Multi-Unit Residential (New)

Project Brief

Design an environmental concept for a 2000m2 multi-unit residential building. Housing is of course a multi-facetted topic. While we will be focusing on sustainable building design aspects such as occupant comfort and operational energy use, we compiled a list of basic requirements for the building that you should follow:

  • You project site may be in any urban area on earth and should embrace some of the goals and concepts that your group members described in their future living essay. Infills are ideal but optional. If you decide to replace an existing building, you need to justify your choice. When choosing your site, you might consider additional parameters such as neighborhood walkability, spatial proximity to jobs and/or adaptive reuse of existing, underused office space.

  • There should two zone types in the building, apartments and circulation areas. The minimum depth for each zone - with the exception of any sharp exterior edges - is 3m. The default zone templates are Apartment and Corridor for your site’s climate zone and Multifamily Housing

  • You may treat each apartment as a single closed volume (brep) and ignore any within-unit walls. The floor-to-floor height should be 3m. Individual apartment may vary in size between 35m2 and 150m2 with the default number of occupants as follows

  • Dividing a floor plate into apartments and circulation areas is a complicated task. Below you see some example floorplan layouts.

  • Each apartment should have a home office area. The glare analysis will focus on that area.

  • For the daylight availability study, you may want to consider both the default reference schedule of 8am to 6pm every day as well as the custom occupancy schedule that you define for your apartment zones. (optional)

  • In a mixed-use urban zone, the ground floor may be retail/commercial (optional).

To develop the project, go through the following Design Exercises: Climate, Benchmark & PV, Daylight Precedences + Massing Study, Daylight Availability Study, Visual Comfort, Electric Lighting, Thermal Model Setup, EUI Study and HVAC Design. If you are taking 4.401/4.464, your final presentation should draw from these design exercises. You are welcome/encouraged to add additional work to create a coherent project narrative . This skeleton presentation provides additional tips.