Environmental Building Design

The Performance Design Workshop examines the design and assessment of the environmental systems in architecture that have been developed to improve thermal comfort and to reduce energy use. With semester-long design research, the focus is on the thermodynamic analyses of the systems for their climatic effects on occupants, for which students learn the necessary technical and analytic skills. Environmental systems of interest may include the Trombe wall, double-skin façade, external thermal mass, integrated shading, stack ventilation, and passive downdraft cooling. For performance assessments, computational fluid dynamics and building energy simulation are incorporated along with physical modeling and energy flow diagram.

Environmental Building Design Research Methods serves as preparation for a research project by students in the MSD-EBD or PhD programs. Students learn how to develop, plan, and conduct experiments and develop the tools to write research papers based on these experiments.