In this project, we were required to select a building with two passive design strategies and the building that we have selected was S11 House. This house was the first Green Building in Malaysia to be rated Platinum. Not only does it combine cross ventilation and stack ventilation, it also has wind turbines that aid in cooling the house. Creepers are also planted on one side of the wall for sun shading purposes. The passive design that we have chose to analyse on is the ventilations and green wall.

 

After a visit to the house and collecting all needed data, we used Revit to generate the sun path diagrams and also Vasari to generate the wind rose and wind tunnel diagrams. It was not easy getting the Vasari software as we were unable to download it online. After getting the cracked version from seniors only did we manage to start our analysing process.

 

The software however was quite easy to use as we just have to determine the direction of the building and also the location of the building and the software itself will automatically generate the information that we need. The only glitch is the file format that is needed for Vasari to perform its analysis. As we modelled our building massing in Rhino, it was a tedious process as we had to convert the file into a Family before it was workable in Vasari.

 

I was not exposed to Revit throughout the project, except for converting files, but through previous tutorials, i find it quite easy to use especially when modelling thus i am looking forward to learn more about this software. I think this case study is very useful in designing especially when i applied it in my studio project whereby i imitate the arrangement of the brick walls in the S11 house, which aids in ventilation. I think this case study has given me the knowledge to bring passive design into my building, thus reducing the cooling load needed to maintain the thermal comfort within my building.