Harmony in marriage: integrating sustainable solutions into historic house museums without interfering with the historic fabric

textHistoric buildings live a double life between climate-adapted largely-passive structures and draughty, poorly-maintained ones. Preservation professionals argue that preserving these structures is more resource effective than constructing new buildings, and that pre-electricity structures were built to take advantage of climate and geography, using passive technologies to perform efficiently. Modern technologies have also been adopted- electrical lights, air conditioning, fire alarms - as a natural progression of inhabitation. Yet in historic house museums, there is still the promise of historic representation, one unmarred by ‘inauthentic’ additions. If modern and past technological changes have been accepted and integrated, how is the historic house museum not a ‘living building culture’? And if house museums are indeed a living building culture, why not allow a more flexible representation of our historic properties if they are interpreted with integrity and honesty? The EPA estimates that buildings represent 65% of the U.S. electricity use, and predictions estimate 80% of the 2030 building stock exists today. If we truly plan to reduce our energy consumption, we must confront the reality that existing buildings are a significant contributor to our output. If, as curators, it is our hope for historic buildings to represent preservation, then we must admit that in preserving the past for the future, we must begin by preserving our future. This thesis analyses the opportunities and risks for historic house museums to respect their historic interpretation but adapt to changing conditions. Examples of energy efficiency strategies both historic and current, will be examined in historic structures, illustrating that caretakers of historic buildings are making value judgments about the future of their property, in terms of environmental, fiscal and historical sustainability. This thesis includes the analysis of a case study historic house museum in Austin, Texas, the French Legation Museum, which is used as a base model for estimating energy efficiency gains from the adoption of some low-energy technologies. Calculations based on this information indicate which integrations and additions could offer the greatest return on investment for this historic building to operate as or more efficiently than a modern code construction without visible or egregious alteration to the historic fabric.Architectur

A review: urban heat island and its impact on building energy consumption

Civilization and urbanization are the two key demands of humans in the 20th century. Over the last few decades, a considerable number of the human population have moved to urban areas. This phenomenon has led to an explosion of the population in some of the major cities around the globe, including in Saudi Arabia. Urban Heat Island (UHI) is a climatic condition in which urban settlements experience increased air temperature than their neighboring rural counterparts. The UHI is attributed to the anthropogenic modification of land surfaces, population growth, urban development, and its consequential production of waste heat, which is endangering human health and the environment as well as the quality of living. Series of factors have been responsible for UHI, including building orientation, material albedo, land use, high-rise constructions, and human activities. The present study investigates the significance of the UHI features and their relation to building energy consumption. A list of contributing factors to UHI was identified and analyzed. The study suggests that there is a positive relationship between urban greening and urban material concerning energy consumption. Thus, this is a potential study gap that needs to be addressed to analyze the impact of UHI, particularly in the context of Saudi Arabia

The adoption of energy efficient residential building technology in Canada: understanding Canadian adoption levels

Canadians have access to an abundance of relatively low cost energy and Canadians are very high consumers of energy. Residential energy use accounts for 16% of total energy use in Canada and is a significant contributor to GHG emissions. A typical Canadian home uses energy for space heating, domestic hot water and lights, appliances and mechanical equipment. Many tried and proven technologies are available to reduce energy use in residential homes. The Government of Canada has implemented the EcoENERGY Program to encourage Canadians to implement these technologies. Many provinces have followed with similar matching programs. Homeowners investing in energy saving technologies through the EcoENERGY program will recognize two types of economic benefits. The first benefit is the EcoENERGY grant. This grant is a one-time payment based on the technologies that are implemented by the homeowner. The second benefit is the reduction in energy costs. This reduction in energy costs is on-going and will benefit the homeowner long in to the future. The objective of this study is to assess the levels of adoption of these technologies and to determine the impact the grants and energy cost savings are having on adoption of the technologies. The research was completed in three phases. The first phase was a study of adoption theory. The second phase was research on the EcoENERGY program including the technologies used in construction of energy efficient homes, the impact those technologies have on energy consumption and the federal and provincial grants available to homeowners implementing the technologies. The third phase was the analysis of a Natural Resources Canada database of over 640,000 homeowners that enrolled in the EcoENERGY program between its conception in 2006 and June 30, 2010. The research clearly supports the argument that grants impact the level of adoption of the energy saving technologies. The research also shows that although the energy savings from the implementation of the technologies is higher than the grants, energy savings do not appear to impact the level of adoption

Research on Building Layout Driven by Energy Flow in Humid Tropics: Take the living space of HALE KUAHINE Dormitory in Honolulu as a thermal comfort simulating object

Building, which can be defined as a “container of life”, should not only be analyzed for expressing visual beauty of architectural language, but special attention related to living quality indoor and outdoor also must be asserted. The desire of comfort is usually satisfied by some mechanical equipment with high energy consumption in modern architecture; however, facing the current crisis of environmental pollution and energy shortage, it is urgent to blaze a trail and to find an architectural approach that is energy-efficient to enhance the life quality. As a part of the Shanghai-Hawaii Global Track Project, this doctoral research has been launched in University of Hawaii at Manoa (UHM), by selecting the non-air-conditioned dormitories in East-West Center (EWC) as an object to study the relation between the comfort level of daily activities and the building programming, which is one of the main architectural design contents once linked too much to spatial accessibility but lacking of considerations from a performance perspective. In order to find appropriate strategies for building programming in such a climate of humid tropics, the paper will blend the lessons of architectural history with the future-oriented technological progress, presenting in two major research clues ---- one is “experience” and the other is “evidence”. Specifically, the clue of “experience” will commence in studying the ancient ingenious ideas from typical human dwellings and vernacular settlements in hot-humid areas and then move to those salient modern regional explorations sparked by their ancestors’ wisdom. Meanwhile, the clue of “evidence” will serve as an evaluation system to demonstrate the feasibility of certain sustainable design concepts, with the assistance of computational simulation data and new credible discoveries from relevant disciplines such as environmental psychology, thermodynamics, neuroscience and behavioral economics on man-environment interaction. By mixing these expertise, architects can take the role of traditional engineers to fabricate a well-tempered “living machine” and figure out some constructive design techniques, which, if applied to mold the campus dormitory, would create a sense of well-being and encourage more students to enjoy the space for a longer time

The Built Environment in a Changing Climate

The papers included in this Special Issue tackle multiple aspects of how cities, districts, and buildings could evolve along with climate change and how this would impact our way of conceiving and applying design criteria, policies, and urban plans. Despite the multidisciplinary nature of the collection, some transversal take-home messages emerge: • Today’s energy-efficient paradigms may lose their virtuosity in the future unless accurate estimates of future scenarios are used to design modelling platforms and to inform legislative frameworks; • Acting at the local scale is key. Future climate change adaptation will be implemented at the local level. Overlooking regional and local specificities will contribute to inaccurate and inefficient action plans. As such, the smaller scale will become vital in predicting future urban metabolic rates and corresponding comfort-driven strategies; • Energy poverty, heat vulnerability, and social injustice are emerging as critical factors for planning and acting for future-proof cities on par of micro- and meso-climatological factors; • Given that the impacts of climate change will persist for many years, adaptation to this phenomenon should be prioritized by removing any prominent barrier and by enabling combinations of different mitigation technologies. These topics will receive a global reach in few decades, since also developing and underdeveloped countries are starting their fight against local climate change, with cities at the forefront

Development of A Sustainable Landscape Architecture Best Practices Manual

The goal of this project was to develop a Best Practices Manual (BPM) for Stantec Inc regarding sustainable landscape architecture practices. The manual will be used by Stantec employees to help assess the feasibility of landscape architecture practices for specific projects. Potential Benefits, Potential Risks and Considerations, Estimated Costs, Recommended Site Characteristics, and Potential LEED Credits were researched and presented for each practice within the BPM. This information was then posted on an internal electronic best practices manual so that all employees within Stantec could access the information

Full Proceedings, 2018

Full conference proceedings for the 2018 International Building Physics Association Conference hosted at Syracuse University

Integration + Innovation: Proceedings of the 2019 Building Technology Educators\u27 Society Conference

This volume contains papers, abstracts, and posters from the 2019 Building Technology Educators\u27 Society (BTES) Conference, which focused on Integration and Innovation as the theme. Innovation can begin with conjecture, with a searching for more effective solutions, or with an application to currently unknown or unarticulated needs. Innovation scholarship examines the personal intellectual habits that support new ideas, such as openness and exploratory behavior, as well as the circumstances behind the places in which creativity flourishes, such as support for cross-disciplinary fertilization and access to resources. The 2019 BTES conference explored the role of technology education and curriculum in cultivating these intellectual habits in our students (and ourselves) and in creating the organizational spaces in which the future of practice will be shaped. Sessions shared exemplary proposals of research and pedagogical applications that explore innovative practices and integrative thinking in the academy and profession