Though many talk of the need for our cities to adapt and change to respond to current and future demands achieving significant change remains somehow elusive. The Melbourne Cities Transition Cluster is being established to focus on the implementation of platform projects that demonstrate and lead the transition of Melbourne towards a sustainable future. Arup’s role in the Cluster, in addition to driving formation, will be to promote the utilisation of digital innovations as key enablers to deliver on the Cluster’s objective as it charts a course into new territory. Application of innovation will be critical in four areas:

• Communication to the cities’ residents and businesses about new futures for our built environment. This digital component of the Cluster will be essential to the process of building people’s confidence and support for new forms of built environment. Recently, Arup developed Digital Manchester, a 3D rendition computer model of the entire inner Manchester area and provides the City with a tool that can be developed for an enormous range of uses including flood defense mapping and also how cities can be retrofitted to mitigate against climate change. The model is viewed using computer gaming technology and enables users to virtually fly, walk and circle the streets and buildings of inner Manchester. This tool has been modified and adapted for use in consultation to enable the attendees to ‘walk around’ the proposed master-plan.
• Data collation, analysis and synthesis to enable effective integration of development solutions and implementation of preferred solutions that achieve lower environmental resource use and impact, while maintaining equivalent or higher quality of life outcomes. The Urban Energy Systems project at Imperial College London is an example in this area (refer figure 1 below), which aims to identify the benefits of a model-based, integrated approach to the design and operation of urban energy systems. The primary methodology involves the development of a holistic model of the city, involving the city layout, the behaviour of its citizens, the flow and conversion of resources (materials and energy) and the associated infrastructure. A key component is a model of the population and how, as individuals, they interact with the infrastructure. This enables the matching of energy demand and supply in innovative ways.

• Providing visualisation and modelling support to enable shared appreciation about the best solutions to city transition to develop amongst the Clusters diverse participant membership group.
• Mapping stakeholder networks to domains of influence, transition arenas and implementation sequencing to support strategic engagement of stakeholders in the process of transition.

To understand more about the The Melbourne Cities Transition Cluster contact me at Arup.

The May/June edition of Architectural Design presents an unusual take on generative architecture based on field theory.  Sean Lally offers a new way of thinking about the design of environments.  Instead of conceptualising indoor environments as a space defined by its surrounding surfaces (e.g. a curtain wall glass facade), Lally conceives of a space as the boundary (isovalue) of a spatial field at a specified value.

For example, we might use particular arrangement of hot and cold panels to generate a radiant field, and if we could visualise the isosurface of a particular temperature then we’d be generating a form within which the environment was controlled without the use of boundary surfaces.
Various articles in this edition of AD explore a fluid dynamics solution as part of the generative process.

It’s an idea that we’ve been playing around with for a while too and this seemed like a nice opportunity to see what could be created.  I’ve used a computational fluid dynamics package (ANSYS-CFX) to set up convection currents within a box shaped volume and visualised the isosurface of a constant temperature.  This has then been exported, translated and rendered using the Radiance visualisation package to produce the image above, with a rather unlikely sky.  It’s an interesting problem to contemplate how the people within the space would modify this environmental boundary, i.e. there is an interdependency at work here …

Although not typically recognised as a discrete engineering discipline; building physics is identified within Arup as an activity that is integral to the design process and adds another layer to our understanding of the built environment. We include a broad range of physical and physiological topics including fundamentals of heat transfer, fluid mechanics, light & colour and human thermal & visual comfort. By digging in and exploring some of the fundamental physics normally hidden within the conventional design processes, we emerge with a much richer understanding of the behaviour of the built environment and our interaction within it.

Building physics can be applied across a range of scales; from single buildings and the people within up to the larger city-system and human interaction at the urban scale. At the smallest scales it may be applied to understanding individuals and their physiological response to the built environment. At much larger scales, an example application of building physics might be the design of clusters of buildings, precincts and ultimately cities, via an assessment of building energy and water demand and consumption and links to energy and water supplies. The design of net-zero energy systems would fall into this category.

The potential of building physics is realised when partnered with other engineering disciplines to add insight to the design process and enabling better outcomes. As an example, we apply building physics to our facade engineering design process, which is enhanced through a multi-faceted consideration of daylight, glare, energy, heat and moisture transfer, to provide a more complete understanding of the building envelope as a filter and modifier of the outdoor environment. Through this broader consideration of facade exposures and desired outcomes we can realise an optimised facade solution that is tuned to the site and climate and which achieves the desired aesthetic and indoor environment qualities.

Simulation can be used as an effective means of uncovering patterns and trends within the complex behaviour of building systems, revealing constraints and opportunities for system design as well as providing a useful means of communication within the design team.  And of course it’s not always about simulation.  So long as we understand enough about the fundamental behaviour of the problem were facing, then building physics is often best applied through hand-calculations or thought experiments that complement the more traditional rules-of-thumb.