INTERNAL TOOLS & RESOURCES
BKSK’s Nine Syntaxes
The BKSK LAB’s resources include in-depth analyses of design strategies, building material investigations, curated inspirations, evaluations of industry practices, and select third-party research. We explore these resources through human-centered themes that blur the boundaries between projects, disciplines, and geographies. Our explorations are roughly organized into nine Syntaxes, or nine frameworks for understanding how design impacts our world:
BKSK NYC Design Strategy Tool
The NYC Strategy Field tool is a free interactive database of sustainable strategies utilized by designers and developers on multi-family development projects across NYC’s five boroughs. The Strategy Field tool was developed by the BKSK LAB to provide a full view of the city’s growing sustainable landscape.
EXTERNAL TOOLS & RESOURCES
Payette’s Glazing and Winter Comfort Tool
This tool displays the impact of glazing geometry and U-value on occupant thermal comfort during winter months. It shows when it is possible to eliminate perimeter heat in cases where the U-value is low and windows are small.
Smithgroup HPD Library
The Health Product Declaration (HPD) Library is a reporting tool for material transparency and ingredient disclosure. With assistance and support from many industry leaders, SmithGroupJJR has developed this searchable database that contains hundreds of HPDs which owners and designers can access, free of charge, to assist in their LEED documenting process.
Perkins + Will Transparency Site
In 2011, Perkins + Will launched the Transparency Site, an open-access database highlighting dangerous chemicals present in building materials that are harmful to humans, animals, and the environment.
Building Green
Urban Green Metered New York
Pharos Project
Energy Star Target Finder
Center for the Built Environment
LEEDuser
Green Building Advisor
Performance Network
Whole Building Design Guide
RHINO TOOLS
Grasshopper 3d®
Grasshopper® is a graphical algorithm editor tightly integrated with Rhino’s 3-D modeling tools. Unlike RhinoScript, Grasshopper requires no knowledge of programming or scripting. The robust system allows the input, control, and output of complex data sets.
Ladybug
Ladybug is a free and open source environmental plugin for Grasshopper to help designers create an environmentally-conscious architectural design. The initial step in the design process should be the weather data analysis; a thorough understanding of the weather data will, more likely, lead designers to high-performance design decisions.
Ladybug imports standard EnergyPlus Weather files (.EPW) in Grasshopper and provides a variety of 2D and 3D designer-friendly interactive graphics to support the decision-making process during the initial stages of design. The tool also provides further support for designers to test their initial design options for implications from radiation and sunlight-hours analyses results. Integration with Grasshopper allows for an almost instantaneous feedback on design modifications, and as it runs within the design environment, the information and analysis is interactive.
Here is Ladybug in a less than 5-minute video.
Honeybee
Working in conjunction with Ladybug, Honeybee connects Grasshopper3D to EnergyPlus, Radiance, Daysim and OpenStudio for building energy and daylighting simulation. The Honeybee project intends to make many of the features of these simulation tools available in a parametric way. You need to have Ladybug installed in order to run Honeybee.
For more information on Ladybug and Honeybee, including installation instructions, downloads, example files, and video tutorials, click here.
Diva
DIVA-for-Rhino is a plugin which runs thermal, daylight, solar radiation, and glare simulations. Their goal is to bring validated environmental simulations directly to the conceptual design environments of Rhino and Grasshopper.
