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Rocky Mountain Green - Thermal Comfort, Radiant Energy and Regionalism
- 1. A Watershed Moment ThermalComfort, RadiantEnergy,and Regionalism: AWatershedMomentfor SustainableDesign Pete Jefferson, M.E. GROUP, and Mark Broyles, Cuningham Group Architecture
- 2. A Watershed Moment Learning Objectives: Explain the fundamental principles of thermodynamics related to radiant heat transfer and storage. Illuminate the history of buildings and architecture that utilize principles of radiant thermal comfort and demonstrate the relevance and potential of these building design concepts to modern building tasks. Revisit the recent history of thermal comfort in architecture to clarify the path that has led us to our modern approach to building design, and to develop a new, clear- eyed appreciation for the ability to reimagine that path as designers. Explore the applicability and considerations for these systems relative to regional environmental characteristics. Provide demonstrable models, both built and speculative, for a radiant-energy-based architecture across a range of regional conditions.
- 4. IfSustainableArchitectureisSo Great… Why Isn’t Everyone Doing It? LEED Gold Building Everybody Else
- 5. Are We Practicing Sustainability at the End of an Evolutionary Branch? Charles Darwin’s original sketches of evolutionary branching Where has the accretive logic of our building science led us?
- 6. An Historical Perspective So How Did We Get Out This Far (Evolutionary Branch-wise)?
- 7. Dancing with the Sun: Early buildings that shade, absorb, and create microclimates based on their environment
- 8. Dancing with the Sun: Early buildings that shade, absorb, and create microclimates based on their environment ‘SolarStreet’,Priene,Anatolia
- 9. A pre-industrial watershed: Glass enters the built environment…… and the Greenhouse Effect becomes a new means of creating thermal comfort in buildings
- 10. A pre-industrial watershed: Glass enters the built environment…… and the Greenhouse Effect becomes a new means of creating thermal comfort in buildings
- 11. Large ‘sandwich’ floor plates with a functional need for high-quality illumination on complex and dangerous industrial processes spur building technologies forward The Recent (and Misunderstood) Past: The Industrial Revolution launches a tsunami across the culture of building
- 12. The Early Factory: A paradigm for the next 150 years of architecture Mechanically powered ventilation and cast-iron structural frames allow large floor plate buildings
- 13. The Early Factory: A paradigm for the next 150 years of architecture Mechanically powered ventilation and cast-iron structural frames allow large floor plate buildings
- 14. A new kind of interior landscape: a dense environment of powerful machines and their minders…. needing unprecedented quantities of light and oxygen Can I have a latte NOW?
- 15. It’s déjà vu, all over again Yogi Berra, famous baseball figure and architectural historian
- 16. Radiant Heating: Four Thousand Years of Slow Evolution The Fire-Pit The Brazier The Fire-Place and the Stove Rumford Fire-Place
- 17. Meanwhile, back at the Victorian House: ‘Engineering’ moves the hearth to the basement And radiant direct heating evolves into central air heating with the gravity furnace
- 18. The rise of balloon frame building technology changes the face of American building culture: the American house is transformed from a masonry ‘radiant repository’ into a container for warm air
- 19. The Incandescent Lamp and the Electric Fan become revolutionary architectural drivers And conditioned air begins its ascendancy in the shaping of modern building culture
- 20. Where Does This All Lead Us? Are Buildings Merely Efficient Containers for Conditioned Air? ‘Spaceship Earth’
- 21. Our current building culture: stuck in aesthetic and programmatic expectations that are 60 years old…….
- 22. And these expectations arise out of a Modernist way of making architecture….. utterly reliant on cheap electricity and complex, air-based space conditioning.
- 23. if we continue to approach today’s building tasks, Burdened with yesterday’s expectations… We will likely fail to green the built world.
- 24. LEED-Gold - LEED-Platinum still isn’t enough in most cases. We can’t depend on the ability of LEED methodology alone to drag an extinct building culture into a sustainable future.
- 25. IntegratedDesignvs. IntegratingDesign: Buildingsystemswon’tbeintegrated until… and unless… ourdisciplinesbecomemore integrated.
- 27. An inevitable dichotomy or a false and artificial division? Engineering vs. Aesthetics:
- 30. Define loads.
- 32. Credit: Devin Abellon, PE, Uponor Industries
- 33. Old versus current expectations for “comfort” Old Expectations: (I should wear warm clothes when it’s cold) New Expectations: (I should be able to wear whatever I want no matter the outdoor conditions)
- 35. Demonstrate conventional approach to heating/cooling
- 40. What if we addressed the loads where they happen?
- 41. What if we addressed the loads where they happen?
- 42. CCD CONFLUENCE
- 43. What if we tried to take the most thermodynamically sensible approach to solving these problems? Source: Thermally Active Surfaces in Architecture, Kiel Moe
- 44. A 30” Round Duct OR A 2” Pipe 100,000 Btu/h Cooling Needs:
- 45. Integration of radiant with architectural and structural Elementalbuilding.com
- 47. Examples in the Built Environment
- 48. Passive Mass
- 49. Radiators
- 52. Thermal shock Limitations of radiant
- 53. Hybrid approach (radiant for sensible, forced air for latent)Opportunity: Mixed mode systems
- 54. Loyola Information Commons Architect: Solomon Cordwell Buenz Architecture Building Physicist: Transsolar
- 55. NREL SEB
- 56. NREL SEB
- 57. Thermodynamic merits of water versus air. Source: Thermally Active Surfaces in Architecture, Kiel Moe
- 58. CHAPTERFOUR: PUTTINGITINTOPRACTICE Heifer International Headquarters Polk Stanley Rowland Curzon Porter Architects, LTD 63.
- 59. How do we get there?
- 60. Rethinking the ‘function’ of the building "It is the pervading law of all things organic, and inorganic, of all things physical and metaphysical, of all things human and all things super-human, of all true manifestations of the head, of the heart, of the soul, that the life is recognizable in its expression, that form ever follows function. This is the law.. Louis Sullivan
- 61. Rethinking the ‘function’ of the building Why should building programs continue to render all other considerations subservient? Why should we allow energy efficiency to drive us towards environmental cocooning? Why can’t the richness of climate and place Infuse program and building form? of all true manifestations of the head, the heart, the soul… of all things physical and metaphysical of all things organic, and inorganic
- 62. Modernist architectural process studies and manipulates ‘program’….
- 63. And ‘integrates’ an overlaid set of engineered systems afterward.
- 64. So…let’s heed Louis and scrap that process.
- 65. Whatifweseek, fromthe beginning,tochange everything ratherthan justonething? To do this- we need to put program expectations on the table along with everything else.
- 66. Starting at the beginning of a project and taking an entirely different approach: What if we spent any given project budget a bit differently? Roofing 1% Mechanical 18% Electrical 9% ConveyingSystems 3% General Conditions 8% Equipment 3% Sitework 2% Foundation 7% Substructure 7% Superstructure 27% Exterior Closure 14% Roofing 1% Mechanical 35% Electrical 10% ConveyingSystems 3% General Conditions 9% Equipment 3% Sitework 2% Foundation 6% Substructure 2% Superstructure 16% Exterior Closure 11% from Thermally Active Surfaces in Architecture, Kiel Moe OldThink NewThink
- 70. Rethinking Building Concepts: what if we re-learn the art of making complex programs out of the fabric of simple buildings ?
- 71. An Emerging Vision for our Design Culture: what if we re-learn the art of making complex programs out of the fabric of simple buildings ? Jefferson Scholars Foundation, VMDO Architects
- 72. More efficient, cost effective and simpler. Portland Community College Newberg Center, Hennebery Eddy Architects
- 75. Regionalism: Nurturing a Building Ethos that Leverages the proximal Natural Resources and Climate …Form ever following Function
- 76. Regionalism. Romance or Real Re-Connection? Office Building, Seattle Weber Thompson Architects
- 77. Regionalism Conference Center, South Carolina Clark Menefree Architects Buildings that Re-connect people to the Natural World
- 78. Regionalism Centre for Mathematical Sciences, Cambridge Edward Cullinan Architects
- 79. Rebalancingourapproachtothe builtenvironment … To rebuild our connections to the natural environment The Human Impact: A Question of Balance
- 80. The global impact. attaining real sustainability through balance and wholeness In process and product
Editor's Notes
- We’re here today because we want to share with you some of our questions, thoughts, discoveries, and conversations over the past few years about where we’re headed… and perhaps where we SHOULD be headed. It’s led us to think about the central role played by thermal comfort and regulation in achieving true sustainability, the historic arc that helps us unravel how and why we got to this point, and how those lessons- joined to a new understanding of how local environmental characteristics can be leveraged through transformational processes to reconnect us to the places we inhabit- to ‘regionalize’ and sustain an overly and unbalanced, globalized approach to our building tasks.
- We’re here today because we want to share with you some of our questions, thoughts, discoveries, and conversations over the past few years about where we’re headed… and perhaps where we SHOULD be headed. It’s led us to think about the central role played by thermal comfort and regulation in achieving true sustainability;the HISTORIC ARC that helps us unravel how and why we got to this point;and how those lessons- joined to a new understanding of how local environmental characteristics can be leveraged through transformational processes to reconnect us to the places we inhabit:to ‘regionalize’ and sustain an unbalanced, overly GLOBALIZED approach to our building tasks.
- Despite groundbreaking ideas like LEED and the heroic project-by-project efforts of dedicated professionals like those in this room today, the vast prosaic mass of the built environment remains largely unaffected by the concept of sustainability.
- What follows is a slightly revisionist and guerilla history of the March of Architecture into the present day.
- For a great part of the history of architecture, the task of creating appropriate thermal environments for the civilization’s activities has involved the arrangement of found materials to mediate an essentially open system, selectively admitting and retaining useful qualities and quantities (light, air, warmth) while moderating the effects of too much or too little in a constant ballet with the surrounding environment.
- Many times this kind of open-system design extended from individual architectural response to the geometries and forms of entire cities. Priene, in Asia Minor, has a uniform street and block system that allows most of the urban housing to orient its living spaces to the south while the northern streetscape elevations shield dwellings from cold winds and storms.
- A tremendous achievement that revolutionized building technology and transformed the use of architectural space was the advent of glassmaking technologies that allowed widespread use of vision glass in windows. The ability to trap infrared radiation inside buildings as an accompaniment to natural light reshaped the parameters of buildings as open energy systems.Buildings now became much more useable as places of work and human interaction and altered again the possibilities of urban form shaped by new building types.
- 17th Century Amsterdam- a city shaped by a democratic approach to solar access.
- The buildings that have shaped our civilization’s critical activities are not the high-style buildings we study in Architectural History 101. James Marston Fitch- in American Building: the Environmental Forces that Shape It- addresses the critical contribution of the containers of the industrial Revolution.
- Pre-electric: artificial light from combustion sources necessitates sophisticated artificial ventilation.POWER becomes a part of architecture (steam and water in the beginning)…..
- And, later, electrical power amplifies the potential size of interior environments to new heights.
- People performing critical work tasks far from the outside world of natural light and air; mining technology applied to a new kind of ‘mine’
- So while new building tasks drove technological innovations to support increasingly ‘closed’ systems of habitation, radiant thermal transfer and storage- as primal and old as the discovery of fire- took a long, relatively slow course of technological evolution with human civilization. Burning wood inside buildings for the radiant heat it gave off was largely responsible for the deforestation of large areas of the earth’s surface as populations grew.Fireplaces are surprisingly a relatively recent widespread technology- only migrating from the house of the very wealthy to common people around the 17th-18th century.
- The 19th Century brought on revolutions in domestic architecture, as houses became larger, more specialized, and more compartmentalized. Corridors were ‘invented’.And the fire inside the house began a journey from companions for every room to an unseen ‘servant’ in the basement. And fire warmed indirectly through the transfer mechanism of heated air rather than direct radiation across space.
- Almost coincidentally, the balloon frame building of the American frontier expansion became a natural companion for the hot-air furnace- A lightweight ‘balloon’ membrane to contain a volume of heated air. The transition from open energy system to closed system at every level of building was almost complete.
- The remaining critical elements of our modern universe came quickly; electricity for power and light spread from 1880 on and the transition from a civilization tied to its environment and a culture largely independent of its environment was essentially complete.The humble electric fan is perhaps the single most important and unsung shaper of our modern world.
- So here is where we would suggest that our evolutionary branch of architectural technology and building culture has led us.
- And our technological evolution has interacted with our expectations for buildings and our assumptions about how they SHOULD be designed- because with cheap energy that COULD be designed in that manner.
- These habits of thought are so ingrained we hardly think about them.
- But- it seems to us that perhaps they are real impediments to real progress.
- LEED is a light in the darkness- but we can’t rest on LEED laurels.
- A key to changing our mindset has to begin with emerging from our professional silos.Wright was trained as an engineer, not as an architect.
- Our more mechanistic approach to design process integration produces buildings that work IN SPITE of their system’s interrelationships;A more ORGANIC approach to design process ought to produce buildings that work BECAUSE of their system’s interrelationships. This is am more general and maybe less literal interpretation of the lessons to be learned from biomimicry and the way nature creates sustainability in its organisms.
- This is what happens when the engineer comes on board too late.
- I’m going to start by talking a bit about what we consider to be the typical problems we’re trying to solve. The entire discipline of mechanical engineering has one consistent theme, and that’s energy transfer. Whether you’re an engineer designing cars at Ford, or a mechanical engineer in the built environment, energy transfer is at it’s core. So what we set out to do in buildings is balance the energy transfer to achieve a balance that yields a comfortable building. A building in the process of gaining energy will rise in temperature. A building that is losing energy will cool. Now there are some pretty consistent elements in buildings that effect that energy balance. The environment is often the largest influence in that energy balance, but in certain building types, these internal loads can become more dominant.
- Now this energy transfer takes place in one of three forms.Radiation happens by the transmission of electromagnetic waves from all matter that has a temperature greater than absolute zero. Conduction happens when heat is transferred through direct contact. In this image, the body’s feet are in direct contact with another surface. The third form is convection. Convective heat transfer occurs through the movement of fluids. Imagine a cold day – now imagine a cold windy day and the effect of the wind on your comfort. That’s convective cooling in effect. About 50% of the heat lost from the human body is radiated. 25% is convective. The remaining 25% is made up exhalation and conduction. THE HUMAN BODY IS A RADIATOR.
- `True or false – heat rises?
- Along the way, in trying to solve the fundamental issue of energy balance in buildings, our expectations of how our internal environment should be has changed. We try to create building environments that completely isolate the interior environment from the exterior, allowing our occupants to where whatever they want. And we shoot for some happy medium, where somebody wearing a t-shirt on a cold day is just as comfortable as the person wearing the sweater.The end result is that we as engineers, and LEED, ASHRAE and every standard, have come to acknowledge that total acceptance is not possible. What many people don’t know is what that range is – 80% satisfaction is considered acceptable. In other words, if 2 out of 10 people are uncomfortable, then we’ve met our goal.
- A contributing factor to this unambitious goal is the gradual disconnect between our interior building environment and the external environment. But just as culpable in my mind is the way we have come to condition this interior environment, and what has become the de facto standard for heating and cooling systems in building.
- The last 50 years has been a process of gradually increasing the interior loads within the building, and generally decreasing the reliance on environmental assets like natural ventilation. And during this period, the basic form of treating this environment has relied on convective heat transfer – i.e. Forced air systems.So we load up the space with all of these hot surfaces and our response is to blow 55 degree air into the space. This air mixes with all of the surfaces, we get the thermostat to read somewhere around 72 and life is good. Except for the person that feels a cold draft near that diffuser.Or the person that is hot because of the radiant effect of the solar gains on her workstation and surfaces.
- How did we get to this point, where we increasingly rely on mechanical systems to regulate what is comfort?I would argue that we did it because the cost of energy was cheap. But as we see the cost of energy and water continually increase, it’s forcing us to reevaluate the impact of buildings. That’s a reason we’re all here talking and sharing ideas – and why buildings are actually getting better. But the fundamental way that we condition nearly every building has remain unchanged – and our position is that now is the time for us to stop ignoring the realities of physics and thermodynamics through incremental improvements in sustainability, often relying on moderate increases in efficiencies of building components, insulation, and systems. We need to fundamentally change our approach to building design.
- So what – what if we start to look at the way the natural world works around us.
- Earth is sustained through radiant energy. Electromagnetic waves travel 92 million of miles to keep Earth from becoming a dark, lifeless ball of ice.
- Now to look for other forms of inspiration, we don’t have to look into space. We can look around the room. The human body itself is a tremendous study in mechanical, structural and electrical engineering. And architecture… and plumbing.What happens in the body is that the circulatory system regulates our body temperature. And it uses blood, not air to do it. How we condition our temperature is decoupled from how we breathe through the respiratory system.Could you imagine the human body heating and cooling systems operating the same way as a building with air ducts running everywhere?
- Now, what if we took steps to limit source of our energy imbalances at the source? That could be the building envelope, or it could be the equipment we bring in.
- So what if we start to address the loads where they happen rather than let them into our buildings unabated and then addressed by blowing cold air everywhere?Maybe we start absorbing these energy imbalances where they are absorbed into the building.
- So looking around at our world and even ourselves, do we see things that can inspire our fundamental approach to buildings and systems?Let’s start with the basic fact that water is incredibly more efficient at moving energy around than air is.
- Add a ceiling plenum to the imageQ = 0.89 x CFM x T = .89 x 5617 CFM x 20 degQ = 500 x GMP x T = 500 x 40 GPM x 5 deg
- When we start to take these approaches, our buildings are inherently built differently.The mechanical system is no longer this separate mechanism. It’s inherently part of the building fabric.
- Left image – person blasted by cold air.Right image – surrounded by cool surface. The large amount of surface means that the temperature differential can be much smaller.
- ----- Meeting Notes (4/23/13 16:52) -----Return to controlling the loads - massive buildings address the loads where they happen. A long absorption process.
- The available heating is proportional to the surface area available.So these were designed to increase the surface area to the greatest extent possible, but it’s still a relatively small source, so they had to run pretty hot.
- In a more modern application, the surface area is increased. So the temperature differential between the surface temperature and the desired temperature is much closer.
- Explain thermal shock.Explain hybrid systems.
- So that brings me to my summation.If we’re going to reach truly high levels of sustainability and efficiency in our buildings, we’re going to have to stop designing our way around some basic facts. Water is more efficient than air. That buildings and systems should resemble the types of efficient systems found in nature more. And ultimately, our buildings will need to more closely resemble the organisms that they were built to protect.
- TRANSFORMATIONAL Ideas about thermal comfort rediscovering the power of radiant heat transfer and storage as a new path to sustainability can’t thrive without a recalibration of philosophy and attitude to our task as professional designers. We always face the task of applying new ideas on the backs of our clients. How do we make it pay for them and the greater good?
- We all are familiar with Louis Sullivan’s rejoinder, Form Follows Function- but the full original is much more complex and rich.It’s been thought of casually as a suggestion that architecture should perform like machines.You can see here that Sullivan’s full quotation is more poetic and suggests not a machine but biological design as its model.
- I might suggest an organic- and not mechanistic- interpretation of Sullivan, and extend his advice to a new philosophy of rejoining disciplines to rebalance our building culture.
- To return to our earlier point about how we currently work together, too often the process looks like this.
- If we’re going to practice holistically, we need to start by being willing to change EVERYTHING. Too often we need too much that’s familiar and comfortable from a design standpoint and we end up somewhere like this.And at the risk of being repetitive and tiresome, we have to put PROGRAM EXPECTATIONS in our test tube along with everything else.
- We can’t ignore our individual client’s needs to accomplish new levels of sustainability within old levels of expenditure. To do this we have to take our new understanding about thermal comfort and reallocate building budgets to support it. More money goes into a more thermally active and INTERACTIVE structure and correspondingly less goes into complicated mechanical systems.
- Shifting program expectations will take intellectual energy and time on our part but it cannot be ignored. We as professionals must lead the way.The comforting news is that our current building forms have never been the result of inexorable evolution and they can change- if we have the imagination and the will to do so.
- Closed Systems vs. Open Systems: the environment has necessary ingredients for the life inside. Sun-Air-Heat-Coolth-Water……
- Civilizations need to do complex things with diverse functions in close proximity. But can we be smarter about composing them in a way that gives us simpler, more robust, more interactive containers of life?The Bank of England- a complex set of functions, organized in an village-like composition of simple building forms and INTERWOVEN with a collection of diverse courtyards, light wells, and atria. (the word ‘Atrium’ comes from the Latin meaning ‘lungs’.)
- And a contemporary building- a recent AIA CAE award-winner- composed of simple, shallow-plate buildings that shape and interact with exterior spaces.
- When building programs are sorted into simple forms and those forms and their activities are arranged to extract every advantage out of the natural environment around them, engineers can create works of true elegance and real organic integration.
- We can make formerly single-purpose ‘mechanistic’ spaces work harder and more integrally as part of the ‘regulatory system’ of buildings…buffering and redistributing energy input in the form of light and heat (and air)…..
- And simplifying and regularizing the regulatory tasks for other habitable spaces……..
- Which brings us to the final item in our long-winded title- regionalism. AN idea that buildings can and should arise from and reflect the particular and precious aspects of their locale. (This is what organisms do.)Add to that an extension of that concept that suggests that buildings that put their occupants in more direct and intimate contact with those environments are in a very profound way ‘regionalist’ buildings.
- Program distilled to simple, memorable architectural forms that operate thermally in a simple, repeatable manner and that harness solar orientation and tree cover as integral participants in the building’s thermal regulation.
- Sophisticated universitybuilding with large internal loads (people and power)- even in a temperate environment, cooling is an issue. This building uses thermal mass, ground coupling, window shading, and thermosiphoning from perimeter windows through central vertical stair cores that incorporate ventilation cupolas.
- None of these buildings are balloons. If we stop thinking about sustainable thermal comfort in terms of increasing our environmental isolation-And instead design around principles of efficient thermal regulatory systems that actually participate and leverage their environments- We suggest that we then can have a fighting chance of making real and lasting reconnections of people to the natural world around them. And reconnecting ourselves to our world is the best way to save it for our children.