Creating sustainable cities one building at a time: towards an integrated urban design framework

One of the tenets of urban sustainability is that more compact urban forms that are more densely occupied are more efficient in their overall use of space and of energy. In many designs this has been translates into high-rise buildings with a focus on energy management at their outer envelopes. However, pursuing this building focused approach alone means that buildings are treated as stand-alone entities with minimal consideration to their impact on the surrounding urban landscape and vice versa. Where urban density is high, individual buildings interact with each other, reducing access to sunshine and daylight, obstructing airflow and raising outdoor air temperature. If/when each building pursues its own sustainability agenda without regard to its urban context, the result will diminish the natural energy resources available to nearby buildings and worsen the outdoor environment generally. This paper examines some of these urban impacts using examples from the City of London where rapid transformation is taking place as very tall buildings with exceptional energy credentials are being inserted into a low-rise city without a plan for the overall impact of urban form. The focus of the paper is on access to sunshine and wind and the wider implications of sustainable strategies that that focuses on individual buildings to the exclusion of the surrounding urban landscape. The work highlights the need for a framework that accounts for the synergistic outcomes that result from the mutual interactions of buildings in urban spaces

Catherine Zuckert, Machiavelli’s Politics, University Of Chicago Press, Chicago & London, 2017

Maja Korolija (Catherine Zuckert, Machiavelli’s Politics, University Of Chicago Press, Chicago & London, 2017

Bogdan Bogdanović: Dissident in life, architecture and writing

The paper analyses selected works of Bogdan Bogdanović (1922- 2010). This Serbian architect, writer and Professor of Architecture at the University of Belgrade, was the author of numerous monuments devoted to the victims of fascism in former Yugoslavia (1952-81). As the Mayor of Belgrade (1982-86) Bogdanović was a liberal member of the Yugoslav Communist Party and later, a strong opponent of Milošević’s regime. This paper argues that Bogdanović has always been both a dissident and an avant-garde proponent of architectural surrealism and its wider culture. Living with the belief that the vocation of an architect presupposes lifetime devotion to learning and experimentation, Bogdanović carried on with this attitude throughout his life. This approach, spiced up with playfulness and mystery as presented in his early volume Zaludna mistrija (The Futile Trowel) 1968, is the focus of this paper. In this unusual book the narratives are an intrinsic part of the architectural realm including design, drawings of various kinds, and the built form itself

A Sociotechnical Perspective on Winter Window Opening and Heating Controls in Purpose-Built Student Accommodation

The auto-generation of UK school building stock models could facilitate non-domestic carbon emissions tracking. However, contextual fabric and building service data are required to differentiate between asset or operational performance, and these may only be available in situ from building users. Engaging such groups through proposed data crowdsourcing would require robust feedback and data gathering mechanisms to be developed to overcome motivational and informational barriers. There has been significant investment in purpose-built student accommodation (PBSA) across the UK. A case study research design was used to investigate the in-use performance of two recently built PBSA developments by monitoring indoor environmental quality, radiator use, and window opening, alongside semi-structured interviews with the building’s residents. The results showed that during the heating season the study participants typically controlled the conditions in their bedrooms by opening their windows regularly, often for long periods, and frequently whilst the heating was on. Five behavioural causes of consistent winter window opening were identified. These were to prevent overheating, inadequate ventilation, poor understanding of the controls, lack of responsiveness of the heating system, and lack of financial implications. Important lessons for the future design of PBSA are identified

Balancing accuracy and computation burden - an evaluation of different sensitivity analysis methods for urban scale building energy models

Urban-scale building energy models capitalise on the increasing accessibility of large-scale urban data sets and allow the rapid evaluation of competing policy options, making them a vital tool for urban responses to the climate emergency. However, the vast number of different inputs required to model a complex urban environment makes it impossible to precisely quantify all inputs and the complex energy flows within models must be simplified to achieve tractable solutions, as a result, the outputs of these models inevitably have a significant range of variation. Without understanding these limits of inference resulting policy advice is inherently defective. Uncertainty Analysis (UA) and Sensitivity Analysis (SA) offer essential tools to determine the limits of inference of a model and explore the factors which have the most effect on the model outputs. Despite a wellestablished body of work applying UA and SA to models of individual buildings, very limited work has been done to apply these tools to urban scale models. This study presents a systematic comparison of three different sensitivity analysis methods for a high resolution, dynamic thermal simulation at the neighbourhood scale. Accuracy, processing time and complexity of application of each method is evaluated to provide guidance which can inform the application of these methods to other urban and large-scale building energy models. The results highlight the importance of considering both model form and input parameter scale when selecting an appropriate method. In this case, the elementary effects method (EER) offers good performance at relatively low simulation cost

Good neighbours

The energy impact of tall buildings on neighbourhoods should be taken into account when evaluating their carbon emissions, say Julie Futcher, Gerald Mills and Ivan Korolij

Modelling of District Heating Systems: Comparative Evaluation of White-box Modelling Approaches

District heating systems are prevalent in most European countries, and such energy delivery methods can be crucial to decarbonisation objectives. To appropriately size and design the control of such networks, the modelling of district heating networks should have a good representation of the demand-side, which is the set of buildings connected to the network. In-stead of simplified modelling of the demand, whole-building simulation tools can be invoked in this case, like EnergyPlus. More recently, equation-based libraries have been developed in Mod-elica for component-based simulation of HVAC systems. Modelica-based libraries offer easier model composability and are particularly interesting for control fine-tuning; on the downside, the model setup can be more complex, with more validation needed. This paper conducts a comparative study of the Modelica LBNL Buildings library against Ener-gyPlus, based on an archetype-based hypothetical case in the UK with a small-scale district heating system. The methodology resides on models developed in the two tools with the same level of modelling detail. The comparison helps understand software differences in the model-ling procedure, computational time, relative accuracy of energy predictions and heating system variables. The results indicate Modelica Buildings library yields similar accuracy in terms of heat transfer calculation through thermal zones as EnergyPlus, whilst capturing additional en-ergy consumption caused by the dynamic changes at system startup and the realistic controllers used in the Modelica district heating models. Meanwhile, the Modelica Buildings library’s out-puts show the fluctuations of system variables, indicating different operation patterns and con-trol effects against EnergyPlus. This study also proves that the Modelica Buildings library is the better tool for district heating simulation in the context of dynamic performance evaluation and control testing, based on overall capabilities, limitations, and prediction differences

London Loves the Thames - Flows and Assemblages - Movie

Visual represetation of flows and assemblages along London South ban