Tuesday, February 5, 2013

Term Project: Intelligent and Green Buildings

.                For the term project I plan to study the similarities and differences of  “intelligent” and “green” buildings. Next year for my senior design, I want to research the loading on roofs caused by the components that make it a “green” or “intelligent” building. Green buildings and LEED certifications are becoming very important and idealized in the construction of new buildings in our modern day. There has been a big push towards Green design within the past 10 years, and it’s still a growing field. To my understanding, Green buildings deal with making certain components in a structure more environmentally friendly.  On the other hand, I believe that an intelligent building focus more on making existing components more tactical and useful. I feel that “Green” buildings are a lot more popular then intelligent buildings, yet they share a lot of similarities and differences. Like Ryan Krall also mentioned, people hear the word green and immediately want to implement any changes to their building to make it green even if they don’t understand the full meaning or concept of the word. I still feel that people can relate to a green building more than they can to an “intelligent” building. When one thinks green, we think green roofs, storm water management, green walls, and so on. However like Gayaneh Gulbenkian stated, “everyone has their own definition of what exactly an intelligent building is” and for that reason, it will be harder to summarize and describe it as whole.
                Being that both are fields with lots of areas of research, I plan on focusing  my report on green and intelligent design with respect to roofs. Intelligent roofs can vary and define roofing such as solar panels, cool roofs, or sometimes just a more “intelligent” use of the roof space. A green roof on the other hand can be anything related to storm water management, or sometimes even biowalls that greatly reduce the water runoff. I want to study the effects of hydroponics on these green roofs, to see how it’s a combination of green and intelligent building systems.


Sources:
http://www.supergreenme.com/go-green-environment-eco:Intelligent-Roofs-Save-Energy
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reflective_surfaces_(geoengineering)

1 comment:

  1. After reading your project idea I can relate to you and Ryan Krall aspect of how most of the common public has a narrow mind set of green building as I have mentioned in my blog post. But as Gayaneh Gulbenkain mentioned “everyone has their own definition of what exactly an intelligent building is” and nothing is wrong with that. I think if your research goes as planned it would be a great to share the results to the open public to give them more knowledge to consider when they think about green building after reading the results from your results.

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