passive design + education

How students HEAR?             Excessive reverberation and background noise has a significant negative impact on short-term memory and speech perception.

How students BREATHE?      Clean, abundant, fresh indoor air is essential to student’s health and their ability to retain new information. Problems to consider: Moisture control, Carbon dioxide, Materials
                                                      used, Outdoor air usage

How students SEE?                 Access to natural daylight affects chemical and hormone production in a child’s body that impacts how alert and ready students are to learn. Long distance views, such as those
                                                      from classroom windows, are known to prevent eyestrain and keep children eyes healthy

How students FEEL?               Thermal Comfort to support healthy learning environments implies: Air Temperature: 68-78 degrees Fahrenheit, Relative humidity: 20 to 80% in winter. 20 to 60% during summer,
                                                      Air velocity: 20 to 60 fpm (0.1-0.2 m/s), and MRT, mean radiant temperature, is near air temperature

How students MOVE?           Physical activity increases a student’s ability to think clearer, feel better, and study smarter.  Promote sites that are more accessible to their current forms of transportation. 

Avoid the third tier of Mechanical systems to cool or heat a building. Rather, focus on Heat Avoidance or Absorption principles, and rely on systems of passive heating or cooling.

the design

Maximize individual access to the natural environment by building the school house in a "skinner" layout, such that each classroom has direct access to the outdoors. 

Maximize daylighting for task and ambient lighting by adding window fixtures designed with space configuration/layout and exterior, integral or interior light redirection devices. Such techniques may include: Solar Light Tubes, Light Shelves, Skylights, Emphasis on dispersed light

Maximize natural ventilation by using operable windows, night ventilation, double envelops or vented rain screens, and analyzing the building's form for utilization of cross or stack ventilation techniques and the location of air intake. 

Minimize enclosure heat loss/gain by designing roofs, windows, walls and foundations using thermal mass, not insulation due to Haiti’s climate. Thermal mass acts like a battery, it will store heat and release it into building when its cold outside and visa versa

Demonstrate solar heat and glare control by observing local sun patterns, reflections, colors and glare effects, and then redirecting or using glare/heat reducing materials. 

Demonstrate load balancing and mean radiant temperature control by making sure the ‘heat’ is evenly distributed throughout the room, such that someone who sits closer to a window isn’t hotter than someone who is sitting in the core of the building. This principle is calls 'core to perimeter load balancing

Maximize enclosure integrity and material sustainability by designing for disassembly and modification, moisture/air barrier detailing, detail for rain integrity; rainscreen technologies, water reutilization, and weathering resilience.

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project failure

It is important to recognize the reasons for project failure. Centre d'Education Inclusif failed for several direct and indirect reasons, but those reasons are mostly be attributed to a failure to create strong relationships with the project owner and stakeholders. It can also be attributed to the plethora of challenging project objectives, ranging from challenging cultural beliefs, the construction of a schoolhouse for children with physical and mental handicaps, earthquake relief, an addition of a medical center, and the desire for a schoolhouse that can adapt into a community and health center. So many objectives made it difficult to create one design in an abnormal, small site that would be able to accomplish all goals. However, even though the scope of the project was largely unregulated and the stakeholders relationships weak, there was much taken away from this project, and it ultimately inspired my work authoring the CUSD Design Guidebook that would address such concerns and limit failure for all future CUSD projects.