{"title":"A Sound Approach to Concrete: Transforming Concrete Through Shape and Porosity for Acoustical Reflection, Diffusion, and Absorption","authors":"D. Butko","doi":"10.1080/24751448.2021.1863673","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/24751448.2021.1863673","url":null,"abstract":"The shape, interior volume, and materiality of the built environment influence occupant perception of sound. Placement and articulation of surfaces directly relate to how sound is reflected, diffused, and absorbed prior to aural reception and comprehension. Researchers experimented with and fabricated prototypical aerated concrete sawtooth panels by manipulating ingredients and form, yielding acoustical properties conducive to speech frequencies (specifically Noise Reduction Coefficients). While acoustical measurements were primarily focused on multi‐use educational spaces, laboratory testing and development of frequency‐responsive porosity revealed data for evidence‐based design applicable to various occupancy types. Attention to the spatial interactions of sound and noise corrected common speech intelligibility and clarity deficiencies by decreased reverberation times, linking surface, form, and spatial volume to reflection, diffusion, and absorption.","PeriodicalId":36812,"journal":{"name":"Technology Architecture and Design","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"75498317","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Methods: How We Invent and Research","authors":"A. Zarzycki","doi":"10.1080/24751448.2021.1863678","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/24751448.2021.1863678","url":null,"abstract":"TA D 5 : 1 E D TO R IA L “[O]ur writing tools are also working on our thoughts” summarizes Friedrich Nietzsche’s experience using one of the early typewriters: a Malling-Hansen Writing Ball. His experience speaks directly to the tool-and-thought continuum evident in creative disciplines. It is also mirrored by Marshall McLuhan’s “the medium is the message” claim emphasizing the importance of the mechanism delivering the content. New tools and technologies (methods) often manifest themselves in new outcomes. While general questions remain unchanged, new methods can lead to qualitatively new answers. Thus, the focus of this issue is on how we invent, develop, and deliver new knowledge. Doris Sung advocates for expanding the entrepreneurial mindset within AEC disciplines by broadening architects’ services from exclusively client-oriented to product and building technology development. Sung uses her own experience as an inventor and developer of the InVert passively dynamic self-shading window to draw broader lessons for others following a similar path. This entrepreneurial path allows designers to respond to current and emerging social, technological, and environmental concerns by defining their own research questions and problems to solve—giving them autonomy and agency. In a voice coming from the allied discipline of civil engineering, Amy Seif Hattan demonstrates how collaborative research between an engineering firm and academia helps to validate best sustainable practices and ultimately become a catalyst for firm-wide environmentally focused transformation. The added benefit of this collaboration was the firm’s ability to offer new embodied carbon design services and gain market advantage over its competitors in addition to fostering a mutually beneficial relationship with academic researchers. In a similar way, the evidence-based design method helps practitioners to learn from their past projects and bring greater value to their clients. Galen Cranz, Lusi Morhayim, Georgia Lindsay, and Johann (Hans) Sagan emphasize the necessity of post-occupancy evaluation (POE) research in architecture, both in practice and academia, to address users’ manifest and latent needs. Christopher Pagano, Brian Day, and Leah S. Hartman expand the discussion of human factors in architecture by contextualizing it within a broader ecological psychology framework that sees people and the environment as interdependent. The authors point to affordance as a key characteristic that empirically quantifies this relationship. Precedents, either environmental performance data points or user feedback, are critical components of the architectural design process (method). William Braham in his review of Case Study Strategies for Architects and Designers by Marja Sarvimäki reiterates the importance of case studies as one of the primary architectural research methods and grounds it in a larger interdisciplinary perspective. He also reiterates the importance of research methods, and ","PeriodicalId":36812,"journal":{"name":"Technology Architecture and Design","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"84480177","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"An Argument Framework for Ecological Psychology and Architecture Design","authors":"C. Pagano, Brian J. Day, Leah S. Hartman","doi":"10.1080/24751448.2021.1863665","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/24751448.2021.1863665","url":null,"abstract":"Integral to the scientific process are theoretical frameworks that motivate specific research questions and empirical methodologies. This paper introduces ecological psychology and argues that it can serve as a new theoretical framework for architecture and design. Ecological psychology holds that people and their environments must be defined relative to each other, with this relationship being empirically quantified by affordances, and that the perception of affordances does not require mental representations or cognitive deliberations. This theory has driven the expansion of human factors, which applies basic research in perception, cognition, and motor function to the design of artifacts in the real world. Ecological psychology provides an empirically testable theory that can inform design choices and assess proposed designs’ functionality.","PeriodicalId":36812,"journal":{"name":"Technology Architecture and Design","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"90069096","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Validating an Emerging Design Area through Industry‐Academia Research Partnerships","authors":"Amy Seif Hattan","doi":"10.1080/24751448.2021.1863661","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/24751448.2021.1863661","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":36812,"journal":{"name":"Technology Architecture and Design","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"82933494","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Building Integrated Evaporative Cooling Utilizing Pervious Concrete","authors":"A. Timmer","doi":"10.1080/24751448.2021.1863675","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/24751448.2021.1863675","url":null,"abstract":"This research proposes an integrated building evaporative cooling assembly using pervious concrete acting as a thermally active system. The proof‐of‐concept prototype demonstrates the capacity of the system. The prototype simulates the operation of a wall assembly of pervious concrete that utilizes gravity to drive water through its matrix. The wall assembly lowers the interior surface temperature of the concrete by 9–11°F and the interior air temperature of the insulated box by 7°F. This research demonstrates the capacity of an integrated wall assembly utilizing pervious concrete acting as a non‐technical ceramic evaporative cooling wall assembly.","PeriodicalId":36812,"journal":{"name":"Technology Architecture and Design","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"84662015","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Molding Liquid Stone: A Computational and Experimental Mixed‐Method Study of 3D Print Formwork for Interlocking Concrete Modules","authors":"N. Emami","doi":"10.1080/24751448.2021.1863677","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/24751448.2021.1863677","url":null,"abstract":"With bespoke fabrication on one end, and mass production on the other end of the fabrication spectrum, this study investigates custom repetitive manufacturing through molding concrete by using 3D printed formwork. The process demonstrates a proof‐of‐concept for 3D printing elastic resin as a formwork for repeated casting of interlocking concrete blocks. Among the challenges are the method of digitally generating the block geometry and designing the molds to accommodate complex curvatures on four sides of a block while operating within the material limitations of 3D printing with an elastic material. The overall process investigates the limitations of such a system in order to identify future potential for mass customized fabrication employing casting techniques.","PeriodicalId":36812,"journal":{"name":"Technology Architecture and Design","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"88573341","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Research Redux","authors":"D. M. Addington","doi":"10.1080/24751448.2021.1863660","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/24751448.2021.1863660","url":null,"abstract":"TA D 5 : 1 Research Redux I was about three years into my doctoral studies at Harvard’s GSD when three questions, or more accurately, three challenges to my work, were posed. For context, I was part of the initial wave of academic researchers and practitioners who were enamored with all things “smart,” particularly walls in whatever nominative designation rendered them as technologically advanced and functionally, if not formally novel: smart skins, intelligent facades, performative glazing, interactive surfaces, adaptive envelopes. Inspired by the cover of James Marston Fitch’s seminal text, American Building: The Environmental Forces That Shape It, depicting a building envelope as mediating the full sweep of environmental phenomena, I planned to develop a wall system to control all scales of heat transfer, thereby covering thermal, luminous, and acoustic behaviors—the ultimate smart wall. The first challenge came from one of my doctoral advisors in Mechanical Engineering who kept asking me what my hypothesis was. I thought he simply didn’t understand; in Architecture, we dealt with big ideas. The second challenge came from my doctoral advisor in Environmental Health, who kept pressing me on method. How was I going to determine the value of what I produced? What were my criteria? I thought he didn’t understand that true innovation lay beyond the bounds of the known and should not be constrained by the limits of measurable criteria. The third challenge lit the proverbial light bulb when I took an undergraduate course on Plato and the Socratic Elenchus and discovered my writing less than enthusiastically received. I expected to excel as I had in all of my previous classes in Architecture, but I was instead roundly criticized for my overly personal reinterpretation of Socrates’ argument. It was at that point I began to realize the argument I put forward as a thesis was but an empty vessel, a diversion to obscure that there was indeed no thesis. My entire approach was predicated on what I wanted to do, to make, and I justified the project by self-determining both the criteria for measuring the results and the ultimate value of the results. I was completely trapped in the closed circularity of my personal view. So I inverted my thesis: instead of technologically advanced smart walls, I shifted the smartness directly to the atmospheric physical phenomena that we had heretofore attributed to the walls. It was enough of a shift that the hypothesis and method were deemed acceptable by my circumspect advisors. While I am proud of the resulting thesis, it was only a first step toward a lifelong rethinking and reassessment of how our profession develops research questions, brings objectivity to its methods, and, most importantly, frames meaningful contribution. There have been many missteps and retrenchments along the way, and I am grateful to the intrepid doctoral students who hung in there with me as I tested and retreated from different methodological pa","PeriodicalId":36812,"journal":{"name":"Technology Architecture and Design","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"82119517","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Evaluating Energy Targets and Efficiency Measures in Multifamily Subtropical Buildings through Automated Simulation","authors":"Wendy Meguro, Elliot J. Glassman","doi":"10.1080/24751448.2021.1863676","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/24751448.2021.1863676","url":null,"abstract":"Building operation accounts for a significant portion of global greenhouse gas emissions. Hawaii is committed to 100 percent clean energy by 2045. This study demonstrates a replicable process using early design phase energy modeling to reduce energy use in multifamily residential buildings in subtropical climates. The team simulated the design of air‐conditioned buildings that can reduce annual energy use 29–61 percent compared to the International Energy Conservation Code, with an additional 10 percent savings if air conditioning is not used. The results inform the design of multifamily residential buildings by identifying building characteristics with the largest impact on energy use, energy cost, peak loads, and greenhouse gas emissions. The study demonstrates that generating 100 percent of annual site energy is possible using a combination of design measures and rooftop solar panels.","PeriodicalId":36812,"journal":{"name":"Technology Architecture and Design","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/24751448.2021.1863676","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"72428563","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}