Comfort strategies for flexibility and longevity
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Transcript: English(auto-generated)
00:00
As a professor at Technical University in Munich and Managing Director of the Engineering Office-Chancellor in Stuttgart, Thomas Auer, you have the advantage of being able to combine basic research in the academic environment and working on projects. In the context of the necessary decarbonization of the building sector and its adaptation to climate change,
00:26
you favor low-tech solutions simply because they prove to be more robust. If you look at the uncertain boundary conditions that architecture has to cope with, that goes clearly against the zeitgeist.
00:43
Why are low-tech solutions better suited to a holistic approach of sustainability? I'm not sure if it's against the zeitgeist, actually. I think it was always kind of a zeitgeist. Let's put it this way. I think architects always had a very good gut feeling, at least many architects, about common sense.
01:06
And I think low-tech in architecture is actually common sense. It had been common sense for centuries and we just forgot about it. Cedric Price in the 80s had this famous saying, technology is the answer, what is the question? And that was like for a long time the mindset.
01:21
But what we recognize is that of course we don't want to go back, live in caves. And of course technology is playing a role. But sometimes we do not ask what people want, what people request, what people need. We know already the technology before we know what the problem is. And this is the only thing we question.
01:41
Do we need all of this? Do we need all of this technology? And does it make things really better? Because let's say lifetime of technology, complaints we see in buildings, etc. show us that there is limitations. And I think with architecture we can do better. We can solve a lot of things by design without the need of technology.
02:01
But again, it doesn't mean no technology. It's just let's say being specific and selective. Where do we really need it? Where do we need technology that really serves people? And what can we replace? As regards complexity, you have shown something rather complex with the Manitoba Hydro building in Winnipeg, Canada.
02:24
This is a highly adaptive approach to physical and social conditions locally. However, it took two years of monitoring and fine-tuning until finally reaching the predicted energy efficiency. Apparently, and this seems to be the result of a couple of research projects,
02:45
70% performance gap is the norm. Is this one of the reasons why decarbonization of the building sectors makes so little progress? What is the underlying problem here? It's certainly one of the problems, absolutely.
03:02
And I think we need to distinguish between housing and commercial buildings. There's a part of the problem of performance gap, which we also see in housing. Technology of supply systems, energy supply systems are too complex. Part of the problem is, if you want to call it a problem, is the user.
03:21
So we see suddenly in highly energy-efficient buildings, we see much higher indoor temperatures. We see temperatures between 22 and 24 degrees, whereas before, not every space was heated, et cetera, et cetera. And then we see a different ventilation regime suddenly. So this is part of the performance gap.
03:40
In commercial buildings, there was a study of TU Braunschweig showing this 70% performance gap. There are other studies coming up with different numbers. Anyway, there is a huge potential which is not considered. In all the debates we have about reducing carbon footprint of our building stock, we do not touch this issue.
04:03
And I think a friend of mine, he has an engineering firm in a smaller town, and the mayor came to him and said, are you interested in taking care of our public buildings, like schools, et cetera? We share the savings. He said this was the best deal he ever had because he hired someone for 450 euro who, in wintertime,
04:23
drove to every school and turned off the radiators, just closed the valve of the radiators. And he says it was so easy to significantly reduce the energy consumption of those buildings. So I think there's big savings which are untapped, which we have to look at.
04:40
In another research project of schools in southern Germany, you compared the performance of school buildings dated from the 19th and the first part of the 20s and after-war buildings. And astonishingly, a school building from the end of the 19th century showed you the importance of room height.
05:02
Why is room height crucial for robustness and user comfort? Yeah, room height was the crucial parameter we found. And interesting then, later in a research project, with 4,000 options, we simulated to prove Theodor Fischl, who was the architect at the end of the 19th century,
05:21
who proved him right. So we use now, let's say, the latest technology in research to try to prove what was common sense more than 100 years ago. But indeed, let's say we found that the room was bigger than what we built today, like a classroom, 80 instead of 60 square meters,
05:40
but it was also taller, 4 instead of 3 meters. So we have almost twice as much air volume per person sitting in the space. And just due to the air volume, it takes twice as long until the air is used. So you can cover a longer period of time without opening the window, which is critical in a classroom.
06:01
You have the 45 minutes when you open the windows. Then the other thing is you have more walls. You have, let's say, the walls are taller, so you have more thermal mass controlling temperature and humidity in the space. So we got a very even temperature behavior or comfort. And then the third thing was they used curtains
06:22
for clear control on the windows. And because the space is so tall, the curtains are so big that they are enough to control acoustics to provide enough acoustic absorption. And then the fourth thing was that the windows are fairly small compared to what we built today,
06:41
so among all schools with the lowest fenestration ratio in the facade because the windows are very tall, we get daylight going very deep in the space, and we get very even daylight quality on a very high level. So we saw that this height of the space was critical
07:01
for all what we call technical parameters for environmental quality, for all four. So we knew air quality is going to be better if we have more air volume. But the impact on the others was a bit a surprise for us. A more generous use of space increases also the flexibility of use,
07:20
makes conversion more easy and allows a longer life cycle. That's a hypothesis. We haven't scientifically proven yet. We would need to have a lot of data and examples. But obviously, I mean, if we look at all the buildings from the early 20th century, we see that housing now is used as an office building.
07:42
So we see that buildings with a bigger floor-to-ceiling height gives us a higher flexibility in program adaptation or conversion to other use. So therefore, we have to get out of this kind of performance dilemma,
08:00
this performance optimization, because as a result of performance optimization, we made spaces always smaller. We reduced the height, we reduced the square meters to a bare minimum, and at the same time, people use more than ever a square meter per person. So we see it's not successful as a whole, this optimization or this performance optimization.
08:22
But there's an economical factor in this optimization. That's what we have to figure out, how we get beyond the economics. I mean, that's the dilemma in where we are in. Everything is economically driven. Building design nowadays is economically driven much more than it was decades or centuries before.
08:41
Or eight centuries before. And we don't have the answers, all the answers about this. However, what we see today, how we consider and how we want to accomplish energy efficiency, we replace this lack of space and volume with mechanical systems, and then we build the space on the ground,
09:03
and sometimes even bigger. So I really question the economic equation. This trend towards building more simple means that passive house or low energy house standards are not the real optimization that we should look for.
09:22
I think architecture had always a problem if there is only one model. And of course, a passive house is a model that works, and it's super successful, and I think we should stop passive house bashing. But we also need to recognize that it doesn't work for everybody. And it doesn't work in every context.
09:40
So it's one model. But a passive house needs mechanical ventilation with heat recovery, for instance. And some people don't like air that comes out of a duct, but prefer to open the window. Or in a passive house, I have very evenly distributed temperatures, so I should not have a heat sink in a passive house.
10:01
But some people like me, for instance, love to open the window in a sleeping room at nighttime, also in winter. If it's really cold, I sleep at 10 degrees. This is not really, let's say, feasible. Or it is feasible, but it's not the ideal scenario in a passive house. It's not in accordance to the passive house.
10:21
So that's why we see that whenever we do monitoring, not only us, Avitja, Aachen, Fraunhofer, many people, many research institutes did monitoring and looked at, let's say, bigger apartment blocks. Whenever they have mechanical ventilation, we recognize that the average person, not everybody, of course,
10:41
but a lot of people still open the window, despite the fact that they have mechanical ventilation. And so that's a little bit the limitation of passive house. So the human factor, human behavior, is the disruptive factor in high-tech architecture? Kind of, yeah. Different approaches towards it.
11:02
I mean, we believe our philosophy at TransHola, but also at the TU Munich, is that we should design buildings towards the needs and desires of people. And other people in Germany think we should engineer people. It's more like educate people. But why should we educate people that they should not open the window?
11:23
I don't want to have someone who comes to me and doesn't allow me to open my window in my sleeping room. You say we have to rethink the current economically and technology-driven building design. What does this mean in terms of a reform of construction laws?
11:41
There's one thing we always often struggle with, which are zoning bylaws. Zoning bylaws, for instance, they measure cross-floor area. Cross-floor area goes to the outer line of the wall. So why does this matter? So every developer has a problem if someone would propose, for instance, a rammed earth wall in a downtown environment,
12:02
because the developer would lose something like 10-15% living area, which is like a nightmare for him. Why does cross matter? Why don't we change it to net? So that's a simple thing. The other thing is like FAR, how many square meters can we build onto a property? That's enough of a requirement.
12:21
Why do we also need, in addition, a height limitation? The height limitation we have so that the neighbor gets enough sun and light, why don't we describe the light and sun the neighbor needs? Why do we, prescriptive, have a height limitation? So there are a couple of things that could change, but I think also particularly in terms of, let's say, materiality,
12:42
of course we have to think of a life cycle of buildings. We have to get beyond this question of energy efficiency towards carbon. We have to get towards carbon zero. That's, or carbon positive, however we want to call it. That's what we have to achieve. So why do we tell people that they have to put insulation onto a wall?
13:03
Why don't we give the responsibility back to designers and to people and say, how do we get to zero carbon? Taking materials into account, taking the life cycles of material into account, and everything, the life cycle of systems into account. Also, the energy supply system, if I have photovoltaic on my roof,
13:21
the balance looks totally different. We have to get away of being too prescriptive. It's about carbon. Coming back to this question of performance gap, I just yesterday heard on the news that 35% of the gas imports are from Russia now. I'm not sure how a percentage of this is going into the industry, but in the building sector I'm pretty sure that 30% we could save right away
13:45
just by getting over the performance gap. Do you see early signs that the regulator moves in this direction? I see that now with the new government, I see good intentions. I see that they understand the issues,
14:01
and I see that they brought some really smart people into central government. So I have a hope, and I really believe there will be changes that go in the right direction. We're always, at the end of the day, unhappy with everything that is regulated because when it's regulated, it causes constraints. But of course we have to regulate at the same time,
14:23
but we have to follow up. I think that's the most important thing. Right now we say you get subsidies from the government if you put insulation on a wall. Nobody's following up whether the savings are really achieved. Why don't we say you have these carbon emissions today, per ton you reduce, you get this much money per year
14:42
over a period of whatever. Why don't we combine it to the result? It will be so easy, and then people can decide whether my friend with the engineering office to just close the heating valve. Why does it matter how we get there?