Crunch design research

The City of Miami Beach is one of the most climate vulnerable cities on planet Earth. In the coming decades the city will have to face the challenges of sea-level rise combined with yearly threats of hurricanes, king tides, and tropical rain downpours that can dump as much as five inches of water on the city in one afternoon. Under the umbrella of CRUNCH (Climate Resilient Urban Nexus Choices) this first volume looks at designing building structures that can act as hybrids sitting in, out, or under the water with the ability to be self-sustaining.
This book features ten different approaches each envisioning and testing self-sufficient, adaptive, and resilient hybrid structures benchmarked against 100% carbon-neutrality using calibrated Autodesk Building Information Modeling (BIM) through cloud engines in Green Building Studio (GBS), Insight 360, Dynamo-Grasshopper, EnergyPlus, and eQuest tool-sets. All research designs were based on approximately 80-year scenarios in which modeling by NOAA, NASA, and reinsurance companies places much of the City of Miami Beach's existing infrastructure under water. The research focuses on a low-lying area called Lake Pancoast on Indian Creek in Miami Beach that is currently undergoing a massive city-led infrastructure transformation to raise roads, install storm water management systems, and a proposed living shoreline. Based on this "living shoreline" strategy of biotechnological, adaptive ecosystems such as mangroves, oysters and coral clusters, projects were developed as part of a bigger citywide program to combat sea level rise.

Thomas Spiegelhalter is a professor and a co-director of the Structures and Environmental Technologies Laboratory in the School of Architecture at Florida International University (FIU) in Miami. He is a registered architect, engineer, town planner and principal of "Thomas Spiegelhalter Studio + Associates" since 1990. He studied design, architecture, engineering, and town planning at the University of the Arts in Berlin and Bremen. He specializes in carbon-neutral, passive energy building and city planning, with the aid of parametric-algorithmic generative design workflows to quantitatively measure the efficiency of the built environment. He has received numerous awards and honors for his work and is published internationally.

Darren Ockert was the lead graduate researcher on CRUNCH Vol. 1. He has an eclectic background in the arts, music, technology, production, design, climate, architecture, landscape, and education. The intersection of architecture, landscape, technology, and innovation drives his belief that we already have the tools for a sustainable future and that the lens of climate change must inform every design decision going forward. He is the founder of www.ArchiNEXT.io a channel dedicated to educating the world about design solutions for positive impacts on the planet through our built environment.