battelle darby creek nature center casestudy

Battelle Darby Creek Metro Parks Nature CenterColumbus, Ohioby Brian Skripac

Case Study:

Figure 7.18. A rendered perspective view of southwest façade of the Battelle Darby Creek Environmental Center in design, seen from bottom of the site’s promontory. The image was produced in Revit and post-processed with Photoshop. Image courtesy of DesignGroup, Columbus, Ohio.

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Case Study: Battelle Darby Creek Metro Parks Nature Center

DesignGroup, a 56-person architectural design firm based in Columbus, Ohio, has in its 38-year history considered sustainable design to be an integral part of the design process, as well as a key factor in defining building form. More recently, DesignGroup’s working methods have undergone a valuable evolution through the adoption of Building Information Modeling (BIM). Over the past five years the firm’s BIM expertise has grown to the point that 100% of project work is designed in a BIM environment, spanning more than 50 projects that encompass more than 5 million square feet. This transformation has also allowed new technologies to become integrated into our design processes, ultimately representing a unique opportunity to synchronize the firm’s sustainable design and BIM initiatives.

Because energy conservation is a key formgiver in all of our design projects, we’ve found the use of Autodesk’s Revit Architecture to be a powerful tool in developing building information models at the earliest stages of a project’s conception (Fig. 7.18). This modeling effort provides a more holistic approach to addressing the design challenges at hand. With model geometry in place we are able to better consider how to position the building on site, optimize its orientation, and capitalize on prevailing winds. These issues need to be studied early in the design process when these decisions can have the most positive impact on the building’s performance over its lifecycle.

The most recent example of this early sustainable analysis can be seen in a project that has just completed schematic design, the Battelle Darby Creek Environmental Center, a 10,000-square-foot educational building for the Columbus and Franklin County Metropolitan Park District. The Center will embody the client’s vision of an environmental center that encourages visitors to learn about the diverse ecosystems found within the surrounding area: native prairies, creeks, wetlands and forests. To complement these sustainable design ambitions, the project is pursuing LEED Gold Certification and will be one of the hosts of the 2012 World Eco Summit.

Leveraging Revit to quickly create multiple design iterations enabled the team to study a diverse range of solutions that looked to optimize the building’s envelope and orientation for its unique climate and location. This early prototyping effort helped the designers to further develop two very distinct building layouts and orientations (Fig. 7.19).

Case Study: Battelle Darby Creek Metro Parks Nature CenterColumbus, OhioAuthor: Brian SkripacPublished: Levy, Francois. “BIM in Small-Scale Sustainable Design.” Hoboken: John Wiley & Sons, Inc. 2012Client: Columbus and Franklin County Metropolitan Park District

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DesignGroup

Figure 7.19. Early pre-schematic design planning models of the project were created in Revit Ar-chitecture then shared with Green Building Studio via a gbXML file to perform a whole building energy analysis to understand each option’s energy performance. At left is the long east/west design with 28% WWR (Window-Wall Ratio); at the right the long north/south design has 46% WWR. The wall and glazing areas were calculated within Revit. Images courtesy of DesignGroup, Colum-bus, Ohio.

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Figure 7.20. Schematic design floor plan of the Battelle Darby Creek Environmental Center as the design has evolved from the two competing schemes shown in the previous figure. As the project team developed the schematic design model they gained greater insight into the building’s envelope performance and the amount and distribution of glazing throughout the design. The architects were thus able to leverage the early analytical feedback to optimize the design for a more favorable solar orientation and performance. Image courtesy of DesignGroup, Columbus, Ohio.

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DesignGroup

Utilizing Revit’s scheduling capabilities to easily quantify and understand the overall amounts of glazing (as compared to solid wall surfaces) in each design, the design team examined how these window-to-wall ratios would work in conjunction with each option’s energy performance. Exploiting Revit’s interoperability, the team exported models via the gbXML format to perform whole-building analysis in Green Building Studio. The results of this early analysis allowed the team to realize better than a 5% annual energy reduction simply due to a more favorable solar orientation (Fig. 7.20). Understanding how the optimized long north/south façade with a 46% WWR would outperform the less desirable east/west façade, which had a much smaller WWR at 28%, provided an immediate value to the project with no added cost to the design. Additionally, we found the daylighting analysis tools in Ecotect to be valuable in understanding the impacts of different daylight harvesting options in the project. With Ecotect we were able to study where to locate and how to size shading devices and roof overhangs, while maintaining a high level of daylight in the building spaces. At the same time, we were able to utilize this information in Green Building Studio to validate how these design decisions maximize and minimize solar gains to have the most positive impact on the building’s overall energy consumption. The combination of all of these tools within a BIM workflow gave us the opportunity to balance both the qualitative and quantitative aspects of the building’s design and performance (Fig. 7.21). This type of feedback has proven to be extremely valuable at the early stages of the design process, enabling us to work with project elements that are typically under our scope of work, such as the building’s orientation, envelope, performance, and glazing amounts and location (Fig. 7.22). If as architects we can make these decisions, validated by actual analytical feedback, we will have a much better design, optimized from the outset and exceeding performance expectations.

Figure 7.22. As the design has continued to develop, BIM has proven invaluable for coordinating structural and consultant design work, as well as in continuing to visualize and analyze the evolving project . Image courtesy of DesignGroup, Columbus, Ohio.

Figure 7.21. Rendered perspective view above drop-off area towards building entrance. The image was produced in Revit and post-processed with Photoshop. Image courtesy of DesignGroup, Columbus, Ohio

battelle darby creek nature center casestudy

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