Dan Weissman

This concept paper illustrates a new simulation method to assess how building facades distribute light into interior spaces and how data from simulation studies can inform design for better facade performance. Facade photometry, a term developed by the authors, uses annual simulations and localized weather data to create temporally based illuminance and luminance distributions. This photometric chart is a unique signature of a particular facade design measured at a specific point in a specific climate. By linking data from the daylight simulation to the facade, the areas of the facade that need to be adjusted for improved performance are highlighted. Facade photometry is intended to allow designers to easily compare the performance of complex building geometry and daylight control systems, thus becoming an efficient tool to further aid designers in creating highly energy-efficient, high-performance, and comfortable building facades.

Window views that provide visual connections to the outdoors have been shown to have multiple positive effects on occupants (Heschong 2021). These effects include improved health, well-being (Beute...

"As a child, my father would take my brother and I to the local junkyard. We’d watch, amazed, as the compressor squashed our waste into a dumpster, then scavenge through piles of scrap metal and climb gigantic wheeled Caterpillar earthmovers". For better or worse, this archetypal junkyard has given way to massively controlled spaces of waste disposal. Today, continuously increasing demand for material coupled with a culture of disposability, has coincided with heightened policy measures restricting landfill development. We have a crisis of waste management. Meanwhile, as landfilling has grown from a localized phenomenon into a regional set of distribution networks, neo-industrialization is emerging throughout the Great Lakes megaregion, suggesting new opportunities for re-territorialization of wasted landscapes. This project posits that extraction of existing landfill sites for material and energy is inevitable. Landfill Urbanism suggests that the act of landfill mining, a contentious and stinky proposition, has the capacity to foster a localized, robust industrial ecology, while also recasting the public’s relationship with our waste through tactical deployment of architecture and urban space-making. Directed Robotic Trash Extractors (DRT-E) exhume and cultivate material, as the project’s conveyor-belt infrastructure allows individuals, cooperatives and corporations to safely sort and collect based on their needs: a novel approach to accessing our 21st century resource. By allowing complete engagement with the public, Landfill Urbanism fosters productive interdependent relationships between consumers, as well as offering to its users a series of spectacular didactic, practical, and recreational experiences. Where the public of today consumes, the public of Landfill Urbanism harvests.