Every student and professional working in the construction industry would have always needed to find the coordinates of a certain site at least once during the project duration. This neat little tool (free) from Meteonorm allows one to zoom in to a location using Google maps, and will provide the co-ordinates in degrees/minutes or decimals, or the Swiss Grid (being a Swiss company, I expected this even though I haven’t seen it being used anywhere!)

Access the tool here:

Meteonorm: Coordinates

This post is an adaptation of Ted Ngai’s climatic visualization techniques with Matlab which can be seen here:

http://www.tedngai.net/experiments/climate-visualization-with-matlab.html

The only problem is that Ted’s scripts use Matlab, which is a commercial software and quite expensive. On the other hand, Microsoft Excel can be found on almost every machine!

I have adapted his script which uses Matlab to generate the heatmaps into Excel. Download the Excel file here:

Heatmap_v1

It isn’t that hard to work out, but even then I will give a small tutorial:

1. Click on the IMPORT .EPW button and select an EPW file. This will import the weather data into Excel automatically.
2. View the worksheets Ta, RH, Bn, Dh for the automatically generated heatmaps.

Quite simple!

Here are some screenshots for the Riyadh EPW file:

Ta: Dry bulb temperature

RH: Relative humidity

Bn: Direct beam radiation

Dh: Diffused horizontal radiation

If you print these as a PDF, they can be used Illustrator or other vector-based imaging programs.

AJ has put together a brilliant map of all the UK Passivhaus schemes on Google Maps.

Click to view the map of certified UK Passivhaus schemes.

Source: Footprint

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 any 1 sq. km. area I choose.

The map can be found here.

When you open the map, it is using Google maps as a base and shows a small menu on the right hand side of the screen. There are various options to view different cycling routes throughout London (which is again an awesome thing!). For us, the important one is the ‘Stands (Map)’ link in red.

On clicking the ‘Stands (Map)’ the cursor converts into a red box of 1 sq. km.

Click anywhere on the map where you which to see the number of cycle stands available.

As shown in the screenshot above, it shows the exact location of the cycle stands and with a small number written in between them which is the number of cycle stands.

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:

The 8-House

Scala Tower

Danish Pavillion

Click the image to try it yourself!

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 Avenue, had potential for their energy consumption reduction. The climate study indicated that to achieve a better energy performance the building should take into account external solar shading, Sao Paulo´s high sky illuminance, thermal mass and night time ventilation. In addition, the energy matrix pointed out that office buildings with dependence on artificial sources use almost 50% of their energy for cooling and almost 25% for artificial lighting

A field work was carried out to investigate an office building energy and environmental performance followed then by thermal and lighting simulations to investigate and demonstrate their energy reduction potential. The Eluma building constructed in the late 1970s was selected and further investigated. All dynamic simulations were divided into four different categories regarding relative cost of intervention for a more practical approach. Using Sao Paulo´s high sky illuminance and building adjustments it was possible to reduce the total energy consumption by 40%. Furthermore, by applying the same conclusions to office buildings with similar typologies in Paulista´s Avenue it was possible to reduce the area´s consumption by 1,7 GWh/annum.

By comparing the results from the simulations it was possible to reduce the Eluma office building’s energy consumption from 293 KWh/m2 to 175 KWh/m2 through environmental retrofitting.

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 in their technical dimension rather than in their design implications. Therefore, this research was set to investigate the potential of environmental design, and more specifically the context of solar control and daylight relation, from a morphogenetic point of view. More specifically, through the exploration of parameters that affect this relation, the study produced performance thresholds in geometrical terms that can be applied as the environmental input for form generation in a digital design platform. The outcome of the research is the critical point of morphogenetic strategies and environmental input, contextualised in a reference case of office self-shaded forms in London climate (latitude= 51.5, longitude=-0.1). In practice, this becomes a useful guide of the design process for environmental driven forms’ generation.

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 per capita)
Electric power consumption (kWh per capita)
Energy use (kg of oil equivalent per capita)
Forest area (sq. km)
Improved sanitation facilities, urban (% of urban population with access)
Improved water source (% of population with access)
Renewable internal freshwater resources per capita (cubic meters)

All these statistics can be viewed over time for different countries or for the world as a whole and make some very interesting line graphs.

Issues like Population growth (annual %), Population (total), Poverty headcount ratio at national poverty line (% of population) are also present and can be used to solidify your stand on the environmental reasoning in your design.

Taking the case of CO2 emissions (metric tons per capita), this dataset can be viewed as a line graph.

It can also be represented as a bar graph and can be animated to show the CO2 emissions for the specified countries increased over time.

The data can also be visualized overlaid on a map getting a beautiful visual perspective of the data.

There are many more options, datasets worth exploring.

Head to Google Public Data Explorer to start exploring!

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 in their projects.

Link: Harved G(SD)^2