Since graduate school, I have always liked having gigabytes of data thrown at me in graphical format. Colored heat maps, pie, line, and bar charts; my only desire is to graph everything that can be graphed. An example of this is the articles in the Environmental Design + Construction Magazine. Each article gives a summary of weather data for where the building is located.
That is why I was very excited to find ECOTECT. Through reading one of the Revit blogs, I came across an announcement that Autodesk had acquired ECOTECT. From the ECOTECT website:
ECOTECT is a complete building design and environmental analysis tool that covers the full range of simulation and analysis functions required to truly understand how a building design will operate and perform.
I downloaded a free trial for a number of their products. They have weather and analyzer tools, as well as a number of other visualization and modeling tools. I have been playing with the weather tool for a little bit. The tool allows a user to plot all sorts of weather related graphs for a certain region: temperature, wind direction, humidity, etc.
When I tried to find weather data for Reno, it wasn’t in the program. A quick look on the ECOTECT website gave me a link to the US Department of Energy website that houses loads of weather data. Now I have a way to not only find elusive weather data, but also a way to plot it. This kind of data is necessary for the next step in green design. Incorporating sun angles, temperatures, prevailing wind direction, etc. into building design is uber-green and something I would love to learn about.
If you have any references for this level of design, please share them in the comments.
As an example of the data, I have embedded average temperature data for the three BJG offices. As it is July, I am glad I am in Pleasanton and not Las Vegas; I can’t handle the heat! I plotted this in Excel.
Happy plotting!
