Roxanne:	Good afternoon, my name's Roxanne Bogucka and I'm a science instruction librarian based at the Life Science Library, and I'd like to welcome you all to Research+Pizza, a lunch time lecture series featuring research presentations by faculty from across our university.
	Please help yourself to drinks, and also to pizza, over here on the right, that is courteously and generously supplied by our supporter Austin's Pizza, so yay for them. If you're in line getting your drinks, the water and diet beverages are on the left cooler and the regular stuff is on the right.
	We are recording this, just as a notice, this will be recorded for a podcast. So when we get to the Q & A at the end of Matt Fajkus' presentation, I'll be wandering around with this microphone so if you have a question, toss your hand up in the air and I'll come and bring the microphone to you.
	This is the University of Texas Library's second installment of Research+Pizza and it features the Director of the School of Architecture's state of the art, fa‡ade thermal lab, Matt Fajkus, who's gonna talk about sustainable architectural design strategies, focusing on building envelopes and efficient fa‡ade systems.
	He received a Masters of architecture from Harvard Graduate School of Design and a bachelor of science in architecture from the University of Texas at Arlington. He worked in London for four years, at Foster & Partners and also worked for Max Levy Architect in Dallas, Brinkley Sargent Architects in Dallas, Julie Snow Architects in Minneapolis, and Mario Correa Arquitectos in Barcelona, and he's a licensed architect in the state of Texas.
	He's been a visiting critic and lecturer at the Architectural Association in London, the University of Lund, Sweden, the Arkitekt Skol of Aarhus, Denmark, the Chalmers Technical Institute in Gothenburg, Sweden, and the L'Ecole Epeciale d'Architecture in Paris. 
	His research informed his part in the collaborative design of the home research lab, built as part of the Pecan Street Smart Grid Experiment, to integrate scientific research with sustainable living strategies for the public.
	I also want to encourage you to visit the Fine Arts Library, where there is a More Than Architecture exhibit that will be going on throughout the month. It includes a display of one of his projects, a yet to be built bat house visitor center. This image here, is the bat house visitor center, so go to the Fine Arts Library web page and you'll see a link about the More Than Architecture exhibit that will be going on through the month, and that has a reception on Friday evening. So be sure to check that out, and now without further ado, please welcome Matt Fajkus. (applause)
Matt:	Okay, so I started to think of a topic for this talk today and I knew it was gonna be a very broad audience, so I wasn't sure how to frame this very well, but I ultimately titled it "Skin Deep" which is often a phrase used to describe something very superficial, without much substance.
	In architectural design, the fa‡ade, or the skin of the building, is actually quite a critical thing, and so considering the fact that we spend 90% of our time indoors in this country, and that buildings consume 50% of all energy that's used, we tend to think of SUVs as a big culprit, and they are, but buildings are a huge energy consumer as well, and then the building fa‡ade, the building envelope, or the crust of the building, is what actually allows for the most heat transfer, obviously.
New Speaker:	I'm gonna show a bit from the thermal lab, I'll speak about the thermal lab very generically, and one student project related to that. I'm also gonna speak about a second project that I'm involved in as well.
	I first wanted to mention something that I think is quite critical to set up a discourse, in an architectural history, classism was defined by symmetry and overall geometric priorities, where the form was more important than function. So whether or not you would need to have four separate entries to your house, and need to have four foyers and need to have four equal bedrooms or not, classism would drive that, and being symmetrical on all axis was more important than function.
Matt:	Modernism then challenged that and said, "Well perhaps function should be driving the proportion of spaces, and the relationship between them." So perhaps the living room and the terrace might be larger, and the bathrooms and service storage areas might be smaller.
	What I propose is that, in the future, that actually light and energy will actually supersede function and form, to the extent that there will be no set visual standard for what we can expect buildings to begin to look like, rather it will be about creating very specific environments based on light needs and thermal needs.
	So, the thermal lab is essentially a 12-foot cube, that exists very near the School of Architecture, on the back of the West Mall Building. This was built by professor Verner Long, just before I came here, so I luckily sort of inherited this. Essentially it's a highly insulated box, on all sides, except the south fa‡ade, which allows for window treatment testing or fa‡ade testing of a south facing window. So if you control everything else, you know that the only place where light and heat can be exchanged is on that south fa‡ade. This is a shot inside, looking to the north, where all the equipment is housed, so that you could monitor, on a very granular level, you can have heat sensors peppered throughout the space, as well as on the inside of the glass, the outside of the glass, the inside of exchange structure, so on and so forth.
	So, I wanna just show, one student project. This is a student thesis project, which was interested in examining if there might be a shading structure that could be better than the typical shading structures we see of vertical louvers and horizontal louvers. It first began with an analysis of horizontal and vertical louvers and egg crate louvers, and understanding how these work and how they perform in terms of day light and thermal performance, and by getting a sense of a baseline of how those perform, then trying to propose something that might actually, not only allow a better light quality, but actually allow more view, cause the problem with louvers quite often is that the view is quite marginalized. That's not considered very carefully.
	So, what was developed was a version of a honeycomb structure, which would allow for optimized views at standing and seating level, and then minimizing heat gain within. As we all know from this past heat wave, there are six months of the year, in this climate, when you don't want any direct sun to come in through windows, or you'll quickly overheat.
	It was a critical balance of trying to optimize view, but then minimize the amount of direct sunlight, yet still have diffuse light, light that bounces off the shading structure. So through a series of iterations using different softwares, the student was able to derive this, and then actually build, well this is still a digital model test.
	The honeycomb structure, I should say really quickly, there's three basic reasons why that was chosen. One was that that geometry loosely mimics the geometry of the movement of the sun, throughout the day, also it's structurally efficient, through triangulation. Often you'll see diagonal members in steel structures to help reinforce for lateral reinforcement and it's also a stackable module. If you think as opposed to, a circle, for example, the faceted geometry of the honeycomb allows it to stack and be quite efficient in terms of material usage.
	So, it was actually made, it was actually cut out of a form of plastic called polypropylene, at the school of architecture, it was C&C routed and actually built up on the platform and then installed. The results showed that it performed as well, in terms of light and thermal exchange, as any other conventional shading structures, but it allowed better views, and used less material. So it was an interesting first stab, a very promising first stab at trying to optimize the way that we can design shading structures.
	I should mention, that it's in this specific climate, this isn't meant to be a universal solution everywhere. Having said that, what's important is that part of the study dealt with, we had to worry about comparative analysis, so at the moment you can see there's a gap up here, this platform was built just for the lab and there's a twin lab starting construction next month. The purpose of that is to have dual-comparative analysis, so that you can understand on the exact same day, with the exact same weather conditions, that one structure performs ... can you hear me? I'm getting ... It's okay? Yeah.
	So, one structure performs, you know, X, another structure performs Y. At the moment what we have to do, is you have to do a test one week and then take that down and then do the control test the next week or vice versa and then you have to kind of figure out what the difference was, between the weather those two different weeks. That will be a very big improvement, upon our analysis, once we get the second lab built.
	That's just a shot during graduation, there's no testing going on here.
	I want to speak really briefly about a project, so in line of thinking about building skins, this being a little more speculative and conceptual. A project that I designed, then thinking about, what if we were to try to optimize a building skin? If you basically distilled a small house, a 400 square foot house, down to just being structure and skin, what might you be able to do? If you begin to think of ... imagine if this is a cross-section through a small house, and you imagine having a very thick skin, where you could plug in different types of insulation or different types of light modulating devices, as well as your own belongings. And actually use that as an instrument to manipulate light.
	Let's see and this was driven by a competition by Habitat for Humanity, which was interested in trying to design a 400 square foot house, for two adults, that could basically exist in various climates around the world. So the idea was that you have the starter, the starter frame, and you could plug in regional materials into any context and so you have consistency among all the various houses in that region, but then a variety by the personal belongings that inserted in different parts of the thick skin. So I'm not going to speak in much detail about his, but it was an interesting exercise to try to understand, what might you be able to do with manipulating the structure to allow for a bit of a undulating landscape, cause you would obviously need to have a bit of ... you can't have walls in a 400 square foot house or you'd quite quickly block everything up. So how would you begin to suggest different programmatic functions?
	And then, I won't speak about this too much, but also then did a light study based on taking that same form and then imagining punched windows, which is what one would typically expect in a residential application, and then curtain wall windows, which you typically expect in an office or more like similar to here. And then proposing this hybridized-filter wall, which would actually modulate light, in a more scattered manner. And it ended in aluminum mapping, and it's not too surprising with this top row being a typical window condition where you'd expect, so this is showing essentially, the light levels in plan, looking from above in that house. So understand that you have some very hot spots here, but then quite darker spots, that's when you have the punched windows. 
	Of course, when you have all open, you have quite a lot of, well too much light, actually. So what's interesting here is create a bit of a varied landscape, that looks a bit like Mark Rothko paintings, which as I was saying before, perhaps instead of having buildings that dictate our behavior, instead you have an envelope, which allows for a variety of experiences and then you can migrate around the space, depending upon what light level you would need at any given time or temperature, you know variations of temperature among any given zone. 
	So, this geometry is not really significant, it's more about creating an atmosphere where the building skin and the building envelope can allow for a variety of experiences, by manipulating natural light. So again, coming full circle back to this speculative progression here.
	So the last thing I wanted to speak about, a project that I'm working on, that's relate to the Pecan Street Project, which is a very large entity, but it's funded by a grant from the Department of Energy and a lot of our effort has been to create a, what we're calling ... it's changed names many times, the entomology of the project is as interesting as the project itself in some ways. At the moment, I call it "The Living Lab," the client disagrees now, but I'm gonna call it the Living Lab mostly, but sometimes it's called the Home Research Lab, and it's called the Pike's Powers Lab.
	It was meant to be a demonstration of sustainable living in the Mueller Development, so a bit of a model home, but then it's also an actual active laboratory. So NREL, National Energy Renewable Lab, out of Boulder, Colorado, this will be their Austin seat, this will be where they actually will use, they will actually use the facilities here to test sustainable technologies, as will UT researchers, and skills men from ACC.
	So, to give you a bit of context, those of you who aren't familiar with Mueller, if this is downtown and this is UT, Mueller is the old airport in Austin, which is quite close to downtown, and you can still see the old runway. It's being developed into a sustainable mixed use community, which one of the main sustainable features is high-density. So by having quite small lots, that makes a very walkable community, and a lot more ... So people still have their private property, but they also have a quicker access to parks and public facilities.
	Well I should mention here that we managed a large part of this, was trying to figure an appropriate lot, because it has a bit of a private function to it, but it also has a public accessibility issue. It was meant to be, the demonstration would be visitable by the public at certain times, and so it needed to be in a residential context, but needed to be accessible.
	We managed to get a lot that's directly across from the old control tower from the '60s, which is being preserved. Actually, as a quick side anecdote, Quentin Tarantino wanted to explode this tower, I think when he was filming "Machete" here, and it managed to be saved, people rallied around, saved it. It's a fantastic old piece and bit of an orientation device, as well, so we thought within a very large development, to have this orientation device to the actual Living Lab site, was critical.
	So, we have almost an east-west orientation, it's not quite true east to west, and this particular lot was master planned to be a shop house lot, which means work/live essentially, where you have light commercial on the ground floor and two stories of residential above, it's a very European model, but quite new to the U.S.
	So, the idea, the way the master planners had drawn this out was that you would have the three-story unit, the commercial and residential above, on Burkman, and then have a one story detached garage in the back. What all that really left you was a very small, sort of ping-pong sized yard, really, because these are 20 by 80 foot lots. So it's only 1600 square foot, the entire lot, and when you get to build a 2500 square foot program there. So the strategy was to actually treat that base, all as on large plinth or podium, where you pull the garage and that commercial area, which will be lab for our purposes, initially, and then you allow for a large roof terrace on top.
	So, you have both a large, sort of end piece, or book end to the block, to hold that down and then you also have an amenity on top. Though it's a lab in the short run, it eventually is meant to become a, will be sold as a residence down the road, so we needed to be careful to safeguard for this being a residence. So it was a nice feature to be able to distill the two, and have a difference between the actual podium below and the two story residence articulated and floating above that. 
	So, this is one of the earlier renderings, we're beginning to imagine this lab or commercial zone below, and the the two-story residence up above. In terms of materials, there were obviously many things we were considering in this. One was, thinking about, we found this material called bio-luminum, which is essentially recycled aircraft aluminum, which we though was very fitting to be directly across from the old control tower in the airport, and to be a sort of reincarnated airplane floating above this plinth, and then we used several other strategies.
	In order to have an occupiable roof terrace here, there really isn't much room for any sort of yard, so instead we proposed a vertical garden on the core, which was quite substantial, the core, because it needed to house the stairs, an elevator, an accessible elevator, and many other service features. We have a ductless HVAC system, so the vertical garden helps to cloak that a bit and then also to act as a bit of a nice feature as well. So this being the view on Antone, that's Burkman just beyond there, and you can see the control tower and there's meant to be a park, surrounding that. Of course, this is still a rendering, this is still a drawing. It's meant to start construction this fall.
	A couple things I'll point out. Ideally, the most sustainable way to lay out a building in terms of solar orientation is to have the long axis going east-west, because the south sun is much more manageable, then the east or west. Once the sun goes quite low, especially in the west, it's very difficult to combat that, so in this case, we do have more of an east-west exposure, but we had a bit of a dilemma because the view is actually to the east, to the tower. So we wanted to allow for a view to the tower, but not open up too much there.
	These small apertures, as windows in the north, were more to do with privacy for the residents. So being on a very exposed corner, you're able to have a little more privacy, and then there was also a concept of that being a bit of thickened wall, that allows for storage within it.
	You can see a bit here in that space, where you're able to store walls, it starts to have a couple storage and display in an interesting way and these are those vertical windows, and then the view to the east. So these, it's a bit of a tongue in cheek gesture at the moment, to be honest, but having some sliding louvers you begin to mitigate, at least somewhat, the morning sun, if you want to block that out. But then you can open it up later in the afternoon or the evening if you want to.
	One of the main features of the house, and one of the larger principles of sustainability, is trying to be as flexible as possible. So Michael Braungart who wrote "Cradle To Cradle" talks about that we don't know exactly what the right thing to do is, ever. We don't know if we're doing, if we're designing the right thing, there might be something better, we might realize what we're doing is doing some harm down the road. So what you try to do is just try to not do anything that's irreversible, everything you do, you try to make it that it can be undone.
	So, one of those strategies when that comes to architectural principles, is being as flexible as possible and having, for example, as open of a plan as possible, and that's quite difficult on a 20 by 80-foot lot.
	But in this case, getting back to the core, the vertical circulation core, there was a notion of trying to contain, everything that's fixed, pretty much right there and allowing everything else to be completely open, so that as this changed from lab to residence it didn't involve tearing out a bunch of materials and having to worry about reuse of those, recycle of those. So the adaptability was a big struggle here.
	Just lastly here, I want to mention what interesting dilemma that architects come across, is trying to convey your concept or trying to get across what it is you're after and one, obviously, logos and branding are a critical part of that. So of this project, we termed it the Living Lab, I should also mention, did mention previously, that professor Ulrich Dangel and I have collaborated on this, with some engineering faculty as well, Atila Novoselac and then also Tammy Glass, in interior design has contributed as well.
	What we found interesting about this logo was that we were able to capture the notion of house and home, with this child-like vision of a house for the letter A, but then actually refer to it actually being a laboratory. So as I mentioned, it's meant to both be a bit of a model in terms of massing and in terms of material choice, I haven't even mentioned the PV strategy, about any electric vehicles that we have, that we've acquired to be used as well. 
	But it's also, the research is very specific about domestic research, and home research lab. So for example, it's part of a clean energy smart grid project, which I didn't get into too much, either, which deals with a two way energy system, where you're able to sell extra power back to the grid when you harvest enough sunlight, and you're able to have enough power, you can sell that back to the grid. 
	Also, we're developing essentially technologies where, from your smartphone, you'd be able to understand exactly where you're using all of your energy, how much that costs. So for example, if you leave town for the weekend, and then you realize that you didn't set your ... you didn't adjust your thermostat, you could do that remotely and understand that you would save $18.43 by changing it to X temperature. Or you could set a budget for yourself, that you want to spend no more than $45 in your electric bill this month and then allow your house to then give you the amount of A/C that you would get for that amount, you can then override it of course, but we feel that by having that one to one understanding, of your usage, would be much more useful.
	If you imagine going to a grocery store, and you just buy everything, at the end they just tell you a price, we'd find that very disturbing. That's exactly what happens with our electric bills, our energy bills. We don't know how much we're consuming, we don't know how that partitions or breaks down.
	That's a lot of the research that's going here, is understanding how to make that interface very understandable and making the graphics of it, and the dashboard, if you imagine, of each of those systems. So that you can understand the difference between washing your dishes in the afternoon is more expensive than washing them late at night, for example, that's when the peak load is hitting.
	There's all these things that people don't actually realize. People don't actually realize their energy consumption and their energy footprint, so that was a very large part of this project as well.
	Lastly, I just wanted to wrap up to mention that this is obviously a quick sampling of a few things, but that really a lot of what we do as architects is beginning to understand problems or how you problematize something is very important. You have to understand what you're going to try to solve, and you don't just solve it by, if you're given a program and you just create X number of space and you clear that space.
	You often want to have some sort of concept, and obviously a consciousness of the energy, energy being used-
Speaker 3:	May I have your attention please, could Renita Forte come to the check-out desk? Renita Forte, please come to the check out desk, thank you.
Matt:	So there are a lot of different things going on and this has a lot to do with architecture being somewhere between art and engineering, where you're concerned about both aesthetics and performance. Where traditionally, those two fields have been quite different, so we're very interested in, at least I am in my own research, are trying to couple the two. So that's it, thanks.
Roxanne:	Okay, so if you have any questions, now's the time. Raise your hand and I'll be coming around with the microphone and also where you're sitting, you've probably noticed that you have some feedback forms, so we'd like to have those back from you at the end of the program. 
	So, who's got a question?
Speaker 4:	Yeah, hi Matt, I have question about vertical gardens, you see these quite a lot in European countries, like they've got them inside Heathrow, there are hotels in London that have them, and museums and galleries, how common are they in the U.S.?
Matt:	Vertical gardens actually aren't very common, one large reason, and this is the reason why a lot of things exist as they are in the U.S., is just access to land or we constantly expand, everyone expects to have their own proper lawn and their own fence, and their own ... We never strived for a density that requires it, I think is the main reason.
	There are also climatic reasons, as well, there is obviously in London, the weather is much more amenable, to many different types of species of ivy, for example, that can grow in a vertical wall. So you're more limited in your choices here, but I think the main reason is that people haven't needed to be and you know haven't needed to have ingenuity in the U.S. just because we've always just kept expanding.
	Now of course, this largely has to due with the fact that, many of our cities are planned around the car, instead of around the pedestrian, and that sort of thing. So I think that's really the main driver, and then also just a general interest in Europe, of seeking sustainable methods, there's a larger ... as we all know, there's a huge camp in this country that doesn't even believe that climate change is true. There's some reticence from many different parties to actually try to invest in these technologies, so that's a good question.
Speaker 5 :	I happen to notice in the slide of the honeycomb structure, there was a lovely overhang on the roof of the building it's close by, that shaded down three stories.
Matt:	Right.
Speaker 5:	What's wrong with plain old overhangs? The honeycomb was fun and nice and probably gave you a little bit better quality light, but the over hangs seemed to work pretty well, too.
Matt:	Overhangs are certainly a very tried and true, vernacular strategy. And overhangs do work quite well, I didn't mention in the beginning of this particular application was thinking about commercial or large scale fa‡ades, and so is interested in trying to stay within a relative constraint thickness. 
	But yes, overhangs and eaves work very well on the domestic level. This, even here we were constrained, this is really a tongue in cheek gesture, really, but even just those little moves make a pretty big ... Let me go back one more ... Make a pretty big difference there.
	So, in this application, I wouldn't have done something, like that. So it was more to do with the scaler issue, which is again, I apologize for sampling through these really quickly, it was more to do with the scaler issue than it was to do with a negation of that, that vernacular strategy.
Speaker 6:	Hi Matt, I have a quick question about the economics involved with sustainability and how I'm a firm believer that once it becomes more economical for the general mass to start demanding these things, then in the construction industry and everybody else might start taking this more as a norm. 
	And I'm wondering about your particular projects, was economics investigated in your projects?
Matt:	Actually, no-
Speaker 7:	Could you repeat the question?
Matt:	Okay, yeah, I'll repeat the question. The question was, about the economics of sustainable construction or sustainable technologies, and the fact that, the question suggested that the cost of sustainable technologies will probably come down quite a lot, once they become more mainstream, but it hasn't quite reached that tipping point. I'm adding that, least she didn't say that.
	Basically, that's very much the case, that's exactly why the government had rebates for PV panels, to encourage people to actually invest in solar panels for their houses, so that the market would then begin to diversify quite a lot and the price would come down. And that did happen, it came down quite a lot, but it's still not quite down enough, to where it's reachable for many sectors of the population.
	That hasn't been a part of my studies, to answer your question, specifically, but I'm very acutely aware of this problem and it's something I do think about quite a lot. I think that it inevitability will need to happen, because currently, as you suggest, the building industry is very set in their ways, and they very set in doing things the way they've always done them. Until there is enough demand, from the consumers, to actually insist upon sustainable technologies, things such as PV panels, that's an easy target, PV panels. 
	So, things such as PV panels, as soon they insist upon enough, and it just makes complete sense, in this climate especially, there is so much sun. It doesn't make as much sense in London, but they still have many more in London than they do here. It's unbelievable to me that this happens, but it is very much an issue of time and the market adjusting, and I think there is a tipping point, that will happen, but in terms of, I haven't studied exactly when that would arrive. Thanks.
Matt:	Thanks to UT Libraries, okay, yeah.
Speaker:	So, I agree a structure like you see here, I'm not sure if that's a wall or a window, leads to a much more sustainable local environment, but of course it's much more complicated than just building a flat window or a wall, probably much more costly. 
	So, is this somehow factored into the sustainability argument of structures like this?
Matt:	The thought is that this sort of thing would be a ... this gets a bit back to the previous question, that it does depend upon mass construction, for this to actually begin to work. So the initial thrust of this study was meant to be something that would be pre-fabricated and mass produced, in extremely high quantities. To the point where it would be competitive with any other wall framing system.
	It's a very valid point, and ultimately this is, I keep going over, these past two questions are coming back to the same thing. We ultimately always come back to this life cycle issue, that, so for example, the difference between buying, you can buy a light bulb for let's say $5 that will last one year and you can buy a light bulb for $10 that will last 20 years. Obviously it makes more sense to buy the light bulb that costs $10 that will last 20 years, than a light bulb that's $5 and will last one year, but there are people that just don't have the money to ... that's probably not an appropriate example, but there's people that don't have the money to make that initial investment, and so this is again where the government rebates have come in and tried to help with this.
	There still is a gap, and so that hasn't been a specific part of my research down to actually quantity surveying, and actually doing cost estimation, but so it does have a bit of an assumption that this would need to work, but it hasn't ... Well, so for example, the honeycomb system was built for $1,500 for example, so this system actually is something that's not any more expensive than buying vertical or horizontal aluminum louvers that you would buy somewhere.
	So that certainly was a factor here, but then for this next one, put it a little more speculative, that wasn't as much of a driving factor. It's a good question.
	Thanks to UT Libraries for having me and thanks for sitting everyone. (applause)

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