Fenestration & Debauchery

So Many Thingssssss: I’ve been so busy working on projects that I haven’t had time to write about them!  Here is some of what I’ve been up to for the last few months.

So my dad is a classic car enthusiast, and he has a ’63 Lincoln slabside and a ’56 Lincoln Mark II. It’s not really germane to this post, but let’s have a picture of that, shall we?

So anyway, he edits the newsletter for the club he’s in, the many-syllabled Lincoln Continental Owner’s Club, Texas Gulf Coast Region.  As people his age go, he’s fairly computer savvy, but not really a desktop publishing guy, so his method of publication has been to assemble the stories in Word, and then create a PDF from that with links to flickr albums and email that to everyone in the club.  It’s a functional solution, but I thought an upgrade was in order, so for Christmas I built him a blog of his very own, now up at www.thecontinentalstar.com

If you want to stop by, there are lots of pictures from prior events, as well as listings of cars for sale, directions to the next meet, etc. etc. etc.

In my prior post about daylighting analysis, I focused on a ‘representative points’ approach, i.e. taking as typical a mid-morning and mid-afternoon time on the vernal equinox, along with perhaps some bounding points on the winter and summer solstice, and extrapolate the quantity and quality of natural light from there.  I was interested to know if a more granular approach would confirm the validity of this method, and what other useful information it might yield besides.

I set the computer up to run a calculation for every 30 minutes, on thirty day intervals throughout the year, for CIE Cloudy, Partly Cloudy, and Clear skies.   That made for some 600 radiosity calculations in all, so after queuing all that up, I let my desktop run for about two weeks straight. Continue reading “Incorporating Daylighting in Lighting Design: Part II” »

I found some planks that had been discarded on O’Farrell street (picture here), and decided to make a cutting board from them.  I’ve only got about 2′ x 3′ of counter area in my comically tiny San Francisco apartment anyway, so I’m essentially replacing all of the counter space.  That suits me because I feel like cutting boards are kind of a sub-optimal solution, in that you’d ideally want the entire workspace to be a cutting area.

My original idea for this was that I was going to stain specific pieces in a semi-random pattern as in this pre-visualization rendering I did:
Continue reading “Cutting board from found wood” »

I went to a lecture by Galen Burrell of Arup, on climate-based daylighting design.  One graphic that I particularly liked was the above, showing total energy usage vs. daylight penetration.  As you add more windows, you need less electric lighting, but you also have more thermal gain resulting in higher HVAC loads.  So daylighting design boils down to an optimization problem, finding the saddle point between those two curves.  Neat!

These are some quick reference guides I made for my dad, for Christmas.  I am posting it now because June is the next month after December, clearly.  So my dad has been hampered in working on his classic cars and rental properties with their myriad electrical problems because he’s never been exposed to the fundamentals of electricity.  I figured that what he needed in lieu of a formal physics course was a quick reference that he could refer to as needed. Continue reading “Electricity Quick Reference Cards” »

South exposure glazing at 3pm, noon, and 9am.

Prologue: I have been wanting for  to better educate myself on daylighting design and analysis, and its coordination with traditional lighting design.  Here in California, we have one of the most aggressive energy efficiency codes in the country, Title 24.  While this and voluntary measures such as LEED have driven impressive technological advancements in smart, lean building, we’re now a point of diminishing returns because, quite simply, most of the low-hanging fruit is gone.  With emerging technologies such as LED lighting still less efficient than good fluorescent lighting (and at three times the cost), there’s no source-efficiency cavalry around the corner. Continue reading “Incorporating Daylighting in Lighting Design: Part I” »

Some months ago, I went with my family to the Alexander Calder exhibit at MOCA Chicago.  The collection was impressive, dozens of his collages and a few sculptures for good measure.

Afterwords, as we were eating our ice cream, my father wondered aloud whether how much calculation or adjustment Calder would have had to do, to get things to balance out.  My off-the-cuff answer at the time was that only the last, smallest leaf would have to be correct, but I’ve since started to doubt whether that was correct. Continue reading “The Mathematics of Calder” »

Aerial shot from Adult reading section, looking towards Children’s.

If you were wondering what I do all day: Here’s a project that is still very much a work in progress, but the design process is kind of interesting so I though I’d post up where we’re at with it so far.  West Berkeley Library is a planned Zero-Net branch library for which I am consulting on the lighting.  The architects are Edward Dean and Michael Bulander of Harley Ellis Devereaux. Continue reading “West Berkeley Library, a Zero-Net Facility” »

It’s finally done, jesus. A few years ago, I bought some electronics components from a former Eastern Bloc country.  Nixie tubes are apparently still widely available over there, so since the largest line item in the order was shipping costs, I had them throw some Nixies in with the order.  They sat in my parts bin until, a few months ago, I decided to make a clock out of them. Continue reading “My Nixie Clock Build” »