Search

This research investigates the potential of additive manufacturing and digital planning tools for the creation of location-specific façade redesigns that can host cavity-dependent animal species and develops methods for their realization. The proposed approach is explored based on a case study of a student dormitory in need of renovation in the urban area of Munich. Based on theoretical knowledge and design experimentations that link the fields of architecture, climate-responsive design, terrestrial ecology, and digital fabrication, a set of design principles for the additive manufacturing of inhabitable ceramic tiles is conceived and transferred into a computational design tool. The conception of single tiles and the overall façade design are developed in terms of their positive climatic impact on both the animal species and humans, their nesting opportunities, their structural feasibility, and their integrability with standard ceramic façade systems. To verify the fabricability of the proposed design, a façade fragment was additively manufactured as a prototype in 1:1 scale. The initial findings presented in this paper provide a glimpse of how emerging digital technologies could provide new ways to expand current habitual architectural planning and fabrication tools, to enable the creation of site-specific solutions, and to bring together human and animal needs.

Studies on microclimate of cities have already proved that pedestrian thermal comfort is function of built environment and it is fundamental to understand this phenomena both with numerical techniques and field measurements to achieve comfortable, healthier and more livable urban spaces. There has been wide variety of methods to approach this question that how people react or behave in transient outdoor condition since most of the thermal comfort studies perceive pedestrian thermal comfort as “static” phenomena. The application of thermal comfort monitoring in transient conditions is limited due to complexity of the task and instrumental setup which leads to lack of understanding about how pedestrians compensate heat loads. This study contributes in two directions, first to setup a georeferenced environmental monitoring equipment as a methodology and second to use the toolkit to have better understanding of dynamic thermal comfort and the thresholds for tolerance to thermal discomfort.

The Universal Thermal Climate Index (UTCI) has been linked to outdoor activity patterns and used to evaluate the effectiveness of urban interventions to improve thermal comfort. This study investigates how simulating the urban environment at increasing levels of physical accuracy impacts UTCI values along three cycling routes in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Baseline UTCI values are estimated using a local weather file, and the following increments in physical accuracy are considered: wind-scaling, shading from buildings, shading and cooling from trees, computational fluid dynamics simulations for wind speeds, and simulated surface temperatures. With bike ridership data from Bluebikes, Boston's bike-sharing program, the relationship between bike ridership patterns and UTCI values along each route is studied. Supervised machine learning models are applied to predict bike ridership based on UTCI and other predictors. UTCI simulation results show that incorporating the various increments of accuracy influences hourly UTCI values at urban areas and exposed areas differently. Incorporating local wind speeds is especially impactful for urban areas. The statistical models trained to predict hourly bike trip counts based on UTCI and other demand and weather predictors achieved a root-mean-squared error of 1.06 trips. 47% of predictions were correct, and an additional 42% of predictions were off by 1 trip. This study demonstrates the importance of spatial refinement in simulating UTCI, and motivates future research into efficient simulation methods or rules-of-thumb for deriving spatial-temporal UTCI values. Future work into building a robust predictive model would motivate the design of thermally comfortable environments for human-powered transportation in cities.

In urban areas the impact of built environment on wellbeing and human health should be considered due to urban heat island phenomenon. The present research aims at identifying a method for an accurate estimation of thermal outdoor comfort and mean radiant temperature, modeling and simulating the effects of urban form and vegetation on microclimate of cities. In order to reach this main objective, this research incorporates CFD based simulation tool ENVI-met and TRNSYS (Transient Systems Simulation) by means of Grasshopper. The results of the study demonstrate the reliability of the proposed method, i.e. that a combination of ENVI-met and TRNSYS increases the simulation accuracy in terms of outdoor thermal comfort, especially during night. This method allows exploiting the potentialities of both ENVI-met and TRNSYS for the calculation of urban features (urban form, vegetation, canyon proportion, etc.) affecting urban microclimate.

Majority of the world population live in urban settlements where for the city dwellers, the quality of life is directly influenced by the environmental conditions as a result of the built environment. The environmental conditions on the public realm and in the buildings, shape how people use outdoor and indoor spaces in their daily life. Correspondingly, the present study implements a generative approach to link urban physical density to performative urban design to investigate the environmental impacts of urban morphology. This approach could be beneficial to implement performance-based planning (PBP), as a method for climate change adaptation and environmental resilience, to improve citizens’ wellbeing. Selected performance measures for this study are: nocturnal Urban Heat Island effect, outdoor solar access (for winter and summer) and indoor daylight availability. The results are analyzed based on the mathematical correlations between building form factors and environmental qualities, within varying range of generated building densities. The study shows that, in the case of buildings with square foot print, maximum potential UHI is highly dependent on height of the urban canyon and optimum outdoor solar access during summer is achievable with intermediate canyon width. Daylight variations mainly depend on window to wall ratio (WWR). In addition, with high WWR values (0.7), canyon height and building geometry sequentially have the highest influence on indoor daylight availability.