Trial / Demo
As an innovative architecture practice with a thoughtful design ethos at its heart, HLM Architects believe in making every project as sustainable as possible. By adopting the targets and approach set out by RIBA’s Sustainable Outcomes Guide, their team specialises in combining innovative sustainable design with the practicalities of achieving statutory compliance and accreditation, to generate long term environmental and commercial value for their clients.
To support them in this aim, HLM Architects use IESVE software to optimise and verify the performance of their designs. This empowers their clients to make informed choices that successfully balance beautiful design alongside energy use, carbon emissions, comfort and cost, from the earliest design stages.
One recent project in which IESVE was instrumental to the HLM team is large scale residential development, comprising 79 bedrooms of single occupancy. While the project is located just outside London, the design is intended to be replicated in other developments across the UK, therefore it was crucial to ensure that the bedroom design would also perform across future planned locations.
The typical bedroom design for this development, devised by HLM, included a built-in desk and wardrobe unit, a single bed, and two windows. One of these is a tall window with a narrow, operable side panel and metal louvre, designed to maximise natural daylight and provide unobstructed views.
As the project progressed, the contractor proposed an alternative window design, supported by an analysis report claiming that it would save money and outperform the original design in both thermal comfort and daylight levels. However, HLM had reservations about this alternative window design, noting it would offer significantly reduced external views and increase the risk of heat loss, due to a larger frame area.
Based on these concerns, HLM requested that their in-house environmental team review the thermal comfort and daylight performance of the original window design. They used IESVE to conduct a detailed analysis of the standard bedroom design for multiple locations, including London, Birmingham and Manchester, to validate the performance for both current and future developments. For each location, orientation analyses were carried out for all cardinal directions - North, South, East, and West – to account for the fact that bedrooms will be positioned on various sides of the building.
The ability to conduct multiple different analysis types within IESVE was a key benefit to HLM, allowing them to complete a comprehensive assessment of the design’s thermal and daylight performance within a single model. The pre-loaded TM59 templates within the software were particularly helpful in unlocking substantial time savings when conducting the overheating analysis, while the visual outputs – including 3D views and analysis diagrams – enabled them to communicate the results in an easily understandable format.
The results confirmed that the original HLM design would perform well in terms of daylight levels, external views, and thermal comfort, and enabled the team to make minor design refinements to improve the design’s performance based on orientation.
For daylighting, Spatial Daylight Autonomy (sDA) targets were achieved across all room orientations. While Useful Daylight Illuminance (UDI) analysis indicated that some areas near the windows in some south- and west-facing rooms would exceed desirable lux levels, this was easily rectified by introducing some additional shading elements to the design. HLM recommended incorporating operable louvred shutters, designed to match the existing fixed louvres, to reduce overheating in west-facing rooms – providing extra shading in summer, while still allowing daylight to penetrate deeper into the building in winter.
With these minor adjustments, HLM were able to prove that their original design would perform better than the proposed alternative, and would offer a more visually appealing solution. The project is an important reminder that design is often subjective, especially when value engineering proposals are introduced. The ability to model and validate a design’s performance in IESVE therefore provides valuable evidence that helps design teams build a stronger case for their preferred solutions.
HLM continue to use IESVE to assess the performance of their designs – a process which is now becoming ever more accessible with IESVE’s Pollination Revit plug-in.
“Using environmental analysis software early in the design process enables architects to shape more sustainable buildings from the outset, rather than relying on external analyses conducted only after the design is complete. When architects perform these analyses in-house, there is greater opportunity to iterate and enhance the building design throughout the development process.
IESVE offers a significantly broader and more detailed range of analysis capabilities compared to Revit add-ons we have previously employed. A key advantage is that once a model is built, it can be used for a variety of different study types, improving efficiency and consistency across analyses.
We have trialled the use of the Pollination Revit plugin and found it to be an excellent tool. Previously, exporting models from Revit was quite challenging and required significant time to clean up the model, as well as extensive remodelling in IESVE.
The IES team have also been really helpful, we had several calls with them when there were any questions we had.”
- Julie Winrow, Environmental Designer, HLM Architects
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