Forward-Thinking Design

For Clarke Snell, M.Arch., it’s an exciting time to be an architect, a profession he says is essential to addressing the most critical problem of our times.

Because buildings are responsible for approximately 40 percent of the world’s carbon footprint, he explains, inefficiencies make an impact on climate change and rising global temperatures. “We can’t keep building the way we’ve been building,” says Snell, associate professor of architecture in the School of Architecture and Design. “In a very real sense, it’s a question of the survival of human industrial society. Instead of freaking out about it, I see it as an exciting design challenge. Architects get to help ‘save the world’ just by doing our jobs well.”

But, he insists, this approach to architectural design is not a constraint on beauty or creative vision; instead, it’s a conscious decision to design form and performance simultaneously. He makes sure that New York Tech architecture students leave his classroom with the technical and critical-thinking skills to do that effectively.

“We design spaces that people worship in, live in, play in, and work in,” Snell explains about the form of architectural design. “We can design spaces so that when you go into a church, you feel a certain way. In a gym or a home, you feel a different way. We do this by manipulating form and space.”

He says an equally important component of architecture is performance. “Performance really just means measuring the level of success toward a goal you yourself set. In architecture, performance is often related to energy and human comfort. How much heat or light do I need? How much of either will come from the sun or from burning a fuel? Will that beautiful view be wasted due to too much glare? Those are performance issues.”

In Snell’s Architectural Simulations course, students learn to design buildings with both form and performance in mind from the very beginning. To create the course, he researched and chose tools that, for example, allow students to examine the conditions of a building’s exact location, everything from local codes to average rainfall in the area, to the sun’s position in the sky at any given hour at any time of year. These tools integrate these performance considerations into software architects already use to design form. Using these integrated tools, architects can, in mere seconds, estimate the amount of energy their building will use, evaluate the level of human comfort the space provides, and determine whether their design meets local building codes.

“Building performance simulation is a way to think of form and performance at the same time,” Snell says. “We can look at form in a 3-D model and then ask, ‘How will this perform in real life? Will it meet energy code? Will it be comfortable?’ If not, we can make adjustments and run the simulation again, tweaking our vision to meet our own stated goals. Students can design a building with that level of understanding rather than being forced to make changes later to meet legal or client-mandated performance requirements. The secret—and challenge—is to think about both form and performance from the very beginning.”

Some architecture schools have similar classes, but they are often electives “for geeks like me who will end up as specialized performance nerds,” Snell says with a laugh. “What we’re doing at New York Tech is forward-thinking because we’re saying everyone needs to know how to do this. Performance simulation is a baseline skill that every architecture student at New York Tech is required to know.”

This knowledge will give New York Tech graduates an advantage in the job market, too, because they will have skills other candidates don’t. “I’m trying to help people get meaningful jobs,” Snell says. “That’s one reason we’re here.”

Snell admits he may be idealistic, but it’s a trait that brought him to academia. He learned a lot about climate change while he designed sustainable rural homesteads in western North Carolina. Eventually, though, he wanted to have a bigger impact and decided that teaching future architects to be both creative and environmentally responsible was the best way to affect more change.

“This approach to design is geared to help solve the carbon problem and also simply to create better buildings,” says Snell, who is president-elect of the Society of Building Science Educators. “If we expand our perspective to include performance from the beginning, buildings will be healthier, quieter, more comfortable, more energy efficient, and last longer. So why wouldn’t we do it? It would be irresponsible not to do it.”

By Ashley Festa