Cities for the Millennials – Design Tools in Support of Sustainable Urban Architecture

For today’s knowledge workers, the boundaries between work and private lives are eroding. We can now work anywhere and anytime: At Starbucks and during our kids’ swim practice. While at work, we may play Pokemon Go, go running or catch a nap. As our schedules are becoming unique imprints of our lifestyle choices, our buildings and neighborhoods need to become flexible enough to accommodate potentially conflicting environmental needs when one building occupant may go for a blue-light fix along with a double shot espresso while her colleague opts for low color temperature lighting and herbal tea. At the same time, our cities have to house more people using less natural resources. Drawing on recent work at the MIT Sustainable Design Lab on environmental urban performance analysis regarding building energy use, daylighting, outdoor thermal comfort and building integrated agriculture, this presentation demonstrates how a new generation of design tools can be productively used at the interface between architecture and urban planning and reflects on what types of urban living may emerge from these design explorations.

Christoph Reinhart is a building scientist and architectural educator working in the fields of sustainable building design and environmental modeling. At MIT he is leading the Sustainable Design Lab (SDL), an inter-disciplinary group with a grounding in architecture that develops design workflows, planning tools and metrics to evaluate the environmental performance of buildings and neighborhoods. Design tools originating from SDL – such as DIVA, umi, mapdwell and Daysim – are used in practice and education in over 90 countries.

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