Using Parametric Energy Modeling to Design OptimalPerformance Housing Units Within an Existing Framework

Abstract

We face an interesting time in the evolution of the design profession. With a long history of sequential professional service delivery, we are challenged by the need for more highly integrative and productive performance-based methodologies for design exploration, concept discovery, and content application. This is clarified further by the pendulum-like cycling of design interest from the classic categories of formalist patterning to parametric form making. A fundamental conflict in this arena is the habit-of-mind in which designers approach the making of architecture as an outside-in task; establishing a form boundary and then partitioning the functional layers of each ‘story’ of that volume into workable circulation and staging spaces. This outside-in approach contradicts the very lessons of form-making in nature. And with the many emerging interests in biomimicry, biomorphism, and biophilia, the timing could not be better for change, specifically, that a more appropriate 21st century architecture is achievable by mimicking nature in the ‘growing’ of a design across scales, from cell, to organ, to tissue. To do that, an anthropometric basis of ‘walking on the land’ is used to set the design space; using the operational realms of Ground, Surround, and Overhead for the growth of form assemblies as an aggregation of 27 fundamental performance zones. These observations set the context for the methodological design studies described herein.