Environmental Center
at Lewes,DE, USA
Design Highlights
The objective of this project is to provide day-night camp space for students for educational purposes, which will be an ideal environmental center for a sustainable future.
Concept And proposal
The aim is to create an education building that will not only educate students but will give a feeling of comfort. The architectural design of the building is perfectly blended with nature, surrounding, and which will be taking form using ecofriendly materials. The design will have passive design strategies to make is net-zero, sustainable, and will serve thermal comfort, view, and different experience to the users of the building. This educational building will also restore, maintain, and save local flora and fauna.
The proposed building location is near the mid-Atlantic region at Cape Henlopen State Park, Lewes, Delaware, which has a rich history. Site location is a rural area with less dense, low settlements. The location's microclimate is temperate humid subtropical with the risk of climate change and sea-level rise.
Steps involved in the design process :
STEP 1: Set guiding principles for the project.
EXPERIENCE
STEP 2: Site location, Inventory, and
Analysis
The aim of this process helps us to understand the context around the site. After completion of on-site inventory and analysis in for quadrants, we were able to able to find OCR I.e. Opportunities, Challenges, and Recommendations for the selected site which helped us to finalists the building orientation, design, and form to maximize building performance.
PERFORMANCE
SYSTEM
CULTURE
STEP 3: Preliminary design
phase
In this step, we address the relationship between spaces and according to that created four different block plans for Experience, Performance, Culture, and System quadrant and located.
STEP 4: Concept
The letter 'C' shaped building strategically increase the performance of the building. All the fewer occupancy spaces are placed on the west side of the building which also acts as a barrier to block winter wind coming from the west and central open space offer for daylighting and summer breeze into the building along with views.
STEP 5: Application of passive design strategies
N
STEP 6: Design resolution
STEP 7: Final Validations
In this step, we ran the final design model into a Sefaira energy modeling tool to analyze the daylighting and energy usage of the building. Also for water, we used AIA tool kit.
STEP 8: Targets vs achievements
Category Target Achievements
Energy 20 kBTU/SF -3 kBTU/SF ( Net positive)
Daylighting 90 % 95 %
Ventilation 90 % 100 %
Water 80 % 100 %
Ecology 60 % 70 %
Exxperience 90 % 99 %