Solar Block
- Project Overview
In today’s increasingly intense living environment. Our goal is to build a model to test how the community achieves the balance of vision, lighting and use of public space can harmoniously balance with each other with certain circumstances.
Challenges of modern cities.
- Crowding
Crowding is one of the most important urban problems. Stress in turn impairs the mental health of urban residents. Much research finds that urban residents have worse mental health than rural residents. In particular, they have much higher levels of mood and anxiety disorders and of schizophrenia.
2. Pollution
Rapid urbanization, which strains basic infrastructure, coupled with more frequent and extreme weather events linked to global climate change is exacerbating the impact of environmental threats. Making cities more resilient against these environmental threats is one of the biggest challenges faced by city authorities and requires urgent attention.
3. Urban environment
As more people flock to cities in search of social and economic opportunities, cities face challenges with how to best absorb these new populations in the built environment. While today’s cities are designed around the automobile, resulted in the lack of public space.
Goals and Metrics
Metrics
- Views. % of Buildings With Good Views. As urban densities increase, access to natural lighting and views are becoming more demanding in cities. The superblock type has the potential to reorganize buildings as a cluster for more efficiency in spatial layout. The superblock type can increase the traditional distance to visual obstructions for more view access through the courtyard within the block or the orientation and spacing of the buildings.
- Sunlight Sustainable Façade. A sustainable façade leads to thermal comforts and natural lighting access. Both environmental conditions are critical to residents’ physical and mental health and contribute to the preservation of energy consumptions through heating and cooling. We want to increases resident’s health conditions and improve overall building energy consumption performance through the façade design.
- Accessibility. Public Space Access Distance. In order to increase the overall public’s accessibilities to public spaces, the superblock explores placements of public spaces, the number of public spaces, the scale of public spaces to provide shorter travel distances for more residents who live in various locations within the block.
Goal:
Generating a city superblock type to increase the percentage of buildings with good views, improve overall performance of building facades that can accommodate natural lighting requirements during coldest and warmest dates of the year in New York, and incorporating public space access efficiency within the superblock.
What Did We Discover?
By calculating the design model, we can analyze the balance of parks and housing.
Including the relationship between sunshine, streamlines and comfort of vision
In this way, it is easier for planners to know what is a more suitable planning space and how to make the choice between greening and architecture
Conclusions and Next Steps
- This model can be extended to different types of blocks as an idea, and the concept of different types of buildings is used as verification.
- According to other cities’ climate and planning needs, various changes of this model can provide architects with many good suggestions.
- But the weight of the metric obtained is challenging to balance. In general, metrics can provide a lot of help in the general direction. However, in the process of implementing the design, our prediction and actual effect of the metric will be biased.
