Conceptual Design — Building Context & Passive Design

Your Name
Marcella Li
Linked Student
Journal Entry For
Module 4 - Conceptual Design - Building Context & Passive Design
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Created
Jan 22, 2022 6:35 AM
Last Edited
Jan 24, 2022 2:04 AM

I chose to use the Stanford Dish site, and placed my first conceptual mass option between two hills. The site is very open and without any surrounding buildings to consider.

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The shape of the first conceptual mass takes inspiration from the rolling hills in the Dish area and is intended to somewhat blend into the environment via a green roof that connects to the landscape. The undulating topography, however, will be challenging to model around.

I did a solar analysis to evaluate the PV potential and it's clear that one face has much higher solar potential than the other. There's an estimated 17.7 year payback period, which seems reasonable considering the anticipated lifespan of a museum/education-type building

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The 2nd conceptual mass option was a revolved shape set on top of one of the hills. Again, the idea is to take inspiration from the topography. This is a somewhat simpler shape than the previous, which would make for easier construction. This location is also more exposed than the previous one. The hollow middle could be used as a courtyard space. Future iterations of this could be more rounded or with exterior walls that slant to connect more with the topography.

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Similar to the previous design, the PV potential is much greater on one side vs the other. This design has a slightly longer payback period of 18.6 years.

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After creating the energy model, the initial result with the default settings are shown below, which is far from the Architecture 2030 goals:

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Since the building is radially symmetric, changing the building orientation would not have an impact. From inspecting the effect of changing different parameters, there is not much impact on lowering the total EUI, which suggests this design is not ideal.