2007   Winter    Meeting    DALLAS

I will admit that did not get out much,  but I would have liked to have seen more of Dallas than the convention center and a quick drive up McKinney Avenue. I've never been to Dallas before.  But I gained much more knowledge about the state of the art of designing green and high performing buildings.    What an experience. I almost had to run from seminars to meetings and back to seminars , for  about 9 hours a day from Sunday AM till Wednesday morning.     3 1/2 days.  I have done this only twice before in my life (Atlanta Winter 1994 and Anaheim Winter 2003)

My focus has always been design and design procedure.  Especially  since I was introduced to "architectural programming" in junior year of environmental design (30 years ago).  Have not talked about it much lately, but I will more elsewhere on the website.  But over the course of my career, I have understood and implemented design procedure automatically without much thought.  While I was in Dallas, I decided to continue my focus on the design of better buildings and in learning how to do it with better tools.  Well, I think that teaching new approaches may be the way.  

I spent much time hearing about  building energy simulation, integrated building design,  and building information modeling.   I attended presentations by engineers, architects and researchers who build highly efficient buildings on a regular basis.  One seminar that I thought fascinating was on the year round humidity control of ventilation outside air. The researcher had carefully analyzed the entire cycle of the seasons, all 8760 hours of it.  The overall approach is to select a controls sequence that responds to all the varying conditions within.  Energy recovery was used in these of course, to cut down on initial as well as  life cycle costs.  It also demonstrated that ventilation for human health and comfort is both a science an art. 

The design aspect :  I noticed something was always of concern at ASHRAE that was not always obvious.  Climate matters.

So does location.   HVAC design practices vary from place to place. The obvious reason could be that climates vary all around the world, and each building in the world has a unique location.  But this is not so obvious to the public (unless they are well traveled and observant)  Californians and New Yorkers face vastly different design problems with respect to climate.  

  to be continued

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