NUS Guest Lecturer: Integrated Sustainable Design M.Sc. program
Always a pleasure to teach the highly engaged students of the Integrated Sustainable Design (ISD) master of science degree program. This year saw 50 enrolled students from across Asia mostly with an architecture degree background.
What several of the students really liked about the lectures was frequent use of completed tropical building case studies from IEN's own portfolio. And telling the students about many of the valuable lessons learned along the way such as:
The importance of understanding cultural aspects and expectations from building occupants. For example, certain normal daylight and air movement designs suitable for temperate climates were disliked by occupants in one of our tropical office buildings
The importance of post-occupancy building fine-tuning and analysis, so we can learn from our mistakes and not repeat them in the next building project. Unfortunately, many consultants quickly move onto the next project (or "crime scene", as somebody jokingly commented) and therefore continue to make the same design mistakes.
Be careful of the falling into the "text book design trap", i.e. incorporating a passive or active design concept that you have read about was successfully implemented for other projects, but that does not apply to the tropics because the climate is very different. For example, many people think that the ground is cool, which is the case in temperate climate countries (5 - 12°C), but not in the tropics where ground temperature around 27°C.
For most projects, the biggest challenge has to do with human nature, not technical matters.
Sustainable high performance building projects have a short payback period of about a year once all the benefits are factored in. Unfortunately, most building clients are unaware and are mostly only willing to focus on payback time for energy efficiency.
The lectures covered a range of residential and commercial projects, as well as the different stages of the project (schematic, detailed design including daylight / comfort / energy optimisations, and post-occupancy evaluations).
I also conducted a design workshop assignment, where the students had to design a thermally comfortable and energy efficient central atrium for a tropical office buildings. At the end, I revealed the real built project behind this workshop exercise - and many of the students were surprised to see that some of their key design assumptions regarding air movement had been incorrect. That's when you learn!
Intrigued? Check out the newly updated ISD course homepage here: https://cde.nus.edu.sg/arch/programmes/master-of-science-integrated-sustainable-design/
Acknowledgements
Thanks to the new ISD course director, Anna Kerr, and to Dr. Nirmal Kishnani (ISD course founder) for good sparring on the course direction and how my guest lectures / workshop assignment should be tailored.
Many thanks to Alakesh Dutta for assisting with all the practical arrangements
Comments