Design and Construction of High-Performance Homes

Building Envelopes, Renewable Energies and Integrated Practice

Franca Trubiano, Franca Trubiano

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135874919
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Architecture General

Both professionals and students are increasingly committed to achieving high-performance metrics in the design, construction and operation of residential buildings. This book responds to this demand by offering a comprehensive guide which features:

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• architectural innovations in building skin technologies which make lighter more transparent buildings high performing;

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• energy-free architectural design principles and advances in building-integrated photovoltaics;

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• essential engineering principles, controls and approaches to simulation for achieving net zero;

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• the advantages of integrated design in residential construction and the challenges and opportunities it engenders;

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• detailed case studies of innovative homes which have incorporated low-energy design solutions, new materials, alternative building assemblies, digital fabrication, integrated engineering systems and operational controls.

Divided into four parts, the book discusses the requisite AEC (Architecture, Engineering and Construction) knowledge needed when building a high-performance home. It also communicates this information across four case studies, which provide the reader with a thorough overview of all aspects to be considered in the design and construction of sustainable homes. With contributions from experts in the field, the book provides a well-rounded and multi-faceted approach.

This book is essential reading for students and professionals in design, architecture, engineering (civil, mechanical and electrical), construction and energy management.

Part 1 Building Envelopes,
New Materials and
Architectural Design

1.1Energy-Free Architectural Design: The Case of Passivhaus
and Double-Skin Façades
FRANCA TRUBIANO

1.2Translucent Building Skins: Advancing the Technology of
Light Transmission
FRANCA TRUBIANO

1.3Responsive Building Envelopes: Characteristics and
Evolving Paradigms
KATHY VELIKOV + GEOFFREY THÜN

1.4Nanomaterial + Super-Insulator = Aerogel
FRANCA TRUBIANO

Chapter 1.1

Energy-Free Architectural Design:
The Case of Passivhaus and Double-
Skin Façades

FRANCA TRUBIANO

ABSTRACT: Climate-responsive design has been practiced in traditional cultures since the beginning of recorded history. Its energy-free architectural design principles seek to maintain a building and its interior environment within a balanced comfort range without additional inputs of non-renewable energy. With global interest in low-energy high-performance buildings, energy-free design principles are increasingly promoted for a range of climates and for many parts of the world. The Passivhaus movement and the interest in ‘double-skin façades’ are two contemporary examples of highly adaptable envelope-based strategies which successfully integrate the benefits of energy-free design. Albeit vastly different in their approaches, both offer important lessons for achieving high-performance measures alongside excellence in design.

1.0 Defining the practice

In coining the term ‘energy-free architectural design’ this chapter renames one of the most commonly used monikers associated with sustainable architecture: ‘passive design’ and/or ‘passive solar architecture’.¹ The term ‘passive’ had been used to describe the opposite of ‘active’ building's systems, and it so being, has been associated with climate-specific architectural strategies not requiring of additional inputs of energy for their effectiveness. Given, however, the vastly successful solutions made possible by its highly productive principles, energy-free architectural design is a more appropriate phrase for identifying the tenets of a continually maturing and developing building science dedicated to the saving of energy and the enrichment of architectural experience. The phrase in no way suggests its principles are unencumbered by energy considerations, but rather benefit from the workings of energy at no additional net costs to the environment.

Energy-free architectural design remains one of the most cost-effective means for achieving highly-performing buildings. Its principles of climate-responsive design have been tried and tested for thousands of years. Carefully considered at the very beginning of the design process, they reduce, if not eliminate, a building's energy load while imparting to the home an architectural language consonant with the building's geography. Recent interest in low-energy high-performance buildings has evidenced a return to its tenets, particularly those with easy applicability in varied climates, cultures and parts of the world. And contrary to its own history, contemporary initiatives seek the translation of their material and operational details across a broader spectrum of environmental conditions.

In general, the field of energy-free architectural design seeks the following ecological goal: maintenance of a building's thermal, ventilation and lighting environment within a balanced comfort range (both qualitatively and quantitatively) such that radically reduced amounts of additional energy (non-renewable or otherwise) are required, regardless of the external forces acting upon the building (be they temperature, humidity, wind, rain or solar radiation).² Among its most often applied principles are those contributing to the proper selection of a site, to a building's location and orientation, and to the interior layout of the building's program spaces. A site's topography, vegetation and access to sun, air and water define its potential for power generation, light transmission, thermal heating and ventilation cooling.³ A building's orientation can be used to minimize excessive heat gains or to channel the thermal benefits of solar heat. The layout of a home, in plan and section, can be optimized to protect against wintery winds or to encourage exposure to refreshing breezes.⁴ These, and similar strategies, have been well documented for their adaptability on most building sites.

1.1 Beginnings of energy-free design principles

Climate-responsive design has been practiced in traditional cultures since the beginning of recorded history. Its clearly recognizable principles, including the proper alignment of a city's grid for maximum natural ventilation and the avoidance of marshes and overly humid sites for the founding of a town, were recorded as early as the first century AD.⁵ Its lessons are as effective today as they were then. Wind towers and adobe mud bricks continue to be used in hot and dry climates, while trombe walls and thermal mass are celebrated as low-energy solutions for retaining thermal heat in cold environments.⁶

During the twentieth century, a wide array of indigenous strategies were studied and codified by architects and cultural historians. In House Form and Culture (1969), Amos Rapaport wrote of the cultural function of climate, environment and geography. Sun, water, air and temperature affected the form of vernacular buildings crafted by skilled villagers throughout the world. And as keepers of a cultural practice of intelligent building, villagers were always highly attentive to a site and its local climate.⁷ In Architecture Without Architects, Bernard Rudofsky wrote of the many original building practices, which independent of architectural intention, were knowing of the thermal benefits of channeling air (as in the bad-gir wind scoop of Pakistan) and of living in carved-out dwellings (as in the hollowed out underground buildings of the loess belt of China).⁸

Little was codified, however, prior to the publication of key works that communicated the principles of energy-free architectural design to a professional audience. The first was William Atkinson's The Orientation of Buildings, or Planning of Sunlight, published in 1912.⁹ As an architect from Boston who worked on the design of hospitals, Atkinson planned buildings as a function of solar exposure. Addressing quality of life issues in many congested urban cities with tall buildings, he promoted their exposure to direct solar radiation to ensure the health of its inhabitants. He studied the sun's movement (with sun-path diagrams) teaching architects how to calculate the location and orientation of buildings to avoid an abundance of shadows. In 1933, this was once again the subject of a publication by the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA). The Orientation of Buildings was a detailed guide for integrating daylight in design introducing architects and town planners to the merit of heliodons, sunshine gauges and pinhole photography.¹⁰

By the late 1950s, the sun and its movement had become the subject of detailed analytical studies by Victor and Aladar Olgyay, who in their first publication Solar Control and Shading Devices of 1957, promoted its study as an element of design.¹¹ They offered practicing architects building-science-related knowledge for the composition of façades truly responsive to sunlight. With the publication in 1963 of Design with Climate: Bioclimatic Approach to Architectural Regionalism, the Olgyays promoted the regional character of human shelter, comfort, bioclimatic charts, microclimates, the heat transmission of materials and the use of graphical and mechanical tools for determining the sun's path.

By the mid-twentieth century, the sun's movement and its control were transformed into an easily recognizable architectural motif by celebrated architects. Le Corbusier introduced the brise soleil at l'Unite d'Habitation in Marseilles (1947–1952), the Dominican Monastery of La Tourette (1953–1957) and in his retrofit of the façade at Cité Refuge—I'Armée du Salut (1952). When Richard Neutra rebuilt his VDL II home and office in Los Angeles in 1966, full-height operable vertical sunshades of great elegance were prominently integrated in the entrance façade. In these and countless similar projects, the shading device had become a veritable emblem of solar-responsive design.

In the area of applied research, Hungarian-born chemist Maria Telkes conducted early studies in the use of sunlight for the heating of homes. In 1940, as researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology with the Solar Energy Conversion Project, Telkes experimented with thermoelectric devices and other inventive mechanisms for the storage of heat energy. (Figure 1.1.1) In 1949, alongside architect Eleanor Raymond and patron Amelia Peabody, s...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Contributors
• Acknowledgments
• PART 0 Introduction
• PART 1 Building Envelopes, New Materials and Architectural Design
• PART 2 Renewable Energies, Building Systems and Simulations
• PART 3 Integrated Practice and Residential Construction
• PART 4 High-Performance Homes: Case Studies
• Image credits
• Index