Building Equity: Lessons in Sustainability from Community to College Campuses

(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2019-11-08) Hernández, Diana

Buildings represent a middle ground between high-level and small-scale infrastructure. For this reason, they embody specific factors at the intersection of equity and opportunity. For example, recent studies show a correlation between energy efficiency upgrades, usually of interest only to the landlord; and the likelihood of tenant financial burdens and disconnection notices for energy bills. Correlations such as these at the building scale can help reveal otherwise unseen implications of transitions to less environmentally impactful energy technologies. The idea of “just transitions” will be explored in this context, as will comparative approaches from different segments of the US population from college campuses to community settings.
Introducing New Voices in Design Research, Fall 2019

(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2019-11-08) Oh, HyunJoo ; Raymond, Elora ; Roark, Ryan

New faculty members in the College of Design share their research.
Lecture by Bast

(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2019-10-23) Bast

BAST is an architecture firm based in Toulouse, who won the 2019 EU Mies "Young Talent, Architecture” award. The firm takes an anonymous approach and a proactive research posture adopted to experiment with the diverse potentialities of each project. BAST will discuss their current work in a lecture.
History Machines: The Deviant Practice of Inhabiting Information

(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2019-10-16) Kallipoliti, Lydia

The tentative term “history machine” is a medium of immersive scholarship lingering between reality and fiction, with which I examine, redesign, and reimagine archives. I see archives, not as static objects that contain historical documents, but as immersive spaces and living collections where existential ideas about world orders migrate though different architectural and spatial typologies. Contrary to a linear text, a reconfigured archive allows multiplicity, simultaneity and disruption. It allows the reader to travel between different times, places and objects of investigation, enabling multiple connections and complex affinities between themes, concepts and ideas that are not limited to a single place, era, author or type. A reconfigured archive can produce new interconnected categories out of archival boxes, a universe of multitudes that does not necessarily need to be transcribed in linear time. I see the use of history as a creative and generative medium for contemporary concerns in design education and practice; one that does not only promote public engagement with historical material, but also makes evident that in the history of ideas, discourses get recycled. Concepts emerge as allegedly new, though ideas undergo long journeys of migration from one epistemological field to another.
Living at the Intersection of Design and Analytics

(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2019-10-02) Greco, Joseph ; Case, James (Jim) W. ; Kingsley, Alissa ; Mowinski, Todd ; Williams, Matthew

The Kendeda Building for Innovative Sustainable Design was born out of an ambitious partnership between The Kendeda Fund and the Georgia Institute of Technology, focused on making exemplary change in how design and technology are used to create better environmental outcomes. It is the most environmentally advanced education and research building constructed in the Southeast to date- with a specific intent for aspects of the project to be transformative, inspiring- and replicable. Designing a successful Living Building Challenge project is by definition and necessity a challenging, collaborative and integrated endeavor. The highly integrated partnership of the Design Team mirrored the Client relationship. Lord Aeck Sargent and the Miller Hull Partnership along with an innovative and experienced consulting Team developed a Design Process that combined human creativity with technical analytics in virtual lockstep from beginning to end. The lecture will chronical the process and path used to design the facility where Georgia Tech will lead, educate and transform thought in the area of ecology and regenerative buildings. Further, the building itself is designed to inspire research and create aspects of replicability for other building owners, designers and constructors in the Southeast. The design process itself can serve as a roadmap for future Living Buildings. The Kendeda Building is designed for place, climate, culture and the diverse programmatic needs of a broad interdisciplinary set of users. It is designed to seamlessly integrate into and enhance the Eco Commons. The process of design for site and landscape, daylighting, waste water treatment strategies, active/passive approaches to solar, urban agriculture, integrated building mechanical systems, building structure, interior materials and cladding choices- with embodied carbon, health, equity and the human condition all as considerations- will be chronicled.
Decision Analytics in Design and Construction

(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2019-09-26) Aflatoony, Leila ; Ashuri, Baabak ; Bartlett, Chris M. ; Rakha, Tarek

Decision analytics stands to have a profound impact on how design and construction disciplines are woven together to solve today's most complex problems. Rigorous data collection and analysis are core to design and construction decision making. The nature of analysis is to study complexity and deduce a reasonable summary that will then inform design and construction decisions. Decision analytics is distinguished from analysis by the emphasis on causality and prediction. The proliferation of computing power and access to rich data sets has driven innovation in the analytics tools market, lowering the barrier for entry to powerful analytics tools for designers and constructors. This means that decision-makers can more accurately identify causality and leverage the predictive power of analytics to inform design and construction decisions that anticipate and solve for problems much further into the future. Opportunities are growing to align decision analytics across multiple disciplines to minimize economic waste, maximize energy efficiencies, and enhance the lives of individuals and communities. An intuitive example of this opportunity lies in new building design and construction. Construction Analytics is a distinctive discipline, bridging the fields of building construction, civil and environmental engineering, economics, and operations research. Designers and decision-makers use descriptive analytics to identify indicators to cost overruns, diagnostic analytics to predict construction market resiliency after natural disasters, predictive analytics to identify future building trends, and prescriptive analytics to optimize resource allocation during construction projects. Building performance analytics explores various performance measures linked to building energy investigations, including measuring existing building performance through detailed audits to achieve substantial energy savings in deteriorating infrastructures, as well as simulating and visualizing new building and urban energy-flows to formulate informed design decisions empowered by data analytics for a sustainable and energy efficient future. In the example of new hospital construction, human-centered analytics can produce powerful insights and unlock empathy for the people (pediatric doctors, nurses, patients) who actively use the hospital space. Merging and visualizing several sources of quantitative and qualitative data draws out causality and enables predictive decision making aimed at improving the experience and performance of the people using the space.
European Stories: European Union Prize for Contemporary Architecture - Mies van der Rohe Award

(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2019-08-28) Blasi, Ivan

The EU Mies van der Rohe Award was launched in 1988 and for over 30 years has created a network that has scanned and interpreted the construction of the European territory. This space is composed of an emulsion of natural and cultural, vernacular and canonical, traditional and artificial elements. Contemporary architecture must assume this ambiguity, project it towards the future and offset the natural wear to which forms are subject by means of a symmetrical process of innovation. The nearly 4.000 works of the archive, created since the inception of the EU Mies Award, contribute a new inflection or added value to the European territory and the results of the 2019 cycle highlight this attitude. The lecture presents this network of people, institutions and companies and the works chosen by a prestigious jury formed by architects, curators, journalists and clients. The lecture is complemented with the exhibition in the Stubbins Gallery.
Shape Machine and Shape Signature

( 2019-04-11) Hill, Cvetelina
Shape Machine and Interpreters

( 2019-04-11) Hong, Tzu-Chieh Kurt
Interactive Introduction to Shape Machine

( 2019-04-11) Economou, Athanassios ; Hong, Tzu-Chieh Kurt

The talk presents the current state-of-the-art of the Shape Machine, a new computational, visual and disruptive technology, to leading experts in various fields including AI, engineering, computer science, mathematics and design to review, discuss, and envision the field of shape cognition and computing at Georgia Tech.