Active buildings include changing facilities and bike storage to foster sustainable and healthier modes of transport, prioritise the use of stairs, and have flexible layouts and spaces to accommodate sports activities..
In other words, it’s already happening.We just need it to get better.. A formula for change.
Regardless of BIM or digital twins, we won’t win if things continue as they are.We have fundamental problems which need to be addressed.These include the lack of productisation in construction, as well as the lack of knowledge about DfMA principles and practices.. We have drawings moving back and forth across industry silos from architects and engineers to fabricators and beyond in a way that means “we build things, prefabricated or not, that aren't what was originally upfront in the process,” Marks says.. She believes this is where we will see the most change and brings up Gleicher’s Formula for Change (revised by Dannemiller), where dissatisfaction, vision, and steps toward the vision must be greater than resistance.. “I actually think we’ve hit dissatisfaction at this point,” she says, pointing out the various issues across the industry: construction companies unhappy with the money they’re making, designers unhappy with the roles they’re playing, owners dissatisfied with the inconsistency.. And the question that needs answering now is: “what does the future look like?”.
Marks says that her job at Autodesk is to help people envision what that future could be by taking the current building blocks and foundational pieces and expanding on them.She knows there will be resistance and thinks we’ve got to start thinking about things to be able to combat issues like old thinking, processes, contracts, scopes, and procurement methodologies.. “We've got to be able to highlight the dissatisfaction, show people there's a potential vision up.
Nobody changes unless there's something better on the other side,” she says.
“But we should be able to show them there's something better.”.Various structural options can be considered to minimise material usage and reduce building height, carbon, and cost, whilst not compromising cooling performance.. CFD can provide evidence during the design process to minimise design risk and help optimise data hall designs further.
This allows the design to be improved across all disciplines.Below is an example of a structural study, looking at how structural options affect the air pressures within the data hall.. Pressure Plots from a recent Structural Optimisation CFD Analysis Study.
External CFD Model.External CFD analysis plays a crucial role in data centre design by assessing the risk of hot air being entrained by cooling equipment.