Building Performance Simulation in Undergraduate Multidisciplinary Education: Learning from an Architecture and Engineering Collaboration

The paper is concerned with the integration of building performance simulation within a collaborative/ multidisciplinary higher-education environment. The paper presents a semester-long setup in which a course attended by both architecture and engineering students and jointly taught by an architect and an engineer ultimately collaborate with an undergraduate architecture design studio on proposing upgrades to an existing building. As an introductory-level course with building performance simulation (BPS) content, it strives to incorporate other components in addition to the collaborative design one. These other components aimed at grounding the BPS into physical reality are: back-of-the-envelope hand calculations, physical modelling, and data acquisition measurements. The authors find that leaving aside the goal of achieving refined analytical methods of BPS to instead endeavour to establish a proper collaborative framework between BPS consultant and designer (here represented by the course attendee and the studio attendee, respectively) early in the design process delivers interesting results in terms of student understanding of how buildings work.