Farnsworth Seas First Year Package
Conceptual Outline 10/27/96
Week 1
Introduce the Farnsworth House and its
Architect
- Key features of the house (fully
glazed facades, steel frame structure, elevated, open
plan with utility core).
- Note that house is seminal icon of
domestic modern architecture.
- Who is Mies van der Rohe (Aphorisms:
less is more, god is in the details, Barcelona Pavilion,
Seagram Building, IIT campus).
Thermal performance of Farnsworth House
Farnsworth epitomizes real-world trade offs
between art and function inherent in architecture (and other
design professions).
- glazed facade clearly key part of
architects aesthetic vision for the house
- should be intuitively obvious that the
building is poorly insulated and costs a lot to heat
this turns out to be true.
Look at Farnsworth House during a cold
winter night.
Explain principles of building enclosure
heat loss.
Click for big version
- Q in BTU per hr measures how much heat
is transferred from warm interior of building to cold outdoors.
This is exactly the amount of Q that the buildings heating system
must supply.
- In leu of open doors, windows, most
heat is transferred by:
- Qc = conduction
- Qr = radiation
- Qc = direct transmission of heat
through walls and ceiling from inside to outside (imagine
gluing an electric blanket to one side of a partition
after a while the other side will become warm as
the blankets heat is transmitted through the wall).
- Qr = net radiation in infrared part of
electromagnetic spectrum from the exterior wall and roof
surfaces to the sky. Note that every object (living or not)
above temp of absolute zero radiate electromagnetic
energy. Terrestrial objects radiate in the infrared part
of the spectrum.
- Qc = S Ai *(Toutside - Tinside)
/ Ri [i = walls, roof].
- Qr = s (Tsky^4 - Toutside^4)
*(e facade*Afacade
+ e roof*Aroof)
- Define all terms.
- Note: leave out the floor because it
is heated throughout with hot water coils and provides
the heat lost through the facades and roof.
Introduction to
Spreadsheets
- Teach what a spreadsheet is, how to
navigate and use it.
Do a numerical example
- Fall night, Toutside = 40 oF, Tinside
= 72 oF
- How much heat, Q, is being lost to the
outside?
- Compare answers to space heaters and
air conditioners (typical space heaters and AC units
provide 2,000 12,000 BTU / hr of heating or
cooling).
Homework Number 1:
- Read the Farnsworth overview and one
of the articles on it.
- Use a spreadsheet to calculate the heat loss
for the
Farnsworth house during its design heating night (essentially
the coldest winter night in the region where house is
located).
Week 2
Comparative analysis: Farnsworth and a
typical "ranch" house.
- Give students conductive and radiative
data for ranch house.
Analytic and tectonic
redesign of the Farnsworth House
- Show students R values and details for
various materials.
Homework Number 2:
- Read the remaining two articles on
Farnsworth.
- Recalculate week 1 homework using
spreadsheet.
- Calculate performance of ranch house.
- How much better is the thermal
performance of the ranch house? (I.e.: the ranch house is
x times more efficient).
- Develop a redesign strategy for the
Farnsworth facades, using the materials introduced in
class.
- Calculate the new heat loss for the
revised house. Make a table including original
Farnsworth, the normative ranch house, and your modified
Farnsworth.
- Use the provided vrml models and new
material specifications to develop new facade details for
the Farnsworth house facade.