Ideas Beyond Green Sustainable Design Part
There are many supporting teams of experts within Samoo Architects & Engineers (Samoo) that provide assistance to the design function of the organization. We would like to introduce one of these teams of experts: Sustainable Design Part within ENG Team, which is in charge of eco-friendly and sustainable design.
What do we do at Sustainable Design Part?
Among many technical support parts under ENG Team, Sustainable Design Part is specialized in providing environment-friendly design support. Based on sustainability-related know how and technology, the Part is participating in around 50 design projects every year, providing professional consulting.
Its areas of expertise include: i) eco-friendly design strategy development based on climate analysis, ii) environment-related simulation such as building energy simulation (ES) based on sunlight and solar radiation, and CFD (Computational Fluid Dynamics), as well as iii) consulting on global certification and Korean sustainable building-related laws & regulations. More recently, consulting demands on light reflection, condensation, or stack effect are increasing backed by the growing interest of clients in sustainability.
What makes Sustainable Design Part special?
Green Tomorrow, a project which Samoo participated not only in the consulting and design stages, but also in the construction process, is the first-ever zero-energy building in Korea and the first building that has achieved the LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) Platinum rating in the nation. This masterpiece, built 10 years ago, was in itself a concentrate of all the environment-friendly technologies there were back then, and it holds significance in that it has made the Sustainable Design Part what it is today.
Had the Sustainable Design Part simply stayed as a supporting function to the design division, it would not have become the technical expert it is today. Sustainable Design Part is a supporting function, but, in many cases, it actually designed the lay out of sustainability-focused projects and provided environment-related consulting directly and solely to the clients. These experiences played a crucial role in accumulating the know how and professional technologies.
When it comes to building an environment-friendly building, understanding the unique demand of the project and choosing the right technology, be it simple or high-tech, is important. That is, the work has to go beyond the simple combination of general technologies out there. At Sustainable Design Part, professional architects specialized in the environment-friendly field and engineers of LEED AP, CFD, or building energy work hand-in-hand and in close cooperation to present the clients with an optimal-possible environment-friendly architecture.
Environmentally-sustainable building is not valued by the technical items applied, but by the energy performance realized by those technologies. What really matters, in fact, is whether the level of illuminance is achieved with daylight as planned, whether the energy conservation is successfully achieved, or whether the natural ventilation is working. To ensure such performance, Sustainable Design Part runs simulations on building environment, CFD, and building energy with its own capacity, thereby providing data-based and trustworthy sustainable buidling design.
As a result, the Part has been releasing a series of publications namely, LEED Guidebook (2010), ECOTECT Handbook (2012), Eco Factory Global Design Guideline (2015), CFD Project Casebook (2017), and Envelope Design Guide (2018).
What is our core strength?
Sunlight analysis, for optimal building environment
Sunlight is crucial in creating healthy indoor environment and securing a good amount of daylight. These days, more people are aware of the importance of sunlight, and its analysis results are often debated in courts with the introduction of Educational and Environmental Impact Assessment System in Korea. To cope with such trend and improve the credibility of its sunlight environment analysis result, Sustainable Design Part has adopted analysis tools specialized in daylight analysis such as ECOTECT or Sanalyst.
CFD (Computational Fluid Dynamics) Analysis, a topic of growing attention
Though invisible, fluid constantly flows within an architecture, and CFD simulation helps predict the flow of such invisible fluid. Based on the simulation result, Sustainable Design Part provides consulting on wind environment, thermal comfort, optimization of HVAC system, double-skin facade, pollutants dispersion, etc.