Advancing Sustainable Architecture: Lake|Flato's Journey with Autodesk Forma

DANIEL STINE: Hey, everyone, thanks for coming to our Autodesk University 2024 presentation, Advancing Sustainable Architecture, Lake|Flato's Journey with Autodesk Forma. I'm going to do a quick introduction of myself, and then each of us will introduce ourselves. And then we'll get right into it.

Since we do have an Autodesker on the presentation, there's this brief safe harbor statement you should read and understand before making any purchasing decisions. Here's our agenda for today. I'm going to do an introduction of the firm. We'll do introductions of ourselves. Miguel has a couple of case studies to share. Andres has some Autodesk Forma development roadmap information that's really cool and exciting to know about.

So we'll jump right into it. I'm Dan Stine. I'm the director of design technology, and I lead the research program at Lake|Flato. I also teach graduate architecture students at NDSU. I have another class on using Autodesk Forma in academia, shameless plug. I'm on the Autodesk national-- I'm on the AIA National Committee on the Environment Leadership Group, and I've also written 19 textbooks. One of them is the number one book on Autodesk Revit in the academic market in North America. Miguel?

MIGUEL ELIZARDO: Thanks, Dan. Yeah, I'm the design technologist here at Lake|Flato in San Antonio, Texas. I have about eight to nine years of experience. I lose track sometimes. [LAUGHS] That's how long I've been already in the industry. I've been doing projects in residential, K through 12, higher ed and doing a lot of commercial retail work previously. But now I'm a design technologist, which is pretty cool, to be part of the design performance here at Lake|Flato.

And I've been here for about two years now. And I look forward to showing everybody what we have to show today. Andres?

ANDRES D'SILVA: Thank you. So my name is Andres D'Silva. I'm a part of the Forma team and joined in Autodesk through the acquisition of Spacemaker, the previous startup that sprouted this product. I'm a mechanical engineer by trade and been doing what is called, yeah, "adoption" with the new software in North America. And had the pleasure to get to meet Dan through this last year and very much looking forward to explain how they've been instrumental in creating such a good software.

DANIEL STINE: All right. Before Miguel gets into the meat of the information, I want to share a quick overview of Lake|Flato Architects, in case you're not familiar with us. We're based in San Antonio, Texas. We also have an office in Austin.

The firm has won the AIA National Firm of the Year Award in 2004. That was at our 20th anniversary. This year, at our 40th anniversary, our two founding partners won the AIA Gold Medal award, which is the highest award an architect can win in the United States. In 2019, Architect Magazine ranked us the number one architecture firm in the US in their architect top 50 list.

We've won the most COTE Top Ten-- COTE stands for Committee on the Environment-- Award, which is, arguably, the highest sustainable and design award a firm can win. And then we've been a member of the AIA 2030 Commitment since its inception.

We have five studios-- residential, learning, which is K through 12, higher education, eco-conservation and urban development. Our work is national. So about half of our work is regional, and the other half is national. We have projects all across the US and on three islands, two in the Pacific and one in the Atlantic, and a couple of projects at Cornell University and UPenn.

Here are a few examples of the 16 COTE Top Ten Awards that we've won. I always like to point out the one in the lower left, which is a really unique project type, a grocery store. In the lower right area is the World Birding Center, which was designed for deconstruction and also to have what was called "low-embodied energy" at the time. This is something like 15, 16 years ago. And now we call it "low-embodied carbon."

Basically, to give you an overview of our design performance strategy, it's our overarching framework of what Miguel is going to show in a little bit, is we have this design performance action plan or sustainability action plan which is broken up into practice, people and planet. We have our design performance team, which includes myself and Miguel, led by our director of design performance, Heather Holdridge, and design performance manager Kate Sector and then design performance intern Desiree Allen.

And then, another people shot-- the people are the most important ingredient in all of this-- is the studio champions. Each studio has a group of people who are really motivated and interested in sustainability. And they actually are pivotal in helping us keep our project goals on track and, also, the people through which we disseminate information. It actually goes in both directions. When they learn new things, they share it with the design performance team. And the design performance team, likewise, covers new things, like using a tool like Autodesk Forma.

Just a quick overview of how a typical project goes through the pipeline is, early in the project, the design performance team will do a microclimate analysis. And that includes some of the Forma tools. We used to use some other tools and still do use some Grasshopper and just some basic things that we like to understand about the site before we start taking the program and trying to come up with a design solution.

I have another slide for the integrated design workshop, which is across the bottom. But throughout the project, early and while the project is still able to be modified, we're analyzing the project and using tools and workflows, with the design team, to come up with the optimal design for the project.

So one thing we try to do on every project is have, ideally, a daylong workshop. It's not necessarily just about sustainability. It's about the project, in general, but goal-setting as a group, with all the key stakeholders involved, the client, the people who'll be doing the maintenance on the building, the mechanical, structural, the civil ecologist.

Whoever is on the project team, we try to have them all at this meeting. So as a group, we can decide what the goals and strategies are for the project and then come up with a report that we continue to compare to the project as it's moving forward, to hold ourselves accountable for the decisions that we made to come up with the optimal project. And so, with that quick introduction out of the way, to get on to the exciting stuff, I'm going to hand it over to Miguel.

MIGUEL ELIZARDO: Thank you, Dan. Now we're going to move on to the case studies that we talked in our agenda. First case study we're going to go over is 311 Third Street, which is our office here in San Antonio, Texas. We are located downtown, about maybe a mile, if not a block away or two from The Alamo, which is really neat. So we are in an urban, dense environment.

But a little bit of our office is we decided to renovate the office because, during the pandemic, we felt like we grew so much. We were an 80-person firm. We expanded to about 150 now. And then we were looking for spaces to actually move into. But then, at the same time, we were like, let's practice what we would preach and renovate our office and instill some of the things that we talk to our clients about.

So we decided to pursue some certifications, and one of them was the WELL certification, which we just recently got WELL Platinum certified for our office, which is a really great deal. As we all know, the WELL certification, in itself, is a rigorous process which we have to do a lot of performance testings ourselves and then, at the same time, get a third-party certifier to come onboard board and actually test and prove all of these items that we've mentioned and spoke about.

But that was one of the main things that we decided to do for our office. We decided to do our hoteling system, expanded the desk. We had a lot of large desks in our office which we didn't want to-- it wasn't working for us anymore. So with that renovation, we actually had a car garage right next door to us, what you see on the right-hand side. But that car garage--

Let's see am I able to go forward. So there you go. That car garage in the top Left hand corner housed a lot of the cars that we would come in. But at the same time, we decided that we needed to redo something with that space, just because we like to talk about connecting with nature, at the same time, having a space that we could spill out to. And what we ended up doing with that car garage was demolishing it and reusing a lot of the material, actually, within that space.

A lot of the wood members that you see on the images were actually repurposed and reused for the wood slats that you see throughout our office, which is a really cool thing and unique thing to see. We repurposed them and used it and installed it.

But at the same time, this courtyard experience really allowed us to host events and be something that we could go outside and have, in a sense, a third place to really relax and work at the same time. We host our produce markets. We posted artist events and stuff like that in that courtyard and even had our office Christmas party there, which is amazing. Because we have these spaces that are transitional, that transition into work to outdoor landscape areas, which we talk about a lot.

And then, as you see in these diagrams, I really just want to give you an overall overview of how our layout is. So we do have two buildings adjacent to us, next door to us. And then we have a little bit of a parking lot on the bottom. But, really, the main entries, it used to be, previously, that our entry points used to be right at the building. But now, because our car garage single-story went away, we have this beautiful courtyard that we created. That now is the main entry point for every guest and also us, where we come in through.

We get to experience the courtyard, in itself, for its natural beauty and landscapes, which we have a lot of Mexican Sycamore trees and a lot of bench seating. But at the same time, this is an area that we just come into first, before we actually go into the office, which is really cool.

And as I mentioned, WELL certification was something that we really wanted to pursue. We are also pursuing a net-zero zero carbon certification, both embodied and operational carbon. But with the WELL certification, as I mentioned, we scored a really high score. We surpassed our benchmarking. But at the same time, it is a rigorous process, as I mentioned.

But what we're going to be focusing on for this presentation is some of the pilot credits that we decided to pursue and some of the tools that we ended up using concurrently with Forma, which is really cool. Because Forma really uplifted all of the other items that we had and compared the two, which is really cool, too. And at the same time, it streamlined the process, which is awesome.

But we're going to talk about thermal comfort, which is the two pilot credits that we pursued, that we wanted to tackle. And the thermal comfort really relates to our courtyard, to see how it's performing. Since we've been exploring a lot of the spaces outdoors, we wanted to understand how these spaces really performed outdoors. And, especially in San Antonio, Texas, we have really hot weather. Especially in July, August, September, it's really hot, usually. We get to about 110 degrees sometimes. If you add humidity to that, it gets even worse.

Diving into our WELL pilot credits that we decided to pursue, on of them-- there's two subcategories for these, when we're pursuing thermal comfort for outdoor thermal, is T09.1, which is managing outdoor heat, which is one point. The two options that we were allowed to do, one is outdoor shading, and the other one is temperature modeling.

With these two options, we decided to go with option two, just because we wanted to see what the thermal perception was for each month and, at the same time, get the highest index within those months and then show the countermeasurements we were doing for those two months. So for example, you'll see a lot of the things that we ended up doing is adding a outdoor pavilion, adding a lot of open seating, ceiling fans and adding some trees that provide a lot of natural shading and, at the same time, provide cross-ventilation.

We do have walls that surround our courtyard, which block some of the northern winds, but at the same time, allowed us to cross-ventilate the space, which is really awesome. And you'll see that soon.

And then the other part of this was avoiding excessive wind. How do we model that? As we all know, modeling computational fluid design is not something that's really easy. Something I tasked myself and also, at the same time, took on, in a sense of-- more like a thing that I wanted to challenge myself. That's the word I was looking for. It was a challenging thing for me. But at the same time, I love a challenge.

And what I wanted to do was use these tools and then, at the same time, see how we could improve our space and, at the same time, if it's even working the way we intended, which is awesome. But Forma really stepped up the game with the introduction of computational fluid design. It really allowed us to really see how wind patterns were flowing through the space, as opposed to the other softwares that we ended up using, which we'll dive into next.

So some of the tools that we ended up using early on and that was available was Grasshopper with Ladybug. And then, at the time, as Andres mentioned, Spacemaker was out and then got formed into Autodesk Forma, which was still in development, in beta credit. We ended up using these two tools hand in hand, both, together, just to see how they would compare. And the results were almost identical. I was pleased to see that.

Because the whole process, as we all know-- and if you guys have used Grasshopper and Ladybug, the process can be tedious. And you have to develop a script. You have to do a lot of research and then implement the script. And it could be daunting for a lot of designers and technologists out there who are developing these things, that are maybe not aware or familiar with these tools, which is where Autodesk Forma really bridges that gap.

It provides a simple user interface. It allows us to expedite the process. And all of us, across the firm, here at Lake|Flato, we've ended up using Autodesk Forma for that. And it's really cool to see that our designers are using these tools, now, so easily, versus going to a single-point person and relying, for some of these analysis, as previously it was. And, I mean, a lot of firms are also doing that, right? We have a single-point person that we go to, to be doing these analysis. But Autodesk Forma has really bridged that gap, which is awesome to see.

So as I mentioned, this will show-- as you look in the bottom right-hand corner of the screen, when we're talking about tools that we're using, this is one of the tools we ended up using, initially, for the T09.1 option two, outdoor comfort. I had to develop a script. And the way that this script is broken up is into three parts. And what we do is we ended up getting a weather file. And the weather file is a historical data component that we get from EnergyPlus or Ladybug weather files. And we get it for each project location.

And as Dan mentioned earlier, we do this a lot, for a lot of the projects. And you'll see that we actually developed another in-house script that allows us to get a lot of the information early on. So that way, our designers understand some of the passive strategies and even rain, annual rainfall information for that project site. But for this component that I had to develop in-house, is a portion that we needed for our technical documentation that we needed to submit.

So the first part of this script really talks about these climate graphs that we needed to develop and show to them what the highest index of temperature would be here in San Antonio, Texas. So we see that, in these arrows that are pointing, April through September are showing high index of more than 80, 90 degrees Fahrenheit. And according to the technical documentation that we had submitted, there is an extreme temperature. We needed to show countermeasures and also, at the same time, show those temperatures that were being generated.

So in the next portion of this script-- I think maybe I should highlight that they also wanted to see what the thermal stress, what the thermal condition and thermal comfort was for this courtyard. So we needed to model that, which is what leads us to the next portion of our presentation, where we actually ended up modeling our courtyard and which is the meat of the script that does temperature modeling for the actual site.

So the diagram on the right, that you see, shows us a very strong index of stress for thermal comfort outside. And it's a comparison that shows the site courtyard with nothing on there and then the courtyard, in itself, with the trees and the pavilion. And as you can see, the temperature within July is very hot. It goes up to 100.

And then, with the countermeasures that we incorporated, vegetation and the wood canopy, it dropped it down to about 90 degrees, which would be almost a 10-degree difference, which is awesome to see, just because that's what we intended. We wanted to be outdoors, to be able to enjoy the space and the hot summer, incorporate some water features and stuff like that, air circulation, ceiling fans that would really cool the area and allow us to be outdoors, even in July. [LAUGHS]

And then the last portion of the script is something that I started developing, that goes into Butterfly. But the next, I guess, portion of this presentation really highlights both of them. Eddy3D and Butterfly shared very similar results. And for redundancy, to reduce redundancy. I didn't show examples of Butterfly and Eddy together, just because they both shared similar results.

So the next items that I'm going to show you on the computational fluid design is really from one software. Because it comes-- it shows similar results from both. And then we're going to go on to showing how everything within Forma really steps up the game from that, moving forward.

But this took a while for me to develop, which was really cool to see when we were looking for the certification and looking for the technical documentation. And this really did provide a lot of the foundation, but, ultimately, we ended up also submitting some of the technical documentation with the Forma tools that we used.

So temperature modeling, as I mentioned, with the courtyard, we ended up using Forma. Actually, this slide was not supposed to come up first. For some reason, it did. But we see, in Forma, that temperature modeling shows us, in our courtyard, at 103 degrees, versus 104 degrees on the left-hand side, with no courtyard on there, with no pavilion, no strategies, interventions or anything like that, in the month of July.

And then, with the courtyard on the right-hand side, it shows us that, on the bottom of the actual pavilion, it's 93 degrees. And in the parking lot, its shows us at 103 degrees Fahrenheit. So that's a 10 Fahrenheit difference, which is substantial for the month of July, being in our courtyard. And then if we move into September, we see that Forma shows us, without a courtyard, at 97. And then, but, with our pavilion and trees, it shows us at 87 degrees, the difference, which is really cool to see.

And one way to do this, within Forma, is do the microclimate analysis, select the month and then, at the same time, do an inspect tool within Forma. And then you're able to select the surface. And it'll give you the temperature reading for that, what is perceived for that month.

And then, lastly, the month of October, which is now we see that temperatures are being expected to be around 90 degrees outside, with no interventions. And then it shows it to be 79 degrees cool in our courtyard, which is ideal, something we love seeing and being around. That's almost the ideal temperature to be at.

DANIEL STINE: And we have a high of 94 today, so it's right on--

MIGUEL ELIZARDO: [LAUGHS] Exactly. Dan, actually, I don't know why some of these slides did not show up, or the other ones that I initially was supposed to talk about.

DANIEL STINE: Well, just keep moving forward.

MIGUEL ELIZARDO: OK. OK.

DANIEL STINE: This will be the exclusive content for the live presentation.

MIGUEL ELIZARDO: [LAUGHS] Got it. OK. Now we're going to move on to the T09.2, which is avoiding excessive wind in our courtyard. And again, we're talking about the tools we ended up using and how-- early on, I mentioned that these tools really shaped and helped inform our design. But at the same time, some of these tools can take a long time to process.

And one thing I should note, that Autodesk Forma is a standalone tool. It's a cloud-based tool that allows us to see the information on the cloud. And you're able to do multiple analysis at the same time. And it'll let you know when it's done, which is something that's really awesome to do.

With the tools that I mention here, that you see, Butterfly and Eddy, it took a long time to do-- sometimes it would take about an hour or two to just do a single point of analysis, which is something that can be very frustrating for a lot of folks, if you've ever been in that position. I know that sometimes I've run a couple of simulations and I'm like, this is not the results that I was looking to see.

But it's also great to see that we're able to manipulate some of that data and be able to-- we have control of that, which, I know Autodesk Forma is moving towards that, which is really cool to see. But as I mentioned, highly intensive, not as friendly, user friendly. It could be daunting for a lot of people. But that's where Autodesk Forma bridges that gap.

Now, as Dan mentioned, we like to analyze and see and do climate weather information. So the left-hand side, it's a portion of our Grasshopper script that we have in-house, that's been developed. And we like to provide this to all of our designers to provide information, as far as the wind roses throughout the season, and see where the strong winds are coming from.

And we also like to provide these diagrams that you see, on the site. That allows us to display and show a client where some of our winter winds are coming from. That way, we can start to strategize and think about countermeasures to block some of those northern winds, but at the same time, open up to our summer winds.

And as you can see, there's a lot of density, right? There's a lot of high-rise buildings surrounding our site, which creates a challenge within our site, right? We want to try to open up to the summer winds. But maybe some of those winds are being Venturi effect throughout the site, but maybe not coming through our site. But we'll see some of those diagrams and how they look like.

And, first off, we're going to look at the tools we use, which is Grasshopper, Ladybug and Butterfly and Eddy. And like I mentioned, everything with Eddy and Butterfly are almost identical, which is why I'm showing just one diagram. So moving into the actual analysis itself, if you see the legend at the top left-hand corner, we see that the rectangle highlights that we want to be between 0 and 12 miles per hour, per the technical documentation.

We do not want to exceed wind speeds in our courtyard. If we do, what are some of the things that we're doing to mitigate that? And based off the initial analysis, we needed to show what the average wind speeds would be and then show some of them-- on the right side, you see that the document shows excessive winds. So we ended up modeling excessive winds.

Even though the high winds for San Antonio, Texas are being displayed at eight miles per hour, the average wind speeds within are being-- are shown at six miles per hour during the summer. And we see that the model on the right-hand side, at 19 miles per hour, that's just us tweaking the script to show that we have excessive winds and what does that look like in our courtyard.

So right now, in our courtyard, it's looking like seven miles per hour, which is not that bad, right? Based off NOAA, we see that would land between a gentle breeze. Anything above that would be considered a moderate breeze, something-- you don't want to be out there, sitting down, just because it's too windy to be able to do anything. And then we see, on the average wind speeds, that it is just one mile per hour in our courtyard, within our site building.

And then the other one that we needed to show was southern winds. So as I mentioned, we like to see where our wind patterns are coming mostly from. So we have southeast south winds, and then we ended up modeling northern winds. So again, our courtyard is sitting at one mile per hour. Everything else outside of that, average wind speeds are about six miles per hour, as you can see how the streets are being modeled. And then on the excessive winds scenario on the right-hand side, we see that our courtyard is sitting at five miles per hour, with southern winds coming through the site.

And one thing to notice, I think you guys should take a look at and pay attention to how the excessive winds are showing up. Because a lot of these diagrams that I'm displaying, some of it are going to look similar to Autodesk Forma, which is really cool to see. Because they're both speaking almost-- they're speaking the same language, as far as analysis goes.

Now, showing an example of northern winds coming through our site, we see that northern winds are really a big challenge for our site. Even though we have buildings surrounding us, those are the most challenging ones, for sure. But we do have, like I mentioned, a semi-open courtyard with walls blocking. But we do have some excessive winds still coming through our site at 12 miles per hour, which is not that bad, but still falls within that gradient where we want to be, right, in our courtyard.

Now we're going to move on to Autodesk Forma's analysis, which is the exciting part. I really like to see this, just because the streamlines, at the same time, you have this option to be able to take the streamlines off and just be able to see the analysis on the bottom, which will be like a gradient. And you can inspect what the wind speeds look like in there. I really enjoyed seeing this.

And you're able to do multiple analysis, pretty much, in any direction. Once you click the analysis, singlehandedly, you're able to see the multi-direction of the winds coming in, which is something that's really awesome to see. And it doesn't take that long to be able to run an analysis. And you're able to even adjust the diameter of the analysis, which, in a sense, allowed us to incorporate more buildings to be able to see how our site is actually really performing.

With the other tool, we were limited to a site location, right? How many buildings can we incorporate before we start to-- the computations started to take forever. With Autodesk Forma, it has no limitations to this. It also even gives you a rough estimate of how long it's going to take to be able to compute this, which is really cool to see.

But we see that our average wind speeds in our site are right there, within the southeast, sitting below two miles per hour. And then, in our courtyard, for excessive winds, as I mentioned, paying attention to the colors of the arrows, we see these streamlines for excessive winds almost being site-and-site identical.

And then we're going to show the technical documentation portion of this because I'm not going to go one by one, to explain everything. But, really, this is the technical documentation that we ended up submitting, that showed northern winds coming in, northern east winds and then southern east winds at the average speed and then showing the excessive winds, which is really cool to see. Because our northern winds really did show that the excessive winds were coming around. But we do see that, on our site, there's a little bit of excessive winds, which is not that bad.

But even though the streamlines do go over our site, those are going over our site. They're not actually going through our site. If you look at the actual diagram with the color grading on the bottom, you see that some of the areas are below that threshold that we need to view, which is good to see.

And then the other portion of this really cool thing that we can do with Autodesk Forma is wind comfort. So this diagram really shows you how a person would be perceived, at the ground level, with wind speeds coming through the site. So without the courtyard in the space, we see that it is only standing. With the courtyard, it changes to sitting, which is really good, to see that it's designed and intended as we pictured it.

And this is what really created and sparked the idea of our courtyard. And this is just an example of an image that shows us how our courtyard is really laid out. We have ceiling fans. But again, I think one thing I failed to mention, which was the analysis doesn't take into account the ceiling fans that are in the space, the increased humidity that you can start to add within the water features, which data suggests, with research, that that could help increase the comfort within the space by 10 degrees.

So if you saw previously that we had seen that it was 80 degrees, that could go down to at least 70, with the introduction of more humidity, water features. And, of course, since we have our ceiling fans, that also adds a substantial amount. That decreases the temperature on the bottom of that space.

Now we're going to move on to our case study number two, which is 400-500 South Congress. This project is a unique project, in itself, just because we were approached by a client with a design. We then were told, hey, by the way, what do you think? Can you help us?

Actually, this was part of our urban design-- development studio project. And, ultimately, they ended up running most of the analysis. I ended up helping run some of the other analysis, but they ended up also putting a lot of the information on the documents and then submitting it. And then this case study that I'm about to show is really a cool case study, just because we ended up winning the project because of Autodesk Forma and all the tools that we ended up using.

So as I mentioned, with every project, we do a site analysis. We talk about where the winds are coming from, talking about site location and talking about strategies, where we need to start to block some of the winter winds and where we want to open up to our summer winds.

But at the same time, the other portion is understanding what the annual rainfall for water catchment, reuse-- and then also understanding what the humidity, air temperature, heating/cooling degree days is and, at the same time, understanding the psychrometric chart. Because we want to make sure that we're introducing the right passive strategies for our site.

So this is a proprietary Grasshopper script that we developed in-house, that grabs all the weather file data. And then we show this to-- we give this, early on, to our designers. So that way, they have all this information. And we're able to show this to the client, at the same time, to understand what we're trying to convey to them.

So this was the design option one that was given to us. And when we initially saw-- we saw a lot of opportunity. We noticed the placement of the buildings. You'll see that, in our design, the placement of some of the buildings are different. And some of the buildings almost stayed the same, but not really, because we introduced a lot of these areas where it's terraces and things like that.

But with this design, we saw that, one, we already knew what was going on, right? We've done so much work already, previously, that when we see something, we're like, yes, this is what's going to happen. We need to do this. We need to make these moves.

So what the urban team decided to do is propose a design. And the opportunities within this project was that it was enclosed. As you can see in the bottom building, that the one that says "130 FT," that building itself is already blocking a lot of those southern winds coming into the site. But that staggered 290-foot high-rise is actually opening up a lot of, through the summer-- through the winter winds.

As you can see on the diagram on the right, the northern winds are just flowing through the site. The Venturi effect is going just through there. So that was one of the biggest opportunities for this project, that it really had, that we were like, we need to come up with another solution. I think this would be very helpful for this project.

So the prevailing winds showing on this diagram really shows you what the southern one looks like and then the northern one, as I just displayed, but in 3D form, which is something that you can do in Forma, which is really awesome. You're able to spin around the model. You're able to even adjust the wind heights from the ground level all the way to the top. And you'll see the changes in patterns as the wind really-- the streamlines of the winds really flows through the buildings, which is something that really gets me excited to be able to see. I'm a huge fan of this type of analysis, to be able to see.

But as I mentioned, southern winds are being blocked. They're not really coming in through the site. So you can think that everything in that center spine of the design is going to get really hot during the summer. Not a good space to-- yeah, a lot of shading. So that was just what we initially saw and then-- along with all the other tools that we ended up using to analyze within Autodesk Forma.

So then we introduced a couple of design options, but, ultimately, we ended up landing with this design option. So as you can see, we incorporated a lot of green scapes in the project. But at the same time, one thing I failed to mention previously is that they didn't connect to the creek that was there previously. And that was an opportunity that we saw. We're like, no, we need to find a way for this community to be able to connect to the creek that's coming through there.

And so what we ended up doing is, one, of course, opening up to the southern winds in the summer, to be able to cross-ventilate through this space, and then repositioning some of these buildings and then adding some of these features-- terraces, open courtyards-- that allowed everybody to be able to see and be able to enjoy the outdoors.

So as you can see in the design itself, we have some-- in these sketches, too, is a lot of green vegetation, with open terraces and stuff like that. And it really created this community within the space that everybody could come and just enjoy and visit, work, live, in a sense.

So we're going to get into the analysis portion. So what we ended up doing is doing multiple analysis on this design, just to see how it would perform. And one of the things that you can do with Autodesk Forma is the sun hours. The sun hours analysis is a really good analysis, just because it gives you how much of a surface is actually being received by the sun. That, in turn, tells you whether you should apply photovoltaic panels in that location or not.

Or you could also get an idea of how dark your areas are going to be in the spaces below, which is something you want to try and avoid, right? You want to try to get a lot of that natural sunlight into those spaces, but not too many, right? Because, especially for this project, being in Texas, it's very hot. So trying to limit some of that, but at the same time, be conscious about it. We can do this analysis for multiple months. But we decided to show this for the four seasons, within the months June, March, September and October-- and December. Sorry.

And then we go into the other portion of this one, which is another really cool tool that we've used with Forma a lot, which is a noise analysis. This tool allows us to be able to see how our site is performing with the noise traffic surrounding the site. So all the streets have noise data within Forma. And we're able to run the analysis and be able to see how it's affecting and what countermeasures can we start to introduce.

So we had an idea of the spine of the design, that we wanted to make sure that we sat at a safe noise, low decibel. Because we wanted to have a space where everybody can come in and enjoy and sit down and have a lot of shopping experience, in a sense, there. So when we modeled this and we saw the results, we were pleased to see that a lot of the spaces in between really showed soft noises, as opposed to everything around these two busy streets at an intersection being blocked off, buffered from other buildings and stuff like that.

One other thing that I'm going to mention, that I think was really cool, that our team discovered-- and like I mentioned, some of this information is already in Autodesk Forma. But another resource that was really helpful for us to use and explore was the external data that you can get from the Department of Transportation. And the Department of Transportation actually also gets the information from ArcGIS. So if you can't find it on the Department of Transportation for each state, you can also get it from ArcGIS. Because they both go hand in hand and show, sometimes, similar results.

But the Department of Transportation may have their own information, proprietary software that they're using. They may not be using ArcGIS for that information. But what you can get from there is the average daily traffic, which is really cool because you need to know, I mean, throughout-- it has historical data. So you want to get the latest data. And sometimes you may not have that. And this is where you can go to actually assess and get this data.

So this little diagram on the right-hand side, you can see that it shows a traffic count map throughout San Antonio. And as soon as you zoom in to a street level, you'll be able to see how much vehicles are passing through that street daily, which is really cool to see. And then the other portion of this is OpenStreetMaps. OpenstreetMaps has map data that can show you some of this information, too.

I've been a personal victim of going into Google Earth and scrolling through the streets, trying to find that sign. I don't know if you guys have done that with the miles per hour, but I've been a personal victim of that. And that can be tedious. Because you're like, I've been down this street, up and down twice, and I have not found that miles-per-hour sign. I don't know where it's at. [LAUGHS]

But with OpenStreetMaps, there is a layer that you can go into there. All you have to do is click it, and it'll show you the map data. And you're able to select the streets. And it'll tell you what the miles per hour is, which is something very easy, time saver, for sure. I really enjoyed finding this out, when we found out. And I was just like, this is a lifesaver.

But at the same time, take this with a grain of salt, just because, for rural areas, you might not be able to find this information. But for central cities, you'll probably find a lot of this information, for sure. So just a tip for you guys, for external data.

Now, moving on to the microclimate analysis, which is another really cool thing to show. For our site, we wanted to show how it's being affected throughout the years and the seasons. So we ended up displaying this, just to understand how the winds are coming through the site and then being affected, at the same time. So you can see how the temperature is being perceived throughout the seasons, which is another really cool, powerful tool within Autodesk Forma.

And then, as I mentioned earlier, talking about wind comfort, we modeled this and wanted to understand how these trees are buffering a lot of that southern wind speed and creating these sitting-- standing comfortable areas in our spaces. But at the same time, we did see that some of the areas are still showing as uncomfortable. But we ended up making some interventions for that, which we're not showing here. But we ended up making some interventions for that, to mitigate some of that uncomfortable wind speeds within that area.

DANIEL STINE: Yeah, Miguel, probably worth mentioning, in Forma, for the vegetation to work properly, you have to use Forma's trees. A regular tree is just going to block all the wind, instead of letting a small fraction of the wind through, like a tree normally would, right?