My building is a sea-facing museum.

The cutaways of each floor are shown here:

Level 1:

Level 2:

Level 3:

Design features:

1. The permanent display area has a triple height atrium with a skylight. An important design feature that I wanted to include was the play of light, shadow, and volumes. There is also visual connectivity between all floors, and that keeps the visitor engaged.

2. The Temp Gallery has a display area that is partially in the building, and partially in a courtyard with a green wall. This again follows the concept of play of light and volumes.

3. The view from the 3rd floor Display area overlooks the café on the 2nd floor, and the entrance of the building on the 1st, following the concept of visual connectivity and creation of interesting spaces via volumes.

For 3 Units

I used the materials that are lightweight and more suitable for a hot and humid place.

Walls:

Interior and exterior walls: Drywall

Floor slab: concrete slab with custom flooring

Glazing: Double glazed low e panels

Roof: Lightweight concrete

Insight model analysis and results:

The initial value on Insight was quite high.

Changes to model on Insight:

1. Building orientation, WWR southern walls, window shades, window glass, WWR northern, window shades north, window glass north, WWR west, window shade west, window glass west, WWR eastern walls, window shades east, window glass east, wall construction, roof construction, infiltration, HVAC efficiency : set to BIM
2. Plug load efficiency: 0.6 W/sf
3. Operating schedule - changed to BIM
4. Lighting efficiency - 0.3 W/sf
5. Daylighting & Occupancy Controls - Daylighting & Occupancy Controls
6. PV Panel efficiency - 20.4%
7. PV payback limit - changed to 30 yrs
8. PV surface coverage - changed to 90%

Based on the changes listed above, the Insight indicator was brought down to 11.1. This is slightly lower than the Arch 2023 level of 16.4, so the building can be considered environmentally sensitive, and responsible.

For 4 Units

I have used the Cloud Render feature to check Illuminance. The first scene is the atrium in the main display area with a large skylight, and the second one is the temp gallery courtyard. Lighting on two different days at noon have been captures. One is the longest day of the year, and the other is the shortest Dec 22, both at noon time. I chose these views because they are spaces with the most amount of glass and interaction to the exterior, so they receive maximum sunlight.

This the triple height atrium in the display area on June 21 and Dec 22, respectively. In both cases, the amount of illuminance is too high. A comfortable range in the atrium area is about 90-100 fc, and my model has too much light. To counter this, I would have to consider reducing the amount of glass façade, or reduce size/style of skylight. Since views are more important, I may reduce the amount of glass in the skylight. The spaces away from the atrium have optimum levels of natural lighting.

In the temp gallery area, the one from summer shows too much light again, almost blinding. The winter one is much better. A solution to this would be to reduce the amount of glass façade, and introduce spandrel panels in certain areas, This way, the exterior aesthetic would remain intact, but the amount of glass usage would reduce.