MIT Sustainable Design Lab
MIT Reference Office

Christoph Reinhart, Alstan Jakubiec and Diego Ibarra

We are proposing a modeling and analysis convention for a side- and/or toplit space called the ‘reference office’. The reference office is meant to act as a baseline for comparative analyses of different façade and/or electric lighting technologies and may be used in research (facilitating the comparison of results from multiple studies) in practice (for product rating) as well as in architectural education (enabling students to contrast their design ideas to a set of standard design solutions). The reference office represents a somewhat typical ‘shoebox’ model as is commonly used for conceptual design explorations. The shoebox is comparatively ‘deep’, more than three times the window head height, so that the impact of light redirecting façade technologies can be resolved. Venetian blinds are manually controlled to avoid discomfort glare throughout the office. A Dashboard view of the Reference office is shown below.

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Paper at Building Simulation 2013