Green Money Green Buildings
This tool is used to assess a few factors associated with sustainable buildings based on a general building form created by the user. The Green Money Green Buildings tool is meant to be used by an interdisciplinary team in the early stages of design. The tool provides three key metrics, each of which are important considerations for the building design. The cash information (cost to build and expected rent revenues) can be used by the developer/owner to assess the finances of the potential building, the site EUI can be used by the building energy engineers and analysts to have an initial energy benchmark, and the surface are to volume ratio can be used by the design and architecture team to inform their design decisions.
Inputs: The building form is created by lofting three circles together (base radius, mid radius, and top radius). All three radii can be adjusted as an input from the user. The height of the mid radius can also be adjusted as a user input. Finally, the total building height can be adjusted as a user input. Once the building form is created, the building is divided into floors, again based on user input on floor-to-floor height. The final user input is whether the building will be used for residential or office space.
Outputs: Based on the inputs, the tool will output four results: cost to construct, expected revenue from rent, site EUI, and surface area to volume ratio. The site EUI tells how much energy is expected to be used, based on the floor’s areas and use of the building. The surface area to volume ratio helps with energy efficient building designs (i.e. in some climates a high ratio with lots of windows and solar gain are good, while in other climates a low ratio is better to reduce heat gain). While this tool was initially made to help with sustainability and energy efficiency measures, the cash flows are always important when designing and planning a building. So, the cost and expected revenue are good metrics to give a general sense of what the finances might look like for a building.
Graph Details:
The input parameters are set as described above.
The inputs are then used to create the lofted building form with floors.
Next, the surface area and volume are pulled from the building form to assess the surface area to volume ratio.
The cost by floor area is used to determine the cost to construct based on number of floors and the area of each floor.
Based on the use case specified in the inputs, the Site EUI is then computed based on floor areas.
Finally, the expected revenue is computed based on floor area and use case.
Finally, it should be noted that if the user wants to perform a generative design study, the Tool is setup to do so in the Dynamo app.
