ClimateStudio Leads Daylight Specialists to New Ways of Working
Case Study: ACC Glass and Façade Consultant
Figure 1. The Pantheon – Vertical sections showing illuminance at noon on the summer solstice. The simulation reveals the unique effect that the building’s aperture (oculus) has on the distribution of light in the great hall. The speed and flexibility of CS allowed for the team to test a wide range of dates and times to demonstrate how the form of the oculus modifies light with different sky conditions.
‘It is not very often that you find a group of eight people working together with focus on daylight.’ explains Paul Rogers, Head of Daylight Certification at ACC Glass and Façade Consultant. ACC is a façade engineering consultancy with offices in Stockholm, Gothenburg, and Oslo. It employs around 30 people and services the Nordic region with independent technical expertise for glass and façade constructions. Indoor climate is one of three departments within ACC, and it contain the daylighting group.
The group is a mix of architects and engineers of diverse nationalities: Spain, Netherlands, Greece, Bulgaria, Canada and Sweden. They handle many daylight certifications for building code purposes as well as third-party certification systems such as LEED and BREEAM. A large share of the work also concerns the domestic certification systems Miljöbyggnad and Svanen. The new European daylight standard EN 17037 also promises to be a big part of the future. Paul Rogers serves on several committees concerning the development of certification systems. He is quick to point out that there is more to daylight than meeting minimum requirements:
“We spend a lot of time working to achieve the minimum amount of acceptable daylight but there is more to daylight than minimums. Sufficiency is important yes, but in practice there can often be too much light. There is the misconception that daylight specialists just want a lot of daylight. That’s an oversimplification. Rather, we want a lot of control over daylight. And for us that starts with climate-based calculations.”
Figure 2. The Bagsværd Church – Vertical section with corresponding false colour fisheye renderings showing the distribution of light in the church’s nave at 2:30 in the afternoon in mid-April. These images demonstrate how the curvature of the aperture redistributes direct sun to render the space in a gentle uniform light. With the speed of CS, the team was able to gain an understanding of how this space dramatically transforms itself depending on time of day and season.
For their calculations, the group works with a mix of tools anchored around the 3D modeling software Rhinoceros 3D. Through the scripting tool Grasshopper, the group has been able to automate many of their processes. For more complex jobs, the team often uses a combination of tools to produce results. ‘Over the past five years or so, our scripts have largely been based on a combination of DIVA-for-Rhino and other components available for Grasshopper. But we have seen what ClimateStudio can do, and we are very excited about it.’ says senior calculation engineer Mihail Todorov.
The group has started to use ClimateStudio for LEED, BREEAM, and other climate-based assessments. ‘With ClimateStudio, it is easier to include operable shading in the calculations, and that is a must.’ says calculation engineer Pedro Ajenjo. ‘Sure, we could do this before ClimateStudio, but it was a lot more work’. For climate-based certification specialist Angel Perez Morata, it is about the speed of the software. ‘For me, the major advantage with ClimateStudio is that I can rapidly test different options for compliance whereas previously this was too time consuming’.
Figure 4. The Villa Savoye – False colour fisheye rendering of illuminance and cutaway 3d view with results for sDGP. The images clearly demonstrate the extent to which the room is prone to glare. With CS, the team was able to assess all their subject buildings for glare on the room level. Within the time and budget constraints of the project, this type of study would not have been feasible otherwise.
But the group’s use of ClimateStudio extends beyond mere compliance. Perez Morata, Eftychia Stamataki, and Paul Rogers have recently put together an educational module for the NLITED project with ambitions to describe the limitations of current daylight metrics. The project examines the daylight performance of five iconic buildings including the Pantheon, Bagsværd Church, and Villa Savoye, and compares results from the different calculations.
‘The idea is to try to understand how daylight metrics compare with not only each other, but ultimately with our perception of these buildings. And with its speed and accuracy, ClimateStudio has allowed us to start a broader discussion about daylight and daylight metrics.’ says Paul Rogers. Eftychia Stamataki adds, ‘Being able to see results unfold in real time is a major step in bridging the gap between simulation and daylight in architecture’. For the immediate future, the group plans on continuing to work with a variety of software tools but sees ClimateStudio as a key part of their future. ‘To be honest, it has drastically enhanced our way of working.’ says Stamataki.
