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Modern Construction Case Studies

housing density at European norms that also reduces transportation energy. The second section, “Representing Energy,” highlights the strong familial resemblance between the French cartographer Charles Joseph Minard’s famous map of Napoleon’s ill-fated 1812 march to Moscow and the Sankey diagrams (also developed in the 19th century) that represent the flows of energy and water rather than military forces. Revealing an important element of Transsolar’s practice, Erik Olsen distinguishes three forms of energy representation for buildings— literal (quantified) representation, visualization of energy flows and the impact of parametric variations for design influence, and visualization of physical sensation via passive (diagrammatic) or active (in real buildings) experience—and asserts that choice, whether parametric or experiential, plays an important role in the design and operation of high-performance buildings. Christoph Reinhart and Mostapha Sadeghipour Roudsari have developed successful, widely used workflows that link designs developed in Rhino to building analysis simulations linked directly to Rhino or via the Grasshopper visual scripting language. Reinhart’s false-color representations of incident solar energy, daylighting, and energy use, overlaid on twoand three-dimensional views of urban areas and supplemented with carefully developed graphs and tables, provide comprehensive, readily grasped information to building owners contemplating roof-top PV installation, campus facilities managers, and city governments, while Sadeghipour Roudsari focuses on open-source tools for designers. The political and economic divide in the US and other developed countries between those concerned about future environmental impacts and current economic realities of job security and family budgets can be bridged in part through inspired architectural design and urban planning. Educator and practitioner Tim McDonald presents a terrific series of completed and conceived net-zerocapable affordable housing projects in Philadelphia, made possible thermally by adherence to passive house principles and economically by judicious prefabrication that can readily be applied to large-scale developments. Here is an energy account being written for the present and future benefit of modest-income urban dwellers, a gift of enduring social and environmental value from a top-notch design firm. Interface Studio Architects describe their similarly inspiring projects that attack energy and cost barriers facing urban townhouses. The twelve essays in the third and last section, “Representing Climates and Region,” sweep across more than a century of global development. Three design firms—WOHA, SMP, and Patkau—present built work that establishes benchmarks in vertical greenery in Singapore, development of dense urban infill sites in the mid-Atlantic region of the US, and taking full advantage of the climate in Vancouver, Canada. Katushiko Muramoto launches his fascinating tour of bioclimatic design in Japanese architecture, particularly the experimental houses of Koji Fuji, by describing the engawa (often translated as “veranda”), a transition space whose overhanging eaves provide shade and whose outer glass screens and inner shoji screens can be adjusted to mediate climate, views, and social interactions in the long, narrow, mixed-use building type known as a machiya. The lack of such unconditioned transition spaces in many contemporary buildings has led to thermally uncomfortable indoors-outdoor boundaries and unnecessary energy consumption. Providing a stimulating breadth of intellectual nourishment and visual pleasure, the essays in this book amply reward readers willing to take either a cover-to-cover journey or those constrained by time or interest to a specific topic. Perhaps the only discernable flaw is visually obvious: too many of the otherwise excellent graphs are squeezed by a combination of the book’s compact size and double-column format used on some pages that, together, discourages a reader’s effort to develop quantitative energy literacy. While many of us can quote the price of a cup of coffee, many also have no idea what we pay for energy, whether quantified in direct cost or environmental damage, and the compressed images offer limited help. There are other sources of such information, however, and formatting choices alone do not compromise the success of Energy Accounts in fulfilling the aspirations of its editors for relevance. The documented depth of thought and achievements in practice provide hope for the future. Les Norford, PhD, is a Professor of Building Technology in the Department of Architecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he also serves as associate department head. Trained as a mechanical engineer, Les focuses on the sustainable design and operation of buildings, specializing in building energy measurements and simulations, building system diagnostics and controls, natural and mechanical ventilation, and the development of efficient cooling systems. He has worked in developed and developing countries, recently emphasizing interactions of buildings with the urban environment and their electricity grids.