Simplify Sustainable Design with Autodesk Forma

CAOIMHE LOFTUS: Welcome to this session in which we'll show you how to simplify sustainable design with Autodesk Forma. My name is Caoimhe Loftus. I'm a digital lead at Arcadis. I bridge the work of our architecture and digital teams.

I have a background in automation starting out with automating frustrating tasks, like renumbering [INAUDIBLE]. But my current passion is making sustainable design accessible. And I'd like to introduce Simon from the Forma team. We've been working together on developing workflows that make things easier for architects at scale. Over to you, Simon.

SIMON IRGENS: Thank you for the introduction, Caoimhe. It's always a pleasure to work with you. And I'm very pleased that we have this talk today, which has already brought us into exploring tools for sustainable early phase building design.

My name is Simon Irgens. And I'm from the Forma team. I'm a customer success manager, an architect, and based in Oslo. I'll take this safe harbor statement here. So in this presentation, we might make some forward-looking statements regarding product in development and more.

So please read through the statement before you make any decisions on buying products or make any other important financial decisions.

CAOIMHE LOFTUS: Thank you, Simon. Always great to get that covered off. So let's get stuck into our session today. The agenda is as follows.

We will start with an introduction to the climate crisis and industry response. Then the meat of the presentation is explaining how you can assess your projects in three steps, by setting energy use intensity targets, by understanding more about the climate, and by assessing your project.

We have a small section on how to calculate carbon. And then we'll follow up with some key takeaways. But let's get stuck in. Some of you may be familiar with the aim to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius set at the 2015 Paris Climate negotiations. This is widely understood to be the point at which climate impacts will become increasingly harmful for people and indeed the entire planet.

But it can be difficult to understand what this really means. The website Probable Future shown on screen encourages people to have practical conversations and make informed decisions about the future in a changing climate. What will the world look like and feel like at different levels of warming?

At 1.5 degrees you can see there is a clear jump in the portions of the world moving to 30, 90, and even 100 days over 32 degrees Celsius or 90 degrees Fahrenheit. Some estimates believe we will reach this scenario in the next five years, which is why it is essential that we act now to mitigate the impact of our projects.

Over the past 12 months, the reality of this has been coming closer to home with fires in mainland Europe and extreme weather events. But you may be asking, what does this have to do with us in the build environment? You may not be aware that buildings are responsible for 39% of greenhouse gas emissions.

27% of this is due to operational carbon. And 6% is due to the building construction industry. Existing buildings must be decarbonized along with new buildings to meet our climate goals. As an industry there is a renewed recognition that we need to act now. We're in a good position to build on existing frameworks and targets, such as the UN's Sustainable Development Goals, which were launched in 2015 and relaunched recently.

Government guidelines in the UK, we have the net zero strategy launched in 2021, which built on top of existing climate acts, which set out legally binding emission reduction targets. And within the architecture profession, both the AIA and Riba have set ambitious 2030 climate goals.

Let's take a little bit closer look at the AIA 2030 challenge. It's interesting to see the history behind this initiative. In 2005, they set incremental carbon reduction goals to achieve zero carbon for all new buildings and renovations by 2030. But in 2021, they accelerated that ambition and stated we should be designing to net zero carbon today to meet the 1.5 degree target carbon budget.

I'd like to talk about how this is reflected in [INAUDIBLE] climate goals. As a company our aim is to be climate positive for operation by 2030 and climate positive, including materials, by 2040. But how do we get there?

The first step is to set energy use intensity targets and use early design modeling to reduce our energy requirements of our projects. And we'll talk a little bit more about this in our session today. The second point is to use on-site renewable energy where possible. And the third is to offset through programs that add renewables to the grid or verified carbon abatement programs.

But this really is a last step. We wanted to give you a few definitions to help you get started. Energy use intensity, or EUI, is the building's annual energy consumption relative to the building area. It's expressed in the units KBTUs per square feet per year or kilowatt hours per meter squared per year.

This really is your building's efficiency. So much like we talk about miles per gallon in a car, this is energy use per square foot or meter squared. Predicted energy use intensity is the predicted energy use for that project. We've included a graphic on the right hand side from LETI, who we refer to throughout the program, which explains what energy loads are required, how that's calculated, and what is and isn't included.

Today we are focusing on operational carbon, which as you can see from this diagram has an impact across the building's life. This diagram is also from LETI. But embodied carbon also needs to be considered. But that's the subject of another lecture.

So as a company our strategy has been to set incremental goals to get us to meet our planet-positive promise. And our goal is to have all projects at 110% better than baseline by 2030. Our current goal is to achieve 60% reduction on baseline.

But what is the baseline, you might ask? All baselines represent a typical modern building based on CBECS 2003 or RECS 2001 data, which is normalized by climate, weather, space, building type, size, occupancy, and schedule. What we've identified is that often companies sign up to these goals at c-suite level.

But we've identified a gap in understanding how to make that a reality. And that's one of the things we're aiming to do with this session. We know that when it comes to actually working on a project it's hard to understand how you achieve these goals. And that's what we're aiming to demystify in this session.

So the next session is on how to assess your projects. And to make this accessible we've broken this down into three easy steps. Three is always a good number. It's easy to remember and much more achievable. We're going to start by setting EUI targets using zero tool and referencing further material by LETI.

We'll spend a little bit of time talking about how you can understand the climate using Climate Scout and the 2030 palette. And we will spend a bit more time talking about how you can assess your design using Forma, focusing specifically on energy use intensity and our PV study.

But let's start with setting the EUI targets. I think one of the challenges in particular with energy use intensity targets is that they vary by building type, by location. And this doesn't help us because we're not measuring against a consistent goal. So there is this first step required to help you set yourself on the journey.

The tool we've recommended you use in this session, particularly in the US, is Zero Tool. This is a website. It's freely available and easy to use and doesn't require a whole lot of information to get started. You will need project location, building use type, area use type, and your goal for energy use reduction.

We are going to use a case study site throughout the rest of this presentation to help apply practical knowledge to your projects. The site we've chosen is an urban site in San Francisco. The function we are proposing is a residential building with a target gross floor area of 1.2 million square feet.

And working to our current goals we are looking at achieving a 60% reduction on baseline. So what does that look like in Zero Tool? They ask you to populate the building name, the country, city, postal code. And it will auto populate the degree days. You need to populate any building use.

In this case, we've indicated multifamily housing, populated the gross floor area. And it has provided details on the number of residential units and number of bedrooms, which can be adjusted if those figures are available. And then you populate your energy reduction target. In this case, we are working to 60%.

And these are the results. On the left hand side we have imperial. On the right hand side we have metric for reference. So the goal we have set ourselves today is to achieve a 13 EUI. So that's 13 KBTU per feet squared per year. And that is applicable to our goals for 2024.

Out of interest we've also shared goals for 2027. So that would be an 80% reduction. And we would be looking for a target of 7 KBTUs per feet squared per year. And in 2029, we've aimed for a 100% reduction with a target of 0 KBTU per feet squared per year.

So I think you can see the pattern pretty clearly. The aim is always to get as low an energy use intensity value as possible. In the UK, we are fortunate to have access to some amazing documents by LETI. And I strongly encourage you to refer to them for guidance on net zero operational carbon amongst other things.

LETI is a network of over 1,000 built environment professionals working together to put the UK on a path to zero carbon future. And they have tried to make energy use intensity, amongst other things, more accessible by setting clear goals for people working in the UK. So on the right hand side, you can see recommended values or targets for energy use intensity and space heating in residential, office, and school buildings.

And they provide some key performance indicators. So they recommend as we work towards net zero carbon that we designed for and achieve the recommended energy use and intensity targets, designed for and achieve the space heating demand targets, and maximize renewable energy generation on site. So I think you can start to see some patterns with those early strategies we mentioned.

The next section we'd like to focus on is giving you some collateral to help you understand the climate. Climate is the first step any project needs to respond to its location. Sustainability is informed by site, climate, culture, and people. Understanding the climate is the first step to design an environmentally responsible and site-sensitive building.

And the first tool we want to share is a tool developed through [INAUDIBLE] now branded Arcadis. This is Climate Scout. Climate Scout helps users design buildings that uniquely respond to a site by providing climate-specific design advice at the building scale. It pairs with the climate classification system and building design strategies from architecture 2030 palette.

So when accessing the site, you select the appropriate climate zone by clicking on the map or choosing from the list below. When you've clicked on the relevant site or location, you will get the information on the relevant climate. So in this instance, the site in San Francisco is a warm southern Mediterranean climate.

And from there, we will get a selection of heating and cooling strategies to consider in our design. And this is an example of those for this particular site. We've chosen three particular strategies that relate particularly to the design strategy we're going to illustrate in the later section. So please bear in mind things like direct gain glazing, form for daylighting, and form for cooling all can have an impact on the energy use intensity of your project.

Within Climate Scout it's possible to click on any of these strategies for more information, such as the following. So for instance, this provides more detail on the strategy for form for cooling or direct gain for glazing, and then links directly to the site of the 2030 palette, which offers even further information on each of these strategies.

So for instance, under direct gain glazing, you can get advice on the proportion of glazing, which is appropriate for your latitude. And this is something Simon has referred to in the later sections of this demonstration. And similarly, further information on how you can use forms for cooling.

And with that, I'm going to hand over to Simon to talk us through how you can assess your design using Forma.

SIMON IRGENS: Thank you. Now we are at the third step in our workflow. We'll start designing Forma and study how we can design for lower emissions already at the massing stage. But let me just give you a quick introduction to Forma.

Autodesk Forma is a platform for early phase design. In Forma you're working with conceptual design tools in the cloud. And with all the analysis available you get insights to make informed decisions on design direction. This is what we're going to take a closer look at today with energy simulation tools.

Here you can see how it works. So when you design in Forma you get immediate feedback on your design, so you can understand how the building performs in its context. You can test and compare your design options with information from a number of analyses. When using statistics in comparison, your design proposals-- you can quickly learn which one is performing the best, so you know how to develop your design in the right direction.

These days we are developing and adding energy simulation tools to the palette, so operational energy that we're going to talk about today, as well solar panel analysis, also [INAUDIBLE] carbon is in development. Some of these are already released as a first version.

To battle CO2 emissions from the build environment we need tools that can inform us on the impact of our decisions already when we're designing in early phase. And as we see here, out of the 40% or 39% of global emissions that the build environment accounts for, 27% is related to operational energy.

That's the energy our building is consuming today. But for an architect, the sustainability challenge is also an information problem. When we're in the early stage design, we need information, which is really not there yet. The information about the building performance only becomes available later when we go into the detailed design phase.

And that's obviously too late for making good decisions. So the opportunity here is to move the information from the detailed design phase and up to when we start our projects. Then we have a chance to be more successful in designing sustainable buildings for the future.

So now in Forma we are developing energy simulation tools that are helping us to bring that information back to the early phase based on machine learning. Let's look at the brief again here. Here is the site in San Francisco and just a simplified brief of this design challenge.

We will design a residential building with a 700% utilization of the site. The site is 172,000 square feet. So the gross floor area we're looking for is 1.2 million square feet. And we want to make that a low energy building to lead us towards our target for this project. The target is a 60% reduction on the baseline.

The EUI target we found using the Zero Tool is 13 kilo BTU per square feet per year. So let's go into Forma now and start learning how that can work. I've generated a project for our site at One Market Street in San Francisco. As you can see here, it has topography. It has roads. It has an auto photo, a map, and contextual buildings.

The project is georeferenced by default. So we can use our contextual analysis and learn while we design. So now I'm starting with a blank proposal and get the sketch process started. I'm selecting the site and can see here in the statistics, in the [INAUDIBLE] statistics on the right the size of the site area.

Now first I'm creating a volume just to understand what 700% utilization looks like on this site, just to get a first idea. I'm adding seven floors to it. And when finished, I can read the GFA, which meets the target of 1.2 million square feet there to the right. Now this is not a realistic residential building and also not meant like that.

But I'll try to move it around. So I'll try to flip it up. I'm just going to remove it and put it up, so it stands up between the towers here. I'm using the line building design tool just drawing a simple line to do that. It's a quick and simple conceptual design tool.

So in the right panel, I'm just changing the parameters to 70 feet deep. I'm adding floors to it until it meets my desired area, so 56 floors. And now I'm interested in beginning to study the relationship between the shape of the building volume and its energy usage. So I will switch on the operational energy analysis and calculate.

I'm getting an immediate result here, 35 kiloBTU per square feet per year. So that's my first result for this building. This could be a residential tower building with one sided residential flats, for example. To get a little closer to my target here, I will test a new configuration of the building volume.

And first I'm splitting the tower into two here, so two equidistant blocks. Each tower is only 35 feet deep now. And I could imagine some nice double aspect flats in there. My area count is still consistent with what I have from before. And I can switch on the operational energy analysis. And there I got the result already, 48 kiloBTU per year.

So that's obviously the wrong direction. We can see that the relation between surface area and depth of the building is important to the energy usage intensity, the EUI. So now we will study the height and see what impact that can have. So first I'm lowering the building to half the height.

I keep the depth of the building. And I copied them out so I have four buildings instead of two. I just needs to place them on the site so we have space for them all. So these are quick and simple sketch exercises. Again, I will calculate the operational energy when I just check that the area is correct. It's good. We are very close.

So now I'm calculating. And I'm getting an instant feedback. Now the result is 32 kiloBTU per square feet per year. So with this initial learnings about compactness, I will set up one more study and look into building depth versus height. I keep the first block. And I start changing the depth of the next three blocks, so from 35 to 50 to 70 and now 90 on the last one.

And then I'll change the height to keep the target area consistent. So the second one needs to go down a little bit here, changing the flats to 22. See if I'm meeting it. 21 is better. The same with the third block. I take that from 28 and down to 18. And OK, 13. See if we're good there.

And the last one, nine floors, 10 floors. OK, it looks pretty good. We're again at target almost, very close to. And we can calculate the operational energy to understand this relationship between the depth and the height of the building. So now I'm getting this nice gradient from the slim and taller one towards the lower and deeper building block.

And this could be pretty realistic apartment blocks. Double aspect the first one, perhaps the second one sort of with depths that are related to Scandinavian and UK market. And further deeper blocks maybe more common in the US for single aspect flats buildings with double loaded corridors.

So we got an average output here from 27. So it spans from I think it was 34 on the tall and slim one. And then we have below 25 on the green. OK, I will make one more direction for my study. I'm just adding a new blank proposal. I want to add one more design direction with another typology. And I'm using the courtyard building here.

So with the smart tool just adding simple line building to the building plot here. At first I'm keeping it quite slim and seeing how many floors I would need to meet the target area and calculating what that would be in energy usage. OK, so this is the worst result up to now. It's 53 kiloBTU per square feet per year.

So I'm really just learning about how the different typologies here are performing and also, how the building form is impacting the energy usage. So depth, I'm changing that. I learned that already. I'm changing that a little bit from 40 to 50 feet. And already I got down to 46 kiloBTU per square feet per year.

So the depth is obviously very important. I'm going to take this proposal in a little more contextual direction also making the courtyard building smaller and allow the passageways from the neighboring plots here to go through our site. So I'm just drawing up one more courtyard building here using the line tool.

Change the depth of the building in the building parameters on the right. I'm just adding height to it, so we meet the target area and match the height between the two buildings. I think at 15 we're getting close, 15 floors. We're a little bit above. Let's take that down a little bit.

So the courtyard building is now split in two. And I can calculate what that will mean in terms of energy usage. So the result here is that the bigger block performs a little bit worse than the smaller one. And on average, they perform at 30, or they consume 30 kiloBTU per square feet per year in energy usage.

So that was yet another step in the right direction. And since we were quite successful in splitting up this volume, I will continue in this direction and make the courtyards even a bit smaller and of course, lower since we're getting more compact with this design direction.

Also, by doing this I will also allow more passages to go through this quite large site. So the neighbors behind can reach the harbor front more easily. I'm just going to move these buildings down so they're not floating above the ground. So you see I'm just using the move tool and snapping them down to the side boundary.

So now I have a courtyard building proposal almost ready, just need to change the heights so we're meeting the target again. At 11 floors they are pretty good. So now we can-- yeah, now we can analyze the energy usage. It's 26 kiloBTU per square feet per year. So that's pretty good. It's among the better or almost the best proposals that we've gotten so far.

Actually, we had the half of the worst as well. So there's quite a big span in energy usage in just this very quick design study that we've done already at this point. So now, we've looked at how the form and compactness of the building relates to its energy usage. And it's possible to go further in the study.

But now I want to understand how the performance of the building fabric affects the EUI. So now, I'm tweaking the building fabric to further reduce the operational energy. And as you can see here, I've just changed the roof construction, wall construction, the window construction to triple low energy glazing and also, the windows to wall ratio from 40% down to 30%.

And that's some of the recommendations that we got from Climate Scout earlier when Caoimhe presented step number two. There are more advanced settings. At the moment we cannot change them. So it's good to be aware of there are more things that will impact, of course, our energy usage. But these are the parameters you can change directly here.

CAOIMHE LOFTUS: Thank you, Simon. I think that was a really fascinating insight into how kind of important Forma is as a contributor to energy use intensity. And we'll take a look at that again as an overview in the next few slides.

But we wanted to just take a moment to zoom in on those parameters just to give you a closer look. So in terms of architectural input, you could see that the surface, our volume to volume ratio has a huge impact. And then we recommend you explore the impact of the glazing ratio, window construction, wall construction, and roof construction.

There are some additional parameters which you saw were fixed. Those include window shading, HVAC system infiltration, light efficiency, and plug load efficiency. As you may have spotted, we have not got to our energy use intensity target. And we think the next step would be to explore some of these additional parameters.

But first, I think, Simon, you're going to take us through how we can do a solar panel analysis to see how that will offset some of that energy use intensity.

SIMON IRGENS: Yeah, exactly. That's a good next step. We're just launching the solar analysis. It's a close beta. And now we will study how we can offset some of this energy usage from this building proposal. So obviously, we could have continued to study more design options. But now we're going into understanding the potential to offset some of that energy used in the buildings.

So now, I triggered the solar energy analysis. And it is calculating here. So the first result it gives us is the solar energy potential. So that's actually all the energy that lands on the building from the sun. And I've just filtered on the roofs only. I'm just interested in seeing what I would be able to harvest from the roof.

And to understand that better, we're looking at the panel in the lower part of the right panel there to estimate the energy from possible solar panels that we could put on this roof. And now I can configure the solar panels. The first slide there shows the roof coverage. And I just bumped that up a little bit from 60% to 75%, if I believe that's realistic.

And I kept the panel efficiency at 15. So that gives me an output from what will be possible to produce on this roof surface. Also, I can use the inspection tool to look at points to see where the most effect is fetched and also the slider in the bottom there to filter out the best or the worst areas to know where we should not prioritize the panels.

So now we have a quick calculation of what we would be able to offset with solar panels.

CAOIMHE LOFTUS: Thanks, Simon. I think my key takeaway from this is just how quickly you're getting that results, both from the energy use intensity and the solar panel. So it's great that we can get that feedback as we design and use that to inform our design process. So just like you did kind of testing a tall, skinny building and realizing that was not a good solution in terms of energy use intensity.

And you were able to iterate on that to get us to the final version here, which was 26 KBTU per feet squared per year, which was a 35% improvement on your initial design. When you included fabric enhancements, that got us to 23 KBTU per feet squared per year, a 42% increase. And then with offsets we were getting to 18.9 KBTU per feet squared per year.

Not quite the target we set ourselves. And I think this is a realistic scenario. You're not always going to get to those targets through architecture alone. And that's where it's important to be able to use this analysis to start to have conversations with your clients and your MET engineers about alternative options for achieving those targets.

I also wanted to take a moment to shout out the amazing documentation that's available alongside Forma. It really does dig into the science behind the analysis. So if you or your sustainability team would more information about what is going on behind the scenes, do check out those websites. We'll link to them in our handouts as well, if you'd like to dig a little bit deeper.

SIMON IRGENS: Yeah, and this is an overview of more analysis that we have available. So of course, operational energy or solar panels would not be the only thing informing your design in early phase. In the end, it's a trade off between many qualities in your project. And here's a list of some of the things that we can analyze in Forma.

So you have the metrics, as we saw today, updating constantly while you're designing. Then we sun and shadow, daylight potential, wind, rapid. And that's also a detailed analysis, meaning that you can have wind feedback while you're designing, which is quite amazing.

Microclimate as well, learning from wind, sun, and the geometry, and the topography. And then we have noise analysis as well. But what we talked about today was some of these new energy simulation tools that we have in development. The operational energy analysis and the solar analysis with the PV panel analysis attached to it.

So we're moving into development with more sustainability tools. And at some point, we might be able to have a presentation on embodied carbon and total energy. But that's, as Caoimhe said, good material for the next presentation.

CAOIMHE LOFTUS: And be looking forward to it. Well, let's close out the session with just a little bit of information about how to calculate carbon. So we've talked about the energy use intensity. And we would like to help you understand the relationship to carbon.

So depending on who you're reporting to, so for your AIA architecture 2030 submission you're required to report on site energy. This is the energy used by the building itself. But if you are reporting to the EPA, they will ask you to consider source energy.

And the difference there is that it takes into account the energy used to produce the energy consumed by the building, a bit of a mouthful. The next slide might explain this a little bit better. Depending on how your energy is produced, the carbon intensity of that energy will vary.

So for instance, if in Vermont a lot of the energy comes from sunlight. The carbon intensity will be much lower. But if you're using a fossil fuel-based energy source, such as in Wyoming, the carbon intensity will be much higher. We are sharing a formula here to help you convert your energy intensity to carbon if that is something you require.

And please know we'll provide more additional information in the handouts. You don't need to take this all in in one go. But the most straightforward calculation for energy use intensity is to multiply it by area to get your total energy use. You multiply it by a set value to convert the units into MWh per year. And you multiply that by carbon intensity.

This is your variable, depending on where your building is located and indeed your energy provider. And we've provided a link to a website, which can help you there. And that will produce your operational carbon per year. So with that, we've reached the end of the presentation. We're just going to give you a few key takeaways, which we hope will help you make sustainable design more accessible for your projects. Over to you, Simon.

SIMON IRGENS: Thank you, Caoimhe. So as you mentioned in the beginning here of the presentation, we're trying to bridge the gap between these ambitious targets on sustainability in our day-to-day work as architects. In the early phase, we are making a number of decisions that will impact our buildings through its lifetime.

And the one we looked at today, operational energy, the shape of the building we see how tightly that is related to the energy usage. So if we make the wrong decisions, it can be costly to fix later. And today we've talked about how we can get good support from Forma and other tools to set goals early and get our design on track from early on in the design process.

And this is where we have a potential to make good decisions for the environment at a low cost, moving some of those decisions up to the early phase design.

CAOIMHE LOFTUS: Yeah, I really relate to this as a designer having this feedback early on I think would definitely makes me think twice and change ultimately, the design because you want to-- those goals are becoming increasingly important. And we want to make sure that our designs address the climate challenge ahead of us.

So I think that's a timely reminder to go back to that slide from the architecture 2030 challenge and that we should all be designing to zero carbon today to meet the 1.5 degree target carbon budget. As you can see, this is really about getting as low an energy use intensity in your building as possible, maximizing the energy produced from PV panels, and where possible, considering the source of your energy as well.

So we'll leave you with our three-step process. We hope this has simplified sustainable design for you. And those three steps as a final reminder are to set your energy use intensity targets, spend some time to understand the climate, particularly if you work across multiple cities or areas, and to invest time in assessing your design using Forma at the start of the project. And we strongly encourage you to consider assessing your project throughout the design life cycle. Thank you for joining us today.

SIMON IRGENS: Thank you very much, Caoimhe.