, light, heat and air can pass through into the adjacent space, but each room is considered its own entity from a load perspective.
The next step will be to run this model through the likes of VE-Ware (our free tool), the VE-Toolkits and modules within the full Virtual Environment. This will allow you to gauge its performance in terms of daylighting, airflow, energy and thermal comfort. And you thought your sexy SketchUp model was just for show eh. Wait ‘till my next blog.
