Informing Sustainable Architecture: The STED Project

Results from a Nordic Innovation funded project, STED, about how digital tools can be used in transformation of existing built environment. The project was developed with WHITE Arkitekter (Stockholm), Helen & Hard (Stavanger), Studio Granda (Reykjavik), OOPEAA (Helsinki) and Tegnestuen Vandkunsten (København).
This book presents results from a joint project between 4 research institutions and 5 architectural offices; The Sustainable Transformation and Environmental Design (S.T.E.D.) project funded by the Nordic Built Foundation in 2015. It focused on design processes. The design process is where critical decisions are made. It seems evident that when inquiring about the factors that influence sustainable transformation, research on how design decisions are made should be at the fore. However, architectural design processes can vary quite significantly depending on the project and the architect. The design process is informed by many different factors such as the architects’ skills, geographical and cultural circumstances, financial aspects, and technical possibilities. Architectural design processes, therefore, often have a high degree of complexity, which in some cases can be difficult to sort out and to communicate. Nevertheless, the use of information and communications technology (ICT) in this phase can have a great impact on the sustainability and on the performance of the building design. It is, therefore, of great importance to investigate the role of ICT tools in the design process.During the three years of collaboration across universities and architectural companies in the S.T.E.D. project (2015-2018), it has become clear that design processes are based on tacit knowledge and therefore are not very tangible where sustainable transformation in architecture is really taking place. The central questions that emerged during the project were: Should quantitative information of a technical scientific character inform early design decisions? If so, how does it make sense to do so? And, how can this best be organized?Being explicit and transparent concerning the information on which design decisions are based is not new for architects. History & Theory viewed as an institution in architecture can be seen as a true reservoir of knowledge, sharing design processes and strategies for all architects and related disciplines to learn from. With reference to historical examples, Vitruvius and Palladio’s books defined architectural elements and systems of ordering and proportions and made tacit knowledge from centuries of architectural experience explicit and transparent to a broader audience. As manuals for design processes, these books greatly influenced design processes and design decisions of their contemporaries and today they are still points of reference. In other words, architectural design knowledge and methodologies can be transformed into systems of language and categorized in order to be communicated to other disciplines and to be used across the various design phases of the project.In the same way, engineering knowledge has been made explicit, transparent, and available to the general public for centuries. During the last four decades, this has been done using software with easy-to-use interfaces and colorful graphics. The Swedish historian of building technology, Elias Cornell, has stated that all engineering really came about in an explosion of knowledge during the 19th century. In the 20th century, minor optimizations and adjustments were made. However, in the second half of the 20th century computation took off and discussions are still going on. If computation has improved engineering – or created new ideas – could an experienced structural engineer using graphostatics like Cullmann did around 1900 reach the same results in the same time as a modern finite element modeling expert? Yes, probably. The difference lies in the ‘popularization’ of engineering knowledge to non-specialists. The accuracy and the complexity that can be handled in a short time period enlarges the space of solution.To early 20th century architects, producing drawings was an integrated part of the design process and the major part of consultancy service or what architectural offices were selling as products. Computation has changed this. Today, architects design models in software programs. They also define Building Information Models (i.e. use BIM) as part of their central project material. But in present day building projects these digital information models have many stakeholders and BIM is not developed by one group alone or for a single purpose. In recent years, these digital models have created a common ground for architects and engineers to collaborate and exchange specific information about the building design. The S.T.E.D. project enters the arena exactly here.