I am working with Issa Haddad and Jay Ng on this project. We are looking at green vs. intelligent building in light of our senior project, with our design goals serving generally as the “green” aspect and an attempted BIM model as the main “intelligent” aspect. For more background information on our senior design project see either Jay or Issa’s post.
As Gayaneh mentions, the definition of intelligent building seems to be muddy at best. While “green” construction is better defined, especially with the advent of LEED certification in the early 00’s, the concept tends to be mingled with that of intelligent building to form one very confusing impression of the “architecture of the future.” Furthermore this impression tends to resemble a conglomerate of all the cool ideas and new technology we’ve been exposed to, invoking visions of glistening facades and space-agy designs, self-driving cars parking under wind-turbines as a spandex-clad future-human emerges with the press of a button, suavely removes his google-glasses and jetpacks up to the green -roof of his sustainable habitat (by 2020 they will no longer be called homes.) You get the picture.
Our aim, first of all, will be to clear away all of the misinformation and confusion associated with the concepts of “green building” and “intelligent building” by presenting a singular, clearly stated definition of these terms. As Jay points out, the “green” aspect at this point seems to be most easily definable by LEED goals and requirements. “Intelligent building” may likely end up meaning something very similar to what Professor Mitchell has proposed in his first lecture. With a clearer picture of what these separate parts are, we hope to gain a clearer picture of what our senior design project is, or wants to be.
The next step will be an investigation of BIM vs. traditional approaches to building modeling. Steering clear of the obvious advantages in ease of drawing collaboration, modeling capabilities, etc, we hope to take a deeper look at the comfort level of the people using BIM. Is it appropriate in all circumstances? Is it always better? My guess is that the majority of the time BIM trumps all, but there may be a few specific cases we run across in looking at the applicability of BIM to such green analyses as daylighting, stormwater, energy, and life cycle. I suspect interoperability between programs designed for these specific analysis will be flawed if not completely unworkable.
Of course all of this will become clear as we attempt to model our green resource center and include as many systems as Revit will allow. We are hoping that through a discovery of the various capabilities of Revit and linkable analysis programs we will be able to get a much better handle on what exactly our building requires and how our proposed systems can affect these requirements. With net-zero energy, runoff, and environmental impact as our design goals, It seems that Revit will become an indispensable part of figuring this all out.
Some quick research on the topic of Green BIM yielded an interesting viewpoint on the applicability of BIM in the future of green building. It seems that BIM is on the rise in the field, and small “green” renovations are taking precedence among the majority of engineering and contracting firms. The report I looked at went into some case studies, each showing the importance of BIM for integration and import to other analysis programs, allowing for more focus on the design of the building rather than crunching numbers and entering data. This in turn led to higher efficiency in material, time, and money. One of the most interesting examples, pictured below, was the Grange Insurance Audobon Center in Columbus OH, which used a number of BIM programs for daylighting analysis that clearly influenced the shape of the building.
Green BIM: How Building Information Modeling is Contributing to Green Design and Construction. McGraw Hill, 2010
