Architects have traditionally prided themselves as being creators of Environmentally Sensitive buildings and environments. They understand the climate , people, culture and design for their needs using the latest technologies. However, architects never openly accept that the modernist view of seeing building as skin plus the internal space still pervades the working methodology the world over. While a lot of effort is made on the skin of the building, the internal environmental design falls into the hand of the engineers to resolve, usually with active technologies like air conditioning. Tremendous discussion on this and requirements on environmental issues has raised awareness but architects seem to be at a loss on how to work on their buildings differently, especially during their creative process of designing.
Performance by Design: Not a checklist
New constraints and ambitions are driving buildings of the future today. New conceptions of space and form, modern aesthetics, new materials and very importantly, the new environmental consciousness. Infact, environmental issues are perhaps most significant, since they are becoming enforceable by environmental and building laws. Some of them are already in place in India ( e.g. ECBC ) and like Europe they are bound to get stricter. Green rating systems have developed and give architects the broad framework of issues to work with. However the rating systems themselves don’t go further in helping architects integrate the issues into the creative design process. How does an architect get out of thinking of environmental performance as just a series of checklists ? How do environmental concerns change from numbers in a report to real drivers of form and experience in architecture? The secret perhaps lies in rethinking the process we are using for creating architecture. Since its difficult to dispute that design process does determine the outcome of architecture. Frank O Ghery using crumpled paper to design his famous Bilbao museum, is an example, to push the conventional boundaries of space and form.
Performance is the New Design Agenda
Leading architects and academic institutions in Europe are now exploring what can be called a Performance Driven Design Agenda. As the name suggests the search is for using elements of architecture to perform a function more than aesthetic. This requires processes to prove that the design performs to a predefined or prescribed performance criteria. Infact multiple criteria may be met by an architectural element. For example external shading devices to reduce solar gain, control glare, generate solar power by integrated pv and produce innovative form for a building. The new Masdar City in Abu Dhabi, by Foster and Partners, is an example full of such explorations.
Advanced CAD software have started a revolution in exploration of complex building forms. It was perhaps easier to understand the impact and attributes of conventional rectangular buildings. The impact of these new forms on environmental qualities need to be understood and studied. This further highlights the need for incorporation of a new process which enables this.
The simulation of a portion of London using Radiance, shows Vertical Sky Component numbers.Blue areas see very little sky dome.The text is used only to convey various types of analysis that could be taken up to inform built form.
Architecture as an Advanced Product
Interestingly architecture is now being viewed similar to design of a product, for example a car. The form of a car is not just aesthetics but driven out of aerodynamic concerns which affect the working and fuel efficiency of the car. The design of the car is tested rigorously with engineering software and physical experiments in wind tunnels. Today the building industry has a lot to learn from the automotive, aerospace and ship building industries which are more advanced in design and construction techniques. Just like a car, a building is required to deliver a promised performance during it life.
New Technologies to Explore
Technology has created some of the environmental issues (climate change) and interesting technology will also come to the rescue. This is the view being taken today in Europe and US, leading to exploration of new agenda in design called Performance Driven Design. The core idea is to embed advanced tools and thinking into the usual design processes and make it highly collaborative and multidisciplinary at early stages of design. These powerful analysis processes and software tools have the power to understand design solutions in terms of the complexity of the varying sun, wind, temperature, people, equipment and materials. With their aid we can begin to understand the relative impact of design options. Post that it becomes an interesting game of optimising options and choosing the best performing option for actual building. This leads to radical shift in how architects view each element of architecture. From just aesthetics, the focus shifts to balance between performance and aesthetics.
Some of the new design analysis tools being rapidly incorporated into regular architectural process fall into the category of solar radiation and shadow study tools ( for e.g. Ecotect ), climate Analysis tools , Energy and Comfort prediction tools (e.g. IES , Energy Plus, TAS etc), Daylight tools ( (e.g. Radiance), Material Properties ( e.g. Window, Therm), Wind Flow / Computational Fluid Dynamic Tools ( e.g. Fluent, CFX ), Acoustics, Structural Optimisation ( e.g. Ansys ) parametric CAD modelling, Rapid Prototyping techniques, BIM modelling tools etc . The process in brief works as a series of virtual tests on options to create the optimised version of the design. The optimised versions are often physically tested in laboratories to further confirm the performance. It is important to note that the above described performance driven design process in architecture is explorative and a lot of research is being done to connect it to actual CAD modelling software which will make it faster, more creative and integrated.
Architect as an Analyst
Traditionally many of the above software’s have been used by building physicists and engineers to design air conditioning systems. However, due to rapid development of software and faster computers they are now accessible for architects to work with. This is a very important development, because conventionally the environmental design process works as an engineering firm prescribing the orientation, material construction, shading, comfort strategy to the architects. However the performance driven design process, sees the role of architect being that of an active, equal collaborator with the environmental engineer. This offers the architect control over environmental concept of his building and eventually leads to better more integrated and high performing design solutions.
The exploration of Performance Agenda in Design requires a change in mindset. It is important that Indian Architects adopt and explore this to keep their design standards at par with the Western world. However like in Europe and US, the real explorations need to start early in academic institutions. Architects need to be trained for performance Driven Thinking, much like architects in Germany. Readily adopting newer technologies and creatively exploring them for better solutions is perhaps the only way forward. Like in the past, these new tools and new working processes will lead to a newer architecture.
About the Author
Harsh Thapar
Harsh has studied architecture at SPA, Delhi and then M.Sc. in Sustainable Environmental Design at Architectural Association, London. He presently works and explores the Performance Driven Design Agenda at Foster+Partners, London.