Alvar Aalto’s open plan architecture as an environmental technology device

One of the most acclaimed architects of the twentieth century Alvar Aalto (1898 – 1976) was also educator and critic of his time. In particular, he voiced strong concerns about emerging technologies and remained a vivid supporter of humane architecture. Thus this research project investigates Aalto’s approach to active and passive environmental control systems and their spatial integration. Using wind analysis and computational fluid dynamic (CFD) studies, this paper analyzes natural ventilation flow paths in two of Aalto’s major works: The Alvar Aalto Viipuri Municipal Library (1935), which accidentally operated for years on stack ventilation, and Alvar Aalto’s Säynätsalo Town Hall (1952), which uses a raised courtyard to shelter the inner space from strong winds enabling the operation of windows in the courtyard. Both buildings highlight a distinct flow path strategy which enhances air flow through and around the building, reaching from pure wind induced ventilation strategies to combinations of wind and stack ventilation. The courtyard atrium or inner landscape, Aalto’s major spatial devices act as an interface to create an intermediate microclimate. This microclimate mediates between the severe outside climate and a more moderate, comfortable, or even delightful interior. The courtyard has to be inside, i.e. protected in order to protect; the surrounding building thus acts as its own interface. The house acts as a climatic membrane. The main material needed to create this interface is air and its ventilation patterns, which are shaped through the spatial composition. One of Aalto’s early essays ‘porraskiveltä arkihuoneesen’ for the Aitta 1926 sample issue hinges on the idea of inner paradise using Fra Angelico’s (1400 – 1455) painting L’Annuziazione as a metaphor to describe and envision the inside-outside relationship of space and climate in his beginning design work (Schildt 1984: 214). Aalto’s essay hinges on the way one enters a room and how the room is connected to the exterior climate and the light of the sky. I argue with Göran Schildt that the roof lights Aalto first explored at Paimio and Turun Sanomat, and elaborated at Viipuri Municipal Library, are the open sky over a modern version of a classical amphitheatre (Passe 2008). Thus, Säynätsalo Town Hall with its green raised courtyard of low height to area ratio captures the sun while still protecting the inner space from the winds and allowing the low angle of the Northern sun to penetrate and warm the whole inner space. At Viipuri, Aalto, nevertheless experimented with novel environmental control technologies, and challenged basic physics by introducing both heat and ventilation air from above, in spite of his intrinsic critique of inhumane technologies in the USA. This paper thus critically compares some of Aalto’s key texts on technology with the actual design and environmental performance strategies of the two buildings

Traveling Michel Serres’ Passage du NordOuest: what happens, once the ice breaks? A reflection on architectural research conducted between the humanities and engineering

This paper investigates the complex design process for sustainable buildings mediating between spatial composition and architectural typology on one side and thermal, climatic conditions and energy use on the other hand. The theoretical base is Hermès V Le Passage du Nord-Ouest(Serres, 1980) by the French philosopher and mathematician Michel Serres (1930 -), where he is searching for a passageway from the exact sciences to the arts and humanities. While both are looking to explain the world with their own methods, they are turning their backs at each other. The shipping passage in the North of Canada connecting the Atlantic and the Pacific serves him as a metaphor for this complex thought space linking, connecting and dividing, these two explanations of the world. This text is dealing with the connection of places, which seemingly are separate: rigidness and phantasy, myths and exactness, quantitative and qualitative knowledge. Based on this understanding the paper analyses the design process between architecture and engineering as a passage passing four overarching theoretical frames crossing between geometry and perception, drawing and material, atmosphere and typology, technology and desire thus befriending quantitative and qualitative methods of design thinking. The research analyzes a built experiment, the Interlock House, which focused on the relationship of spatial composition and air flow as a means of energy transfer, the impact of passive and active environmental controls and systems on architectural design and improved building energy performance. The means to travel the passage: proportions, thermal detailing, natural ventilation strategies and daylighting are here identified as key moments for sustainable design. Design communication for sustainable buildings needs to convey information between multiple entities with opposing language systems and thus equals a map rather than a flow chart. A collaborative design methodology emerges from these passages when the ice breaks

Towards a dynamic Daylight Understanding

Daylighting is still the most energy efficient lighting strategy, but filtering sunlight might conflict with maximization of solar gains in winter or reducing solar heat gain in summer. In passive solar homes occupants ideally balance visual and thermal comfort. This study explores the relationship of daylight and thermal comfort in a passive solar home using an extended case study method. The resulting daylight measurements reveal a significant tolerance for fluctuations in natural illumination, lower than both high and low thresholds used by emerging dynamic daylight metrics such as IESNA Lighting Handbook, Useful Daylight Illuminnance, and CIBSE lighting recommendations, Minimal evidence of electrical lighting use revealed that passive solar occupants have learned to modify the house to receive sufficient daylight while maintaining a comfortable thermal environment. As a result, a preliminary dynamic visual comfort zone is identified, which presents the notion of a metric that includes occupant illumination control

Performance and Form: new pedagogical approaches to designing the building envelope as an adaptive interface

Architecture pedagogy plays a significant role in building a sustainable world. Sustainable design requires a thorough understanding of building energy performance, while the urging issue of a changing climate demands for higher energy efficiency and improved energy conservation. This demand challenges conventional ways to program buildings as well as purely formal approaches to the design of their envelope and spatial composition. It is no longer the question to build for one climate instead with the lifespan of a building, design concepts might need to integrate the ability to adapt to at least two climate conditions: current and future. The question is how to educate students to creatively address those challenges, when especially natural ventilation and day-lighting are complex and dynamic phenomena. Architects in general need to be better equipped during the early design phase with knowledge and design tools to integrate and predict dynamic performances of light and air movement to achieve these sustainable high performance building

Simulation-based Sensitivity Analysis of Future Climate Scenario Impact on Residential Weatherization Initiatives in the US Midwest

The existing building stock in countries across the world is designed to shelter against the current typical climate conditions. It may not be prepared to counter the possible extreme climate conditions of the 21st century. Based on the projections for the typical climatic conditions in the future, this project is simulating the energy consumption of a neighborhood in the US Midwest that is scalable to a city. Traditional building energy simulation programs mostly take into consideration – the location, weather, construction materials, type of use and occupancy. They do not, however, effectively simulate group of buildings or a neighborhood altogether. We are using a Rhinoceros-based, urban modelling design tool called Urban Modeling Interface (umi) that is capable of simulating building energy while taking into consideration the surrounding urban environment. Using umi, our model simulates the energy consumption of built environment across a street section and thus accounts for factors such as floor area ratio, built density, and other urban morphology parameters that affect the individual building energy consumption. These simulations are performed for current and future typical meteorological conditions using the FTMY data sets developed by Patton in 2013. Weatherization is simulated and tested as a design strategy to overcome the increased energy demands in predicted future climate conditions. In this way, we are examining a design strategy on real world urban conditions and presenting an analysis of how we could maintain the current thermal comfort in future climates

Integrating Themro-Fluid Computational Models into Understanding Sustainable Building Design

While contemporary architects desire the integration of natural ventilation flow and passive solar strategies into architectural design concepts, the evaluation of natural air movement and related energy performance are still difficult to predict due to the complexity of related physics

Using Integrated Student Teams to Advance Education in Sustainable Design and Construction

This article describes a case study involving a Midwestern public university that incorporated an integrated, cross-disciplinary project delivery activity to create an effective framework for sustainable design and construction education. The article first provides an overview of sustainable construction and its advantages, describes how sustainable design and construction requires a modernized project delivery system to work effectively, and discusses the primary impacts of sustainable design and construction on the construction industry. The article then describes how one large Midwestern university has attempted to use integrated, multidisciplinary student teams to advance the concept of sustainable design and construction in the classroom environment. Curricula that include interdisciplinary courses on integrated delivery and leadership in construction, engineering and architecture could better prepare students for their future careers in the building industry and develop better managers and colleagues

Transforming Pervasive into Collaborative: Engaging Youth as Leaders with GIS through a Framework that Integrates Technologies, Storytelling, and Action

This paper presents the methods and preliminary results gained in geographic information systems (GIS)-based participatory activities designed to engage youth in urban planning. We describe our engagement framework that integrates such pervasive IT tools as GIS, online serious games, agent-based modeling, and mobile participatory GIS into engagement strategies that tap into what we see as the storytelling capabilities of these tools. We show how these methods help citizens, in our case youth, assume leadership roles and take positive, tangible actions in their communities. This paper summarizes the elements of our framework and the initial results of a program called “Community Growers” that we created between our Iowa State University research team and a chapter of the Boys & Girls Club of Central Iowa. Participants included middle school-age youth from three resource-vulnerable neighborhoods in Des Moines, the capital city of Iowa, USA. We conclude the paper with a discussion and further research directions