Perry Yang
Georgia Institute of Technology
Perry Yang is an Associate Professor jointly appointed to School of City and Regional Planning and School of Architecture at the Georgia Institute of Technology. He is also the Covestro (Bayer Material Science) Chair Professor at the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) - Tongji Institute of Environment for Sustainable Development. He directs the Eco Urban Lab at Georgia Tech and Tongji University. Perry’s work focuses on promoting the ecological and energy performance of cities through urban design.
Cities are made of systems of energy, materials, water and informational flows that influence and to certain extent, determine physical form of urban environment. Cities can also be seen as a form of urban metabolism, an... [ view full abstract ]
Cities are made of systems of energy, materials, water and informational flows that influence and to certain extent, determine physical form of urban environment. Cities can also be seen as a form of urban metabolism, an analogy of organism that contains flows that are organized in complex forms over uncertain and stochastic processes. While we recognize the importance of the role of materials in the making of sustainable and resilient communities, however, the material dimension was rarely considered in the literature of urban planning and design. The knowledge and research method of how smart materials contribute to the enhancement of system performance, resource renewability and system resilience at the scale of an urban community is to be further developed.
The research investigates an urban-scale building design and performance evaluation system using a workers’ village in Shanghai as a test case. The Holarchy concept (Graedel and Allenby, 2010) is redefined here to address a multiple scale urban system that ranges from M (materials), P (products), B (buildings) and N (neighborhoods). In such a system, different levels maintain their own coherent structure and system properties while being connected to a multiple-scale complex structure. It is used to describe complex relationships across scales of materials/components (such as polycarbonates window glazing and polyurethane window frame) to products/ an integrated system (such as a high performance building) that can be scaled up further to a community-level complex system (such as an eco district or neighborhood).
In the test case, the material flows and processes transform resources from raw materials into products and then a building system that are used by end users for a given period of time and eventually recycled or reused. By utilizing computing tools such as BIM (Building Information Modeling) and GIS (Geographic Information System), a visualization platform is suggested to show processes of material flows from manufacturing, design and construction to operation:
- Manufacturing, looking at the making of both materials and products and how the process and its inputs interact with the overall system.
- Design and Construction, what has the material properties been designed for, what has the product been designed for, and how it is actually being constructed.
- Operation, what levels of performance of the system are in terms of energy use and carbon emissions.
Instead of showing the entire holarchy urban system through its entire life cycle, the research limits the scope of work and aims to demonstrate the holarchy approach, a multiple scale modeling method through a selected smart material product (e.g. polyurethane window frame) and its application to the value chains from raw material manufacturing, design construction to operation.
Smart materials, holarchy, urban building systems, life cycle
Graedel T E, Allenby B R, 2010, Industrial Ecology and Sustainable Engineering, Prentice Hall.
