Digital Media: Environmental Geometries

This course establishes a bridge between environmental analysis tools and their intuitive deployment in design. The course has four modules: Moving Sun, Moving Air, Moving Heat, and Moving Earth. In architecture, we typically think of the geometry of a plan, a surface or a construction detail. Light, air, heat and earth can also be thought of as geometric systems with internal principles and metrics, constraints that are also opportunities for discovery. Lectures and tutorials will be presented on each environmental force, covering: 

• Methods of digital simulation.
• Traditional heuristic principles.
• Course specific techniques to systemize and visualize these principles.
• An approach to parametrically modeling these as constraints.

There is still a missing middle between design and simulation. In the case of heat and air, there are the two poles, computational fluid dynamic [CFD] analysis on the one hand and vague principals like hot air rises on the other, respectively computationally expensive or imprecise. Many work creatively on this problem from the engineering side, developing faster tools. This course approaches from the architectural side, proposing parametric methods for systematizing and visualizing traditional environmental architectural knowledge as a precursor to accurate simulation and seeking typological and experiential consequences from simulation results. Our goal is to go back and forth and in-operate between simulations and heuristics to empower ourselves to think about thermal comfort and siting challenges more flexibly.

We mostly cool and heat spaces as though they are one temperature throughout and everyone enjoys the same, all the while knowing that airflow and radiation create pockets of thermal comfort. With respect to ground, finding the advisable slope of graded terrain, equating cut and fill volume, minimizing runoff, or weaving a road up a steep hill are common architectural problems. The knowledge to solve these problems is available, but unwieldy for designers to use interactively. This course reframes these types of problems as sets of geometric constraints. Using such knowledge is a representational as well as a technical problem.

This is a project-based course. In the first part, students will pick one aspect of one of the geometries to research, following from the course lectures, identifying a narrow set of environmental constraints, and formatting their research visually, so that it can be instrumentalized. In the second part students will develop an architectural response.

The course is applicable at any level, but it is framed as a laboratory for the theme of the second semester core sequence: situate. Studio courses consider all aspects of a design problem. This course considers only those aspects that situate architecture in a specific place, its relationship to the ground, sky, wind and temperature.