Cycle stand locator
August 30th, 2010
It has been a month since I have started cycling on the London roads, and I am never able to find a cycle stand when I need one! This map by Camden Cycling Campaign is a brilliant initiative which gives the location and number of cycle stands (not the TFL cycle hire stands) available in [...]
Tags: cycling, london, united kingdom
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BIG videos
August 23rd, 2010
BIG (Bjarke Ingels Group) has been in the limelight for the past quite some time. He has quirkily simple ideas, visualized amazingly well! Here is the official link of the BIG channel on Vimeo where you can find videos of him explaining his concepts with amazingly good effects! Don’t miss to watch the following videos: [...]
Tags: architecture, big, bjarke ingels group, denmark, visualization
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Daylight Hours Explorer
July 15th, 2010
Stumbled onto this great educational tool from somewhere. It works out the number of daylight hours a location would receive on a particular day after you fill in the latitude of the location. Click the image to try it yourself!
Tags: daylight
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Environmental retrofittings of office buildings in Sao Paulo
April 28th, 2010
Guest author: Ricardo Messano
The purpose of this dissertation is to demonstrate that office buildings in Sao Paulo have the potential to decrease their overall energy consumption by reducing their dependence on artificial sources through environmental strategies. Analysing Sao Paulo´s office building evolution it was possible to identify that the buildings from the 1960s and 1970s, located in Paulista [...]
Tags: architectural association, brazil, energy performance, environmental retrofitting, office building, refurbishment, research, sustainble environmental design
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Environmental Design & Morphogenesis
April 28th, 2010
Guest author: Viktoria A Lytra
Even if the potential of environmental design to cause morphogenesis has been recognised widely, it remains so far unexplored because its main principles – related to building’s physics – are open to many architectural translations. Up to now the environmental input in architecture is limited in most of the cases to passive optimised strategies applied [...]
Tags: architectural association, daylighting, england, form generation, london, research, sustainble environmental design, temperate climate
Posted in Research Initiatives | 1 Comment »
Visualizing data through Google Public Data Explorer
April 23rd, 2010
Google Public Data Explorer is a new tool I found quite by chance which visualizes some very interesting databanks in a useful manner. For example, the World Developement Indicators obtained from the World Bank include quite a few statistics relating to environment: Agricultural land (% of land area) CO2 emissions (kt) CO2 emissions (metric tons [...]
Tags: co2 emissions, datasets, google, public data explorer, world bank
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Harvard University’s daylighting tutorials
April 22nd, 2010
Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design have some interesting tutorials on the daylighting and getting started with Ecotect and Radiance for lighting analysis. They also have an excellent introduction on exporting Rhino models to Ecotect. I feel these are great introductions especially for ungraduate students of architecture who want to incorporate basic daylighting studies [...]
Tags: analysis, daylighting, harvard university, radiance, rhino, tutorial
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Earth hour 2010 tomorrow!
March 26th, 2010
Earth Hour started in 2007 in Sydney, Australia when 2.2 million homes and businesses turned their lights off for one hour to make their stand against climate change. Only a year later and Earth Hour had become a global sustainability movement with more than 50 million people across 35 countries participating. Global landmarks such as [...]
Tags: 2010, earth hour
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Retrofitting at Ecobuild
March 5th, 2010
Guest author: Victor Lopez-Rioboo Gil
One of the main topics at Ecobuild this year has been building retrofitting. This was triggered by the new government strategy “Warm Homes, Greener Homes”, which sets the ambitious target of reducing carbon emissions from UK homes by 29% by 2020. It is estimated that this will imply thermal upgrades in some 7 million households [...]
Tags: 2010, ecobuild, greener homes, payback, retrofitting, warm homes
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Geothermal energy system vs. ground source heat pump
March 2nd, 2010
Over the past year, I and other people as well (Treehugger) have noticed the growing confusion over geothermal energy systems and ground source heat pumps. Googling for one gives results about the other and then there is the trouble of non-standard names. People refer to the GSHP as geothermal heat pumps which is NOT the [...]
Tags: geothermal, ground source heat pump, gshp
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