Module 4 - Design Project Brief: Conceptual Design — Building Context & Passive Design
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Module 4 - Design Project Brief: Conceptual Design — Building Context & Passive Design

Focus

The focus of this conceptual design stage in the process of creating your integrated design project is to identify:

  • Building Site & Context Features that will affect your design decision-making
  • Building Massing -- the overall shape and form that you’ll carry forward in your design
  • Building Orientation -- the rotation of the form relative to the compass and the sun

Recommended Approach

At this point in our design process, we’ll start working with conceptual mass models to develop and test our design ideas.

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Step 0: Establish Goals and Specific Targets

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Step 1: Open the Stanford CEE Student Hub

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Step 2: Select a Project Site and Explore the Building Site Context

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Step 3: Explore Building Massing Alternatives by Creating Several Proposals in Autodesk Forma

Step 4: Compare the Analysis Results and Decide Which Proposed Building Form to Carry Forward

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Compare Your Proposals

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Post the Comparison of Your Analysis Results

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Select the Proposal that you choose as the “Best” of your design options.

Thinking Ahead

In the weeks ahead, we’ll develop these big ideas into a detailed building design.  If it helps your creative process, you can start thinking ahead to:

Space Planning and Building Layout (Module 5)

  • Creating a space budget to meet the program requirements
  • Developing a bubble diagram of how your program spaces will interconnect

Access, Egress, and Circulation (Module 6)

  • Placing the entries, exits, building cores, elevators, and stairways to support circulation and emergency egress in your design

Building Envelope (Module 7)

  • Designing the building facades and roofs (materials, glazing, shading) to support the uses and design/sustainability goals for each of the spaces in your design

Progress Check-In / Documenting Your Design Journey

About Design Journal Entries

You’ll be sharing your ongoing design process and progress with others in our class community through a posting in an online Design Journal using Notion.

Feel free to use whatever format best captures the ideas that you want to share -- text, images, sketches, photos of hand sketches, intermediate models, results of analyses, and so on.

For this class, your design process is as important as the final result.

Post a Design Journal Entry

Create a new posting sharing your Design Journal entry on this linked Notion page:

✏️Design Project Check-In: Conceptual Design - Building Context & Passive Design

Your Design Journal entries for this module should highlight:

  • the design alternatives that you modeled and tested
  • the results of the analyses and how they influenced your thinking about how to move forward

Weekly Design Project Check-In

You’ll sign up for an appointment next week with a member of the teaching team to review your progress and share tips about how to proceed.