A Watershed MomentThermal Comfort, Radiant Energy, and Regionalism: A Watershed Moment for

Sustainable Design

Pete Jefferson, M.E. GROUP, and Mark Broyles, Cuningham Group Architecture

A Watershed MomentLearning Objectives:

Explain the fundamental principles of thermodynamics related to radiant heat transfer and storage.

Illuminate the history of buildings and architecture that utilize principles of radiant thermal comfort and demonstrate the relevance and potential of these building

design concepts to modern building tasks.

Revisit the recent history of thermal comfort in architecture to clarify the path that has led us to our modern approach to building design, and to develop a new, clear-eyed appreciation for the ability to reimagine that path as designers.

Explore the applicability and considerations for these systems relative to regional environmental characteristics. Provide demonstrable models, both built and

speculative, for a radiant-energy-based architecture across a range of regional conditions.

CHAPTER ONE:

A Watershed Moment

If Sustainable Architecture is So Great…

Why Isn’t Everyone Doing It?LEED Gold Building

Everybody Else

Are We Practicing Sustainability at the End of an Evolutionary Branch?

Charles Darwin’s original sketches of evolutionary branching

Where has the accretive logic of our building science led us?

An Historical Perspective

So How Did We Get Out This Far

(Evolutionary Branch-wise)?

Dancing with the Sun: Early buildings that shade, absorb, and create microclimates based on their environment

Dancing with the Sun: Early buildings that shade, absorb, and create microclimates based on their environment

‘Solar Street’, Priene, Anatolia

A pre-industrial watershed: Glass enters the built environment……and the Greenhouse Effect becomes a new means of creating thermal comfort in buildings

A pre-industrial watershed: Glass enters the built environment……and the Greenhouse Effect becomes a new means of creating thermal comfort in buildings

Large ‘sandwich’ floor plates with a functional need for high-quality illumination

on complex and dangerous industrial processes spur building technologies forward

The Recent (and Misunderstood) Past:The Industrial Revolution launches a tsunami across the culture of building

The Early Factory:

A paradigm for the next 150 years of architecture

Mechanically powered ventilation and cast-iron structural frames allow large floor plate buildings

The Early Factory: A paradigm for the next 150 years of architecture

Mechanically powered ventilation and cast-iron structural frames allow

large floor plate buildings

A new kind of interior landscape: a dense environment of powerful machines and their minders….

needing unprecedented quantities of light and oxygen

Can I have a latte NOW?

It’s déjà vu, all over againYogi Berra, famous baseball figure and architectural historian

Radiant Heating: Four Thousand Years of Slow Evolution

The Fire-PitThe Brazier

The Fire-Placeand the Stove

Rumford Fire-Place

Meanwhile, back at the Victorian House: ‘Engineering’ moves the hearth to the basement

And radiant direct heating evolves into central air heating with the gravity furnace

The rise of balloon frame building technology changes the face of American building culture:

the American house is transformed from a masonry ‘radiant repository’

into a container for warm air

The Incandescent Lamp and the Electric Fan become revolutionary architectural drivers

And conditioned air begins its ascendancy in the shaping of modern building culture

Electricity enables the rapid evolution

of deep plates and the ventilation to

support them:

Where Does This All Lead Us?

Are Buildings Merely Efficient Containers for Conditioned Air?

‘Spaceship Earth’

Our current building culture: stuck in aestheticand programmatic expectations

that are 60 years old…….

And these expectations arise

out of a Modernist way of making architecture…..

utterly reliant on cheap electricity and complex, air-based space conditioning.

if we continue to approach today’s building tasks,

Burdened with yesterday’s expectations…

We will likely fail to green the built world.

LEED-Gold - LEED-Platinum still isn’t enough in most cases.

We can’t depend on the ability of LEED methodology alone

to drag an extinct building culture into a sustainable future.

Integrated Design vs. Integrating Design:

Building systems won’t be integrated

until… and unless… our disciplines become more integrated.

designing on the edge or designing-in capacity for adaptation?

Efficiency vs. Redundancy:

An inevitable dichotomy

or a false and artificial division?

Engineering vs. Aesthetics:

Biomimicry: A general principle of organic design

as a self-sustaining entity- capable of being understood as an integrated set of systems

BUT

composed and functioning as an interdependent, indivisible whole.

28.

Fundamentals of HVAC (and an industry run amok)

CHAPTER TWO:

Define loads.

Define “ventilation”

Credit: Devin Abellon, PE, Uponor Industries

Old versus current expectations for “comfort”

Old Expectations:(I should wear warm clothes when

it’s cold)

New Expectations:(I should be able to wear whatever I want

no matter the outdoor conditions)

An industrial revolution

Demonstrate conventional approach to heating/cooling

Source: circleofblue.com

Cheap energy

CHAPTER THREE:

Radiant Systems

What if we addressed the loads where they happen?

What if we addressed the loads where they happen?

CCD CONFLUENCE

What if we tried to take the most thermodynamically sensible approach to solving these problems?

Source: Thermally Active Surfaces in Architecture, Kiel Moe

A 30” Round DuctOR

A 2” Pipe

100,000 Btu/h Cooling Needs:

Integration of radiant with architectural and structural

Elementalbuilding.com

Old Comfort vs. New Comfort

Examples in the Built Environment

Passive Mass

Radiators

PEX tubing

PEX Tubing

Elementalbuilding.com

Capillary Mats

Thermal shock Limitations of radiant

Hybrid approach (radiant for sensible, forced air for latent)

Opportunity: Mixed mode systems

Loyola Information Commons

Architect: Solomon Cordwell Buenz ArchitectureBuilding Physicist: Transsolar

NREL SEB

NREL SEB

Thermodynamic merits of water versus air.

Source: Thermally Active Surfaces in Architecture, Kiel Moe

CHAPTER FOUR: PUTTING IT INTO PRACTICE

Heifer International HeadquartersPolk Stanley Rowland Curzon Porter Architects, LTD

63.

How do we get there?

Rethinking the ‘function’ of the building

"It is the pervading law of all things organic, and inorganic, of all things physical and metaphysical,

of all things human and all things super-human, of all true manifestations of the head, of the heart, of the soul, that the life is

recognizable in its expression, that form ever follows function. This is the law..

Louis Sullivan

Rethinking the ‘function’ of the building

Why should building programs continue to render

all other considerations subservient?

Why should we allow energy efficiency to drive us towards

environmental cocooning?

Why can’t the richness of climate and place Infuse program and building form?

of all true manifestations of the head, the heart, the soul…

of all things physical and metaphysical

of all things organic, and inorganic

Modernist architectural process studies and manipulates ‘program’….

And ‘integrates’ an overlaid set of engineered systems afterward.

So…let’s heed Louis and scrap that process.

What if we seek, from the beginning, to change

everything rather than just one thing?

To do this-we need to put program expectations

on the table along with everything else.

Starting at the beginning of a project and taking an entirely different approach:

What if we spent any given project budget a bit differently?

from Thermally Active Surfaces in Architecture, Kiel Moe

OldThink NewThink

Rethinking the program.

Rethinking Interaction with the Environment

Deep-plate buildings- Like many large, ‘deep’ organisms-

Require significant complexity and specialization.

Shallow-plate buildings Enhance and simplify the relationship between occupant,

sun, direct ventilation, and mass thermal storage

Rethinking Interaction with the Environment

Rethinking Building Concepts:

what if we re-learn the art

of making complex programs

out of the fabric of

simple buildings ?

An Emerging Vision for our Design Culture:

what if we re-learn the art

of making complex programs

out of the fabric of

simple buildings ?Jefferson Scholars Foundation, VMDO Architects

More efficient, cost effective and

simpler.

Portland Community College Newberg Center,Hennebery Eddy Architects

Thermal buffer zones

Thermal buffer zones

Regionalism:Nurturing a Building Ethos that

Leverages the proximal

Natural Resources and Climate

…Form ever following Function

Regionalism. Romance or Real Re-Connection?

Office Building, SeattleWeber Thompson Architects

Regionalism

Conference Center, South CarolinaClark Menefree Architects

Buildings that Re-connect people to the Natural World

Regionalism

Centre for Mathematical Sciences, CambridgeEdward Cullinan Architects

Rebalancing our approach to the built environment

…

To rebuild our connections to the natural environment

The Human Impact: A Question of Balance

The global impact.

attaining real sustainability

through

balance and wholenessIn

process and product