Architectural Engineering Commons^™

Farnsworth Redux; Reconsidering An Architectural Icon As A Passive Energy House, Craig Griffen

Building Technology Educator's Society

To strengthen the tenuous interdisciplinary connection between aesthetic design, building construction, digital representation and architectural history, this project spans two semesters in the building technology curriculum to address these topics simultaneously. Based on the pedagogy of adapting an iconic building to today’s standards, students integrated passive energy strategies into a famous but energy-flawed building; in this case the Farnsworth House by Mies Van der Rohe. Mies designed the home with a preference for concept over comfort, so the large expanses of unshaded glass and minimal insulation make it a challenge to heat and cool the house. The overall assignment was …

The Impact Of Different Building Assemblies On Thermal And Air Quality Performance: An Experimental Student Project In An Architectural Course Comparing City Building Code Versus Passivhaus Standard, Antonio Martinez-Molina, Kelsey Brown, Ibukun Awolusi, Miltiadis Alamaniotis

Building Technology Educator's Society

Building technology can promote environmental sustainability and is a critical component of energy conservation. Well-functioning indoor microclimates do not only affect buildings, however—occupant health must also be considered. Recent research has demonstrated that sustainability and occupant health go hand-in-hand when designing or retrofitting a building. What is the best way to accomplish these goals and to effectively preserve a balance among architecture, efficiency, and health when designing and constructing new buildings? What is then the best approach to integrating this building technology knowledge into an architecture course? This research-educational project introduced an investigation of the effects of two different building …

Team Totemics, Peter Wong, David Thaddeus, Frances Hsu

Building Technology Educator's Society

Team Totemics integrates the Surrealist cadavre exquis as a design strategy to advance remote learning and as a pedagogical tool for cultivating fellowship amongst students in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. Despite the immense significance of the integration of computational methods in design education, there remains a need for theorization and critical exposition of the interaction between building technology and digital making in online design pedagogy. Team Totemics creates materials for discussing, exhibiting, and demonstrating pedagogies based on the principle of multiple origins suggested by the exquisite corpse. The outcomes inform student learning and faculty research at the nexus …

Thinking Outside The Building, Sandy Stannard

Building Technology Educator's Society

In response to the health crisis, they set up schools on abandoned ferries; classes were held on rooftops and in nearby forests.1

The above quote is not a description of contemporary educational spaces in response to the current COVID-19 pandemic. Rather, this is a description of outdoor learning environments established in response to the early 20th century tuberculosis crisis. At the time, there were 65 such outdoor classrooms established as alternative teaching and learning environments.2 However, once the health crisis subsided, learning returned indoors.

This paper will briefly trace the intermittent history of the design and use outdoor classrooms in …

Advanced Tall Buildings Systems Integration, Thomas Fowler Iv, Kevin Dong

Building Technology Educator's Society

The 2020 Skyscraper Collaboratory was a partnership between Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo, California University’s interdisciplinary design studio (architecture and structural engineering) and the design / structural engineering partners from Skidmore, Owings & Merrill’s (SOM) San Francisco, California’s Office, an internationally acclaimed firm that specializes in skyscrapers. The academic design studio was set up to mirror the advanced collaborative practice model of the partner firm, by balancing the nine teams (34 students total) with architecture and engineering students and co taught by a faculty architect and structural engineer. No disciplinary hand offs were ever allowed during the iterative design and …

Quantitative Assessment Of Sun Louver Design Performance, Alexis Severson, Khaled Mansy, Tom Spector, John Phillips, Jeanne Homer

Building Technology Educator's Society

Conventional wisdom holds that carefully designed exterior louver systems tuned to a building’s earth latitude and its glass wall’s compass orientations do a better job of regulating sunlight than interior louver systems due to the intuition-friendly observation that exterior systems reflect or shade the sunlight before it ever enters the building. A multi-criteria, multi-variable analysis performed on a 3600 SF multipurpose space came to different conclusions. The results showed that when accounting for such design criteria as carbon footprint, glare, optimal daylighting and solar heat gain of the interior, tuned exterior louvers perform well against some measures but fared poorly …

Free-Form: The Adversarial Role Of Materials In Automation, Genevieve Baudoin, Bruce Johnson

Building Technology Educator's Society

Beyond allowing students to create physical models of complex geometry they would be unable to produce by hand, how can 3D-printing become relevant to studio and in practice? This paper will discuss the underlying dilemma confronting materials in studio education, particularly in the United States. Materials are, in many ways, foreign to the studio process, and this is compounded by the addition of a “foreign” technology, such as computer-aided manufacturing. Materials are more often seen as an aesthetic selection, and their adversarial role (the way in which materials can be unpredictable, counterproductive, and even belligerent) in construction is not essential …

Assessment Of Deep Façade Retrofit Solutions For Housing, Ming Hu

Building Technology Educator's Society

Knowledge and research tying the environmental impact to operating energy efficiency improvement is a largely unexplored area in higher performance retrofit projects. It is a challenge to choose the façade renovation option that represents the optimal trade-offs among different performance objectives. This paper aims to test a multi-objective envelope optimization method to quantify and compare the deep retrofit façade techniques and their induced environmental impact. An integrated life cycle energy (LCE), life cycle assessment (LCA) and thermal comfort model (TCM) framework is proposed and used. Seven building façade retrofit options were studied to evaluate the operating energy saving, embodied energy …

Volumetric Envelopes: Precast Elements In Building Envelopes, Niloufar Emami

Building Technology Educator's Society

By supplanting survival with comfort, the environmental technologies ultimately increased the dependence of the building design on form and materials, particularly those of its ‘envelope.’ The emphasis on form and materials is best seen in the Brutalism Architecture where the “honesty in structure and material” is exhibited through the envelope. Brutalist is relevant to today’s digital fabrication techniques where materiality and fabrication methods are integrated with the realized building elements. For example, looking at 3D printed concrete, parallel and continuous layers of concrete placed on top of each other can be an indicator of the method, whereas seeing a smooth …

Soft Rock Studio: Exploring A “Soft Systems” Approach To “Artificial Rock”, James Forren

Building Technology Educator's Society

This paper discusses a study aimed at shifting disciplinary norms in construction materials. The study, conducted in a graduate level design-build studio, approached precast concrete construction through the lens of “artificial rock”: a composite material that can use cement, sand, aggregate, and reinforcing supplements and alternatives like flax, calcium carbonate, pyrolyzed biomass, soil, alginates, gelatin, and bacteria. Taught as “The Soft Rock Studio”, the course positioned artificial rock within the larger conceptual framework of “soft systems” - adaptive, networked part-to-whole relationships engaged in feedback loops with the environment.

The Soft Rock Studio designed and prototyped components and assemblies for an …

Recruiting Engagement Through Readings + Media In Architectural Technology Education, Carmen Trudell

Building Technology Educator's Society

The Architectural Technology Fundamentals course has always included reading assignments – usually chapters from a textbook loaded with technical information, data, and a bit of history. In 2020, underpinned by historic shifts in expectations for architectural education, we took a critical look at our teaching and targeted the reading assignment as an opportunity to teach with equity and about equity. The readings have consistently ranked as the least effective learning mode, falling well behind the lectures, hands-on activities, and exams. After unsuccessfully attempting to promote engagement with the readings through quizzes, written outlines, and summaries, we took an entirely different …

Animate The Assembly, Mary K. English

Building Technology Educator's Society

Architects rely on drawings. We learn, teach, and communicate through drawing. We use them to tell the story that they are trying to tell. Over the history of architectural drawings, their definition encompasses a wide variety of approaches. As architects and educators, it is essential to draw from this variety of approaches to develop drawings that communicate as we want them to.

My research of technical drawings is shared with students in both building technology and studio classes to show them that their drawing explorations are rooted in a long history of creating drawings that illustrate technical and tactile information. …

Building Structure In The Context Of Architectural Theory: A History/Theory Course On Technology In Architecture, Christina Mccoy

Building Technology Educator's Society

Building technology is intertwined with the history of architecture. Through any cultural movement, architects chose an approach to the technical aspect of how a piece of architecture is constructed. Sometimes, this is simply an aesthetic approach to conceal or express. Often, it is more complex. Other times building technology is a key aspect in the development of architectural style. Engineers may not often consider this, as they are preoccupied with making technology work, not seeing it in the context of a greater, cultural expression. However, if we accept that, like art, architectural style is an expression of a zeitgeist, the …

Labor Movements: From The Specifications Of The Panama Canal To Robotic Patents, Federico Garcia Lammers, Jessica Garcia Fritz, Nathanial Krueger, Joseph Kenny, Rebecca Woytassek

Building Technology Educator's Society

This paper is part of an ongoing collaboration between architecture faculty and students. The paper highlights two student projects from a recent research studio focused on the link between regulatory documents (specifications, laws, codes, patents, etc.) and the political territories that connect building technology with the movements of construction labor. Each project interconnects two types of movement: (1) physical movements of people, materials, and machines (2) political movements and colonial structures of power. The former are visible and have limited durations, while the latter are seemingly invisible but with enduring consequences. The contemporary effects of these movements are latent in …

Frei Otto’S Pneumatic Experiments For Humanitarian Design, Rob Whitehead

Building Technology Educator's Society

This paper will explore the intersection of building technology and humanitarian design-science research by looking at Frei Otto’s pneumatic experiments. The purpose of the study is to contextualize our contemporary demands for humanitarian design work by reflecting upon the manner by which Otto integrated an ambitious design ideology with an elevated and innovative technical acumen. Constraining the investigation to Otto’s work, particularly his relatively unknown early work with pneus, provides a useful exploration of design-science approach that connect design and technology—an approach that is useful to understand for contemporary pedagogical applications.

Otto himself connected his career to humanitarian work. Shortly …

Commodity And Delight: A Case For A Qualitative Basis For Environmental Technology Instruction, James Leach, Kristin Nelson

Building Technology Educator's Society

Throughout history, human beings have lived in environments of sensory richness and variation. Outside of modern buildings and urbanized landscapes, the thermal, luminous, and acoustic environments of the natural world shift and change seasonally, diurnally, and from moment to moment. Established research points to links between the kind of multisensory environmental variation experienced in the natural world, and positive impacts to human physiological and psychological wellbeing. Unfortunately, modern design standards and comfort guidelines, and the built environments designed to meet them, permit only a very narrow acceptable range of variation in sound, light and temperature levels. This rigid control of …

Zoologijos Sodas, Arjun Elvis Urbonas, Dara Lin, Jesus Ramirez Zambrano, Samantha Ung, Robert Milkovich, Jakob Olsen, Azuolas Skucas

Architecture

50'x50' glass house in Palm Springs.

Schematic Structural Design For Center For Centering (C4c), Jonathan Oberempt, Faith Sharp, Samuel Buckman

Architectural Engineering

The Center for Centering (C4C) is a meditative center for individuals to reflect and discover their own creativity. Based on a spoke and wheel concept, the center integrates social, sensory, environmental, and inductive spaces, allowing for individuals to discover themselves in different settings, while appearing as a striking sculpture conceived in a spiral gesture integrated in the local landscape.

The location for this structure is in Santa Cruz, CA, on Swanton Ranch. The building is built on mostly flat terrain surrounded by sparse trees and an overlooking view of the ocean.

The initial concept for the Center for Centering is …

Take Heart School, Quentin John Porter

Architectural Engineering

Journeyman International, also known as JI, is a non-profit organization that groups together design and construction students with organizations looking to build humanitarian projects around the world. This pairing is beneficial for both the organization because they get free design and construction expertise, as well as for the students who get real-world experience. The Take Heart School is a planned school and grounds for the region of Migori Kenya. Take Heart Africa is a fair trade store with all profits going to help the impoverished communities of Kenya. The three-acre site will have a school with eight classrooms, offices, a …

Accessory Dwelling Unit, Nicholas Scalzo

Architectural Engineering

This project goes through the architectural and structural design of a post and beam accessory dwelling unit. In it are basic calculations for the gravity and lateral system as well as unique designs such as cantilevered diaphragms, angled shear walls, and post and beam framing. In it are also structural and architectural Revit drawings and details to go alongside the calculations. This project had all the design done together and had the structure and architecture informing each other and changing throughout the entirety of the project.