sunflower
year : 2024
location : new england
Köppen climate classification: Dfa
‘Sunflower’ employs the roof solar chimney (RSC), a buoyancy-driven passive ventilation system, to reduce summer cooling load by increasing indoor air movement speed. Instead of a conventional environmental technique used as an appendix, the project integrates the passive strategy as a primary means to create architectural space itself. Optimization of orientation and geometry results in unique spatial experiences.
Each volume houses a program and is arranged in a circle, resembling a sundial, to respond to occupants’ cyclic space use patterns and corresponding sun coordinates. The garage is oriented northwest to block undesired prevailing winds during the heating season. During the day, solar energy heats the roof’s dark metal surface, creating an updraft of air at the shaft behind it. This produces a suction of air at the chimney’s base, increasing ventilation rate even in the absence of outdoor wind. The roof surface’s orientation and pitch angle can be coordinated to be perpendicular to the solar incident angle when solar insolation is at its maximum, precisely when space cooling is most needed. This three-dimensional approach to “airspeed design” becomes both programmatic and architectural. As solar insolation intensifies during summer, the suction of air proportionally increases, providing additional comfort. This contrasts with conventional mechanical systems, whose efficiency often decreases during hot seasons and can have an adverse environmental effect by exhausting hot air into an already overheated outdoor environment.
The scheme places equal emphasis on outdoor spaces. By arranging outdoor spaces between the circularly arranged volumes, occupants can easily extend their activities outward, choosing the most suitable outdoor atmosphere for their needs. Providing expanded climatic options widens the range of occupants’ comfort zones, reducing dependency on fossil fuels.
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