design visibles

Heat flow Sankey diagrams visualize the energy model data from two versions of the same house. The first is modelled to the Nation Building Code of Canada and the second is modelled using our Passive House assemblies and details. The code-built version of the same house would see more than 2.5 times the annual heat flow of the PH certified home of same design.  This shows how PH principles drastically reduce the requirement for mechanical heating, allowing the sun and everyday activities like cooking, working on a computer, or watching TV, to provide more than 50% of the heating load for the house. By drastically reducing heat flow through the system, you can heat your home less to maintain the same overall level of comfort!

Exploded axonometric - House in West Brooklyn, Nova Scotia.

Really enjoying bringing parametric tool making into my new job as a designer of Passive House certified homes. Scripting custom tools to automate material layouts and cost estimates while creating a scale diagram to add to the construction documents for installers.

Just a prairie lobster.

Moving from the algorithm that creates the installation geometry and form to the files that will drive the fabrication of the real thing!

Process images from a project that’s been in the works for a long time - the PhD candidacy work of a colleague for whom I have been scripting in Grasshopper to produce human-scale spatial chitin-like installations out of rotating tubes. First big installation is going in this summer!

Interior rendering for a current project. I have the great opportunity with this one to apply some of my computation in design research to my practice. This will be a thick-wall construction built to the passive house standard for assemblies and uniquely will be built almost entirely out of wood milled by the owner/client. I am working on scripting a little Grasshopper model to do the framing layouts and milling schedules in an automated way to save time and provide us with a complete framing model early in the process.

Dealing with another bought of cluster headaches I decided to try to illustrate what they feel like. This uses current photos during an attack and my 2010 MRI images.

Illuminance daylight study for a current project. Summer solstice 2:00pm.

Working on my intro to daylighting and parametric tools for daylight analysis. I’ll likely upload the lecture and slides later and post the link.

Some images showing some consulting work I am doing to take a 3D model of a proposal from a client and unroll is using a Grasshopper script in a way that tags the components for identification during fabrication and assembly.

Here’s a perspective within a wire frame of a room I modeled to study the daylighting in. The graph represents lux (lumens/m2) for 1:00 pm on December 21st. Winter sun from the clerestory windows shines all the way back to the north wall. The house is a square in plan so the clerestory is a strategy for bringing in light through the winter months to ensure the kitchen and entry are adequately day lit. Gotta love that winter sun.

I am working on modifying and combining a few example files to build an introductory tool for my senior undergraduates this semester. Their program is a public bath this semester and in an effort to provide them with some instruction in parametric design alongside a useful analysis of their project that can lead to critical decision making, I have decided a daylighting analysis of their main pool room is the most useful first step into the Honeybee plugin for Grasshopper (for Rhino) given the limited amount of time I have for workshop delivery and support. Students will manipulate fenestration manually by indicating modeled window surfaces coplanar to walls or simply by percentage. A coloured mesh renders is 3D showing the illuminance (lux) based entirely on natural lighting for June 21st at 2:00pm in Nova Scotia. The sky is based on hourly weather data from the Shearwater, NS monitoring station.

Dew point tool presentation slides.

This is a tool I scripted in grasshopper for my undergraduate architecture students in a building systems course. The tool abstracts a wall or roof 'typical' assembly to help inform where vapour controlling layers and potential condensing surfaces may occur in a design assembly by graphing the temperature gradient through the assembly and calculating the dew point (internal). By studying a proposed roof and wall in isolation, it can inform the process of detailing the juncture between those two assemblies. I will upload the tool to the grasshopper forums shortly and include a link here for anyone who is interested in giving the tool a spin.

Having fun working up the level of detail in this project. Will be converting this model over to do some energy modeling in Honeybee and Ladybug using Rhino/Grasshopper.