Urban Air Cartography

Achieving a real ‘ground truth’ understanding of how airflow works in our inhabited spaces presents a complex challenge; requiring sensitive, creative, sustainable and scalable methods of observation and simulation.

Event Title: Urban Air Cartography
Who: Eric Schuldenfrei, Faculty of Architecture, The University of Hong Kong
Theme: Grow
Genre: Talk and Exhibition
Location: AIRSIDE 2/F Atrium, 3/F Gate33
Age group: All ages
Registration required: Yes

Eric Schuldenfrei, SPARK Talk

Talk title: The Architecture of Airflow: Building Healthy Cities for Our Collective Future

The spaces and buildings that we inhabit across the city represent a complex, interconnected environmental network of water, energy, and crucially – air.

Architects seek to design the spaces that we work and live in to maximize the efficiency and safety of our environmental systems. When we look closer, a complex reality is revealed; one informed by the geometry of the buildings, the seasons, and by the inhabitants’ interventions, where small, individual decisions at the human scale compound to create large scale impact.

Our team has developed a network of tools that allow us to understand, engage and interface with this ‘hidden truth;’ uncovering, understanding and predicting these unseen, but vital, air flow patterns to allow architects and urban planners to make informed, targeted steps to improve and innovate in the built environment.

The diverse toolkit we are developing empowers us with the ability to interface with, even redesign, airflow paths. Identifying where we can ‘edit’ our city via tactical interventions across old and new buildings, we propose precise changes that improve the air quality and sustainability of our spaces and the comfort, health and wellbeing of all citizens.

*The work described in this exhibition and talk was substantially supported by a grant from the Research Grants Council of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, China (HKU C7105-21G).