26 January 2009 | Materials, Monitoring, Projects, Publications
by Nicholas Tamarin -- Interior Design, 1/23/2009
Looking for a prefabricated home for an infill location that's moderately priced, factory-built and sustainable? Then look no further than Builder LivingHome, a collaboration between Kieran Timberlake, the American Institute of Architects's 2008 Firm of the Year, and developer LivingHomes. Continue reading...
6 August 2008 | Monitoring, Residential
How well does a plastic building envelope function in the summer heat of New York City? We attached sensors to the house to collect data on the thermal performance of our Next Gen Smartwrap(TM). With the 53rd street buildings hovering over the exhibition site, the house is in shade for most of the day, so we settled on monitoring the west elevation - the only location with direct solar exposure - which currently gets about four hours of sunlight. We wired the west elevation with sensors on each of the four layers of the PET envelope. These read the envelope's surface temperatures. Data is routed to loggers tucked discreetly inside the chase wall and all wires are nestled into the grooves of the house's aluminum frame. Data is logged every 15 minutes, 24 hours a day, from July to October. To add context to the building envelope data, we are monitoring the relative humidity on the third floor as well as solar radiation, ambient temperatures and relative humidity on the roof. We are also analyzing the airspeed within the cavity space of the building envelope with a digital anemometer, a device for measuring wind speed in low velocity situations, to determine if the thermal "stack" performs as designed.
11 July 2008 | Materials, Monitoring, Offsite Fabrication, Research, Residential
Cellophane House is a five-story, offsite fabricated dwelling commissioned by the Museum of Modern Art for the exhibition, Home Delivery: Fabricating the Modern Dwelling, on view July 20 through October 20, 2008. The project is a full scale prototype that confronts several agendas head on: the economy of offsite fabrication, design for disassembly, recycled and recyclable materials, parametric modeling, and the evolution of SmartWrap™, a high-performance building skin.
13 June 2008 | Monitoring, Offsite Fabrication, Publications, Residential
Our latest book, Loblolly House, Elements of a New Architecture is now available in bookstores.
Princeton Architectural Press, ISBN 9781568987477
7.5 x 10 inches (19.1 x 25.4 cm), Hardcover, 176 pages
125 color illustrations; 46 b/w illustrations
11 June 2008 | Educational, Monitoring, Research
Completed in 2006, the Yale University Sculpture Building is a 51,000 square foot studio space for the undergraduate and graduate Sculpture programs of the School of Art. The program for the building called for an exceptional quality of light, low energy usage and operable windows. A climate analysis performed on the site indicated a strong seasonal variation, with significant heating loads during the winter and cooling loads in the summer. This presented the opportunity to advance solar wall technology.