Precedent Simulation and Analysis in Design History Survey Courses

With a warming climate placing greater emphasis on building performance and optimisation in architecture and interior design curricula, architectural history courses, already in crisis due to limited exchange with the comparatively topical, progressive, and exploratory format of the design studio, are struggling to keep up. As more histories of climatic design increase our understanding of the intersection between architecture and climate [most recently Daniel Barber&s;s Modern Architecture and Climate: Design before Air Conditioning (2020)], the question of how to better integrate a richer understanding of climatic design with the survey-based format of history of architecture and interiors courses remains. The often intangible, ephemeral qualities that describe a building&s;s complex choreography with its site – the movement of sunlight and wind, the dynamic and potentially severe effects of microclimate, the vestiges of use or neglect over time – tell important experiential narratives that elude the still-dominant text and image-based delivery modes defining architectural history pedagogy today. The proposed chapter centres on three undergraduate architectural history projects that pair familiar modelling and rendering software with easy-to-master simulation plugins* to provide students with a richer understanding of pre-air-conditioned precedent buildings and interiors. Just as historian and philosopher R.G. Collingwood had advocated for a form of historical inquiry based on “re-enactment” to reveal empirical “truths,” the modelling and simulation of architectural precedents allows students to “re-enact” a site over time, observing the microclimatic conditions weighing heavily on the earliest stages of the design process. Through this activated, operative approach to precedent analysis, architecture and interior design students are provided the tools to mine and confidently critique design decisions regarding orientation, massing, fenestration, and materiality that define the most significant buildings and interiors of the past.