Category: Facades

Hiding in Plain Sight: In Pursuit of High-Performance Facades

Hiding in Plain Sight: In Pursuit of High-Performance Facades

No aspect of a building is more visible, or holds more didactic potential, than its facade. However, what you see is not always what you get. In spite of the facade’s explicit visibility, a facade’s appearance may not reveal much about a building’s performance in terms of energy, resilience or how it impacts the health and welfare of occupants. This most visible part of a building, when it comes to performance, is an enigma. To counter this, CBE researchers are working on multiple efforts to create new facade tools and metrics, and to document examples of excellence in terms of facade performance.

More

Nudging the Adaptive Thermal Comfort Model

Nudging the Adaptive Thermal Comfort Model

Using an extensive trove of thermal comfort research data, CBE’s research team recently published a set of ‘nudges’ to the existing adaptive comfort standards to improve comfort in commercial buildings while potentially reducing energy use. This work updates the landmark study from 1998 by Gail Brager and Richard de Dear on the Adaptive Comfort Model (ACM), which demonstrated that people in naturally ventilated buildings were more comfortable with seasonal temperature variation compared to people in air-conditioned buildings.

More

Working From Home During the Covid-19 Crisis: Window Views May Help Emotional States, Productivity and Comfort

Working From Home During the Covid-19 Crisis: Window Views May Help Emotional States, Productivity and Comfort

Millions of people are working at home to prevent the spread of Covid-19, creating stress and impacting our well-being and productivity. Science shows that time spent in nature may improve our health and emotions, however, when we are not able to be in nature physically, we may derive benefits simply by access to windows with views. A study recently published by CBE found that a view from a window has positive impacts on emotion, cognitive performance and thermal comfort.

More

CBE Researchers Present New Methods for Design-phase Analysis of Daylighting, Ventilation and Comfort

CBE Researchers Present New Methods for Design-phase Analysis of Daylighting, Ventilation and Comfort

The gap between predicted and measured building performance poses an ongoing challenge for design teams and other building industry stakeholders. Because reliable methods for predicting building performance are critical to addressing this challenge, students, researchers and faculty at CBE are developing and testing new approaches to building performance simulation. In this post we describe recent and upcoming papers that discuss new and innovative simulation methods.

More