Environmental Geometries investigates techniques for visualizing and designing with hard-to-see environmental forces. This is the second iteration of the class that focuses on the geometry of air movement.

Air moves like an invisible ocean through buildings in response to differences in pressure. This motion can be described mathematically, but solving these equations in each situation remains an evolving problem. Ultimately, depicting and understanding complex phenomena requires more than one model and mode of inquiry, as well as awareness of each model’s specific limitations.

There must be a space of interactive architectural experimentation with environmental forces, between general principles, on the one hand, and computational fluid dynamics on the other, accurate enough to allow realistic feedback, but fast enough for iterative conceptual study. This course seeks to create such a space between design-play and engineering through empirical study.

The class proposes a back-and-forth process between physical and digital experiments, beginning with an overview of many kinds of digital simulations and physical tests. Two modes of physical testing will be explored in detail, wind tunnel testing and schlieren photography for the study of ventilation and heat flow respectively. These will be paired with two modes of digital simulation, first, an open-source simulator developed within the course in C# for rhino/grasshopper and second using professional tools. Lastly, there will be a full-scale component, in which students take measurements in real buildings.

Students will experience the friction between the digital and physical modes and engage with the power and limitations of both as approximations of reality. This exploration will be expanded with three additional topics: discussion of the heuristic principles of air movement, the mathematics of air models and ventilation, and historical examples of design before air conditioning.

Architects are familiar with material experimentation with visible materials. Students don’t need to become carpenters or masons, but they do need methods to explore, experiment, test and fail, with wood or stone, in order to use them creatively in design. By analogy, students need methods of experimenting with the invisible material of air to gain familiarity with its behavior and consider it in future work. This class makes a distinction between experimentation and simulation, in which the latter uses one tool to represent reality, and the former uses multiple tools to ask specific questions of reality. The goal will be to operate between multiple kinds of simulations to think flexibly about thermal comfort.

This is a project-based course that includes class wide, paired and individual elements. Last year, the class wide project involved construction of a wind tunnel, which will be used again for experiments this year. This year, the class wide portion of the work will include responsibility on the part of each student for a portion of the schlieren setup. Individually, students will begin from a precedent and design a series of models that will be tested in the wind tunnel, in the schlieren and in the rhino simulator. The collective comparative knowledge from these different kinds of tests will inform a more robust understanding of the interaction between air and form, which will be further supplemented by each student’s thermal measurement of a space at full scale. Students will use this new understanding to select and further develop one of the tests in pairs for additional calculations.

Ultimately, the interaction between distinct ways of looking at the world will allow students to gain control over tools and learn when and where to apply different types of analysis.