School of Architecture and School of Design Faculty Awarded Green Good Design Award

We’d like to congratulate faculty members, Brook Kennedy from the School of Design and Stefan Al from the School of Architecture for being awarded the Green Good Design Award from The Chicago Athenaeum Museum of Architecture and Design for their project, “Evaporative Cooling Partitions”.

The Evaporative Cooling Partitions project (ECP) is an exploration of passive cooling methods believed to have first originated hundreds of years ago in the Middle East and Asia. Building on a niche area of passive neo-archaic building research, this project seeks to explore how this ancient cooling technology might be reintroduced, modernized and integrated in modern building. The aim of the ECP project was to substantiate the technology with proof of concept scaled prototypes and explore how such a technology could be meaningfully reintroduced into building practices today.

The project was funded by university sources.

In the design embodiment conveyed in this Green Good Design Award entry, the individual non-load bearing column prototypes are 3D-printed in interlocking, stacking sections of porcelain and clay, and fired un-glazed to enable water to pass through their walls and evaporate. The water source for the columns could come from a variety of sources. Rhino Grasshopper software was used to explore wall surface texturing of the column modules to help control and increase rates of water evaporation by modulating the outer surface area. Prototypes made with a WASP Clay 3D printer were filled with sand and water and tested using a FLIR infrared camera to measure air temperatures and a humidity chamber to measure evaporation rates. The final visualized system, presented in a “Miesian” pavilion, is set in an arid warm climate such as the American southwest or similar global climates. It is also presented in conjunction with other passive cooling techniques such as shading, brise-soleil and methods of creating cross ventilation, including with electric fans.

Architects: Brook Kennedy, Stefan Al, Georg Reichard, Saeed Sakhdari, Ilan Farahi, Mohammed Ali, and Aditi Hadkar, Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, Virginia, USA