Martin Bechthold, Kumagai Professor of Architectural Technology
Zachery Seibold, Design Critic in Architecture
Our aesthetic preferences are determined by a multitude of cultural and personal factors, but how exactly these preferences evolve remains largely unclear. Digital and other media certainly play a major role in shaping our taste, as does education, to just name a few. The present study seeks to understand the degree to which our aesthetic preferences are influenced by the importance we attribute to sustainability. We focus on materials used on interiors as the immediate interface between people and the physical world of buildings. The study is conducted in two parts: first we evaluate the degree to which study participants can accurately estimate the degree to which various typical interior materials are sustainable – the latter is quantified through a life cycle analysis. In a second step we then assess how the aesthetic appraisal of materials is influenced by their perceived sustainability.
Holly Samuelson, Associate Professor of Architecture
This paper suggests that passive building design measures can play a significant role in shifting the timing of electricity demand to take advantage of solar power. As a case study, we tested the Solar Heat Gain Coefficient (SHGC) of south-facing windows and used building energy simulation to compare two design objectives: 1) minimizing annual electricity demand, 2) minimizing annual electricity demand unmet by instantaneous solar power. We simulated 13 permutations of SHGC in a prototypical apartment building in 19 US cities from mixed to very cold climate zones. We found that in colder climates the maximum SHGC prescribed by current building codes may be too low for minimizing annual energy use in an electrified building (a potential problem already today). Further, we found that in mixed-to-cold climates, to take advantage of solar power, the optimal SHGC must be even higher. Results show the optimal glass selection under the two objectives tested is significantly different and on average there is a 37% increase in non-solar electricity demand when SHGC is optimized based on simple annual energy use. These results show that the choice of energy-related building-design objectives matter if we recognize that all kilowatt hours saved do not have equal importance.
Carole Turley Voulgaris, Assistant Professor of Urban Planning,
Elizabeth Christoforetti, Assistant Professor in Practice of Architecture
Scholarship on green building for housing has generally focused on construction methods, materials, and energy efficiency (Yudelson 2010; Li et al. 2021) with less attention paid to what have been called the three most important characteristics of a property: Location, location, location. It has been well-established that residential location can have a large impact on household travel behavior (Ewing and Cervero 2010; McCormack and Shiell 2011; van de Coevering, Maat, and van Wee 2021; Boarnet and Wang 2019). Can a housing development truly be “green” if its location requires residents to maintain a carbon-intensive, car-oriented travel profile? We propose to develop a set of parcel-level, location-based metrics that represent various dimensions of housing sustainability, including access to open space, access to low-carbon transportation options, and likely commute-generated vehicle miles traveled for parcels across Allegheny County, Pennsylvania. We will also develop a separate set of parcel-level metrics to describe likely housing affordability and the feasibility of housing development. Using these metrics, we will develop an interactive tool that will allow users to specific the relative value or weight they place on affordability, sustainability, and feasibility to identify a set of optimal locations for infill housing development, based user specified values. We will apply this tool to answer three questions:
- Research Question 1: To what degree to does maximizing location-based housing sustainability require trade-offs in terms of housing affordability and/or development feasibility?
- Research Question 2: Do LEED-certified housing developments in Allegheny County have better location-based sustainability than housing developments that are not LEED certified?
- Research Question 3: What relative values placed on location-based sustainability, affordability, and development feasibility are implied by the pattern of housing development within Allegheny County over the past ten years?
Gareth Doherty, Associate Professor of Landscape Architecture
This project researches the relationship between urban colors and the challenges posed by the increased temperatures associated with climate change. It proposes to comprehend the dynamics of urban colors and examine how they interact with the built environment and human activities in the urban ecosystem. To create more resilient cities, we need to understand urban chromatic values better and this project will do so using Lagos, Nigeria, as a living laboratory. Employing remote fieldwork, precedent studies and design imagination, we will examine the thermal and environmental properties of the materials that constitute Lagos’ colors and create a dossier of urban colors and associated design strategies suitable for Lagos. Designers and planners rarely consider color outside purely aesthetic or metaphorical concerns. We expect sustainable cities to be green cities, but green is appropriate for temperate climates. To be good to the environment is often considered ‘green,’ but outside the temperate world, urban greens are often not very green from an environmental point of view due to the resources needed to maintain green, such as water and chemicals. How green should non-temperate, non-Western cities be? The solution is in not just having green, but other colors too. The first phase of the project will evaluate the environmental properties of a selection of Lagos’s various colors, where the rusts of corrugated tin roofs and the terracotta earth sit alongside yellow buses and taxi cabs. The project’s second phase will catalog a selection of Lagos’s primary colors, review innovative precedents that use color to effect environmental change, such as the City of Cambridge’s efforts to green the city though the tree canopy, New York’s efforts to paint roofs white to deflect heat, and Los Angeles’s efforts to color highways light gray to reduce surrounding temperatures by up to 10 degrees. We will also investigate historical precedents, such as Reykjavik’s multi-colored roofs and the changing roof colors of Chinese cities.5 The third phase will imagine and propose landscape architecture and urban design strategies to counter the effects of increased urban temperatures in Lagos in the future.