Vital Signs: The Audubon House Case Study
Sponsor: Vital Signs Curriculum Project Case Study Grant, University of California, Berkeley, 1998
Team: Alison Kwok with Cornell University ARCH 464 class: Caroline Cassavoy Michelle Drollette, Jason Franzten, Pablo Garcia, Carlin MacDougall, Shiva Mandell, Aleks Mergold, Vladimir Pajkic, Sneha Patel, Nick Rajkovich, John Tsai
In the spirit of its concern and awareness for environmental issues, The National Audubon Society in the cooperation with the Croxton Collaborative, renovated a lower Manhattan eight-story building the building with an intent to create a working example of sustainable architecture. The case study took place within an undergraduate seminar course over the spring semester. We focused our investigation on the application of the integrated daylight systems. Our hypothesis stated that the lighting system in the Audubon Building does not function as intended because it does not respond to the variable lighting conditions nor to occupant needs and satisfaction. To engage the proposed hypothesis we broke it down into specific questions of investigation: distribution of illumination on a typical office floor, lighting power density, penetration of the daylight into the space, pattern of electrical lighting use, pattern of use for the blinds, energy use and savings, and occupants perception of glare and general lighting conditions.