Contact:
Eric Sloss
412-268-5765

For immediate release:
March 13, 2006

Architecture Student Creates Tools To Bring the Environment Closer to the Studio

PITTSBURGH—Jennifer Verbeke, a student in Carnegie Mellon University's School of Architecture, has developed a series of mobile tools, called a "Toolbox for Environmental Design," that can test the theories of environmental design. Verbeke, a fifth-year architecture student from Huntington in Long Island, N.Y., will design these tools through a Carnegie Mellon Small Undergraduate Research Grant (SURG) that is funded by the Ford Undergraduate Research Grant, a special non-endowed award.

These mobile tools used in the architecture studio could someday be critical when designing for places with limited infrastructure, such as tsunami-damaged shorelines and economically challenged locations with inadequate natural resources.

The tools are created to study natural ventilation, exterior sun path and sun shadows, and interior day lighting. The tool to test natural ventilation is a water flow table that will run water through a modeled cross section of a building and around the building's perimeter and shell. The water flow table uses ink dropped into a laminar-flow sheet of water to illustrate the wind paths through sections of a waterproof acrylic model. The tool to test sun-path is a model that will show architects the interior day lighting quality and the need for exterior shading for very hot climates. Once all of the tools have completed tests, Verbeke wants them to remain in the School of Architecture for all students to use.

"The School of Architecture needs tools that work easily in the studio. These tools allow students to photograph their work and use the images to analyze results and to present them in architectural reviews," said Stephanie Bartos, Verbeke's faculty advisor. "These tools become more of a test mechanism than a teaching device."

While the School of Architecture at Carnegie Mellon is known for its well-rounded curriculum and promotion of environmental design, the school does not have the facilities for students to test their environmentally accurate ideas via hands-on physical tools or desktop test beds during their studio class. Verbeke created these tools to fill this gap and complement the computer-based design tools available to students.

In a current Systems Integration Design Studio taught by Bartos, students used one of Verbeke's de-lighting study mockups to photograph their design models of a 150-square-foot structure to replace a cabin washed away in the Northern California floods in 2006.

"The photographs reveal the promise of her studio-based, hands-on tools. They are especially good proof of environmental design analysis for clients struggling to understand how a building not yet constructed will perform environmentally," Bartos said. "This has been more than helpful to us in designing buildings for areas with weak or non-existent infrastructure and energy resources, such as Disappointment Slough in the California Delta or Haiti's Artibonite Valley."

The School of Architecture is one of five schools within Carnegie Mellon's College of Fine Arts, a community of nationally and internationally recognized artists and professionals organized into Architecture, Art, Design, Drama and Music, and their associated centers and programs.

For more information about the School of Architecture or the College of Fine Arts, please contact Eric Sloss at 412-268-5765 or ecs@andrew.cmu.edu.