Low Tech Strategies with High Tech Tools: Integrated Modeling in the Early Architectural Education

Abstract

There is a widespread appeal to foster the adoption of building performance simulation (BPS) tools in the education of aspiring architects with the goal of commonplace integration in architectural practices worldwide. This adoption enhances an architect's working methodology through new forms of observational testing, which demonstrate how architectural boundaries and environmental states interact. Given the opportunities provided, students should exercise careful consideration when incorporating BPS tools into their architectural workflow. This paper presents years of BPS tool implementation in the early stages of architectural education and how this work addresses new user challenges, such as the superficial acceptance of BPS outcomes, a corresponding assumption that BPS tools predict building behavior with absolute certainty, and the subsequent abbreviation of the design process when quantifiable BPS results fall within a desired set range. This paper presents a unique approach that prioritizes low-fidelity BPS tools in iterative, multi-scalar, and interactive ways that embrace the replication, augmentation, and even contradiction inherent within architectural design workflows. Instead of settling on the narrowly deterministic solutions generated by BPS tools, students exercise the potential of these state-of-the-art platforms in a manifold way, using them to observe the rich interactions between articulated architectural boundaries and the environmental states they help shape. Fourth-year students in an undergraduate architecture studio practicum use numerous low-fidelity BPS programs to observe how a building can be tasked to produce system- integrated outcomes that satisfy benchmarks set by the 2030 challenge.