Hi, everyone, welcome.
My name is Nick McCullen, I am the director of studies on the
MSc in architectural engineering, environmental design at the
university of Bath. But most people just call it environmental
design or ED.
This is a brief rundown introduction of the course.
So, first of all, let me welcome you to Bath.
As you can see from this map, we've had participants from all
over the world. So first of all, in our department, we are a
joint department of architecture and civil engineering here at
the University of Bath. This is quite unique in the U.K.
where architects and civil engineers study together on the
design of buildings and other structures.
So in ACE, in architecture and civil engineering, we have four
MSc courses, there's Conservation of Historic Buildings, Modern
Building Design, Innovative Structural Materials, and your
course, Environmental Design, which is an architectural
engineering course. These four courses share a set structure,
which is this. This shows you the year layout for the four
courses and the different units.
So there are some units across all four programs, and these are
a unit dealing with professional and research skills, unit
dealing with project and construction management.
Later in the year, Multidisciplinary project.
And then once you've done all the teaching units, the
dissertation, which is a research project that you'll carry out
. These are shared, as I say, between four different courses.
On top of that, we have three technical units which are specific
to this MSc.
There are formative and summative assessments, the summative
assessments count towards your final mark.
First of all, what is an MSc?
An MSc is more advanced than an undergraduate degree.
We will give you a lot of material and a lot of support.
At this level of study, and MSc is a high level of study, you're
expected to show a lot of independent working, a lot of
independent thinking, independent research and also creativity,
the course mission is to equip you with not just a shallow
understanding, but a deep knowledge of both the science and
engineering principles required to design and deliver truly low
or zero carbon buildings.
We also, on top of that, not just knowledge.
We're trying to give you the actual tools and techniques that
you'll use in industry when you're applying this knowledge in
various situations.
Along with that, you should develop the confidence to argue
through actual calculations, but in a design context.
We're also, along with that, trying to instill within you the
traits required to succeed.
But also in academia, a lot of our students go on to study PhDs
and become academics themselves.
So I'll just go into the structure of our course a little more
here. The course is broken down into two stages, stage one is a
taught stage and stage two is the dissertation stage.
The three technical units you will see on this MSc, called
environmental performance of materials and buildings and this
covers how buildings perform with their environment both the
internal environment and the external environment.
So the impact that they have on our environment internally, but
also on the natural environment and on how the environment and
weather impacts on the building itself.
Assessment and modeling tools so these are actual computational
modelling tools that you will use to put in your designs and
calculate how they will actually function.
This covers the actual systems you'll put in, the ventilation
strategies and systems, heating systems, lighting systems,
windows that will be used to design your truly low carbon, low
impact buildings.
Once you've done all the taught elements, you will be applying
this knowledge in a multidisciplinary project.
Now, this multidisciplinary project is between the four MSc's,
so you'll sit on a design team and working to put in your
specialist knowledge that you've learned in these units on a
project that you will be given.
Once you've passed stage one, you can move on to stage two.
And this is a research dissertation.
This is where you pick your own research topic.
You take ownership of this and you work alongside a supervisor
to advise you and you write a research dissertation.
Here are some of the main key teaching staff that you'll
encounter on this MSc.
At the University of Bath, everybody gets allocated a personal
tutor, designed to provide you with a personalised point of
contact to the university.
You will be given individual teaching schedules for each of the
different units. So, for example, this is for that first unit I
was talking about.
Type of assessment and feedback you'll get, at formative level,
there's calculations and oral presentations.
You may be asked to write essays and critiques and asked to
produce a model, and model the outputs.
We will then give you some feedback.
And formative is to help you in assessed reports, summative is
final and goes towards your final mark.
This is a map of the university campus.
This is 4 East South.
The large architecture and civil engineering studios and labs,
we'll be in 4 East South Studios, Level two studios.
I look forward to meeting you all.
Thanks for listening in. Bye.
Hi, I'm Sukumar Natarajan, and I'm not the unit coordinator for
this unit, which is AR50467 entitled The Environmental
Performance of Materials and Buildings.
This has really been coordinated by Nick, whom you will have
met, and of course, there's three of us looking after various
parts of this unit. There's me, Sukumar, there is Richard who's
looking after the material side and Nick himself looking after
the thermal performance end of things.
But it's an interesting unit because it integrates several
aspects of building design.
And I thought before you see me in class, you're probably going
to be viewing a lot of these materials.
I'll be seeing you online and in person.
But I thought this is a good way to say hello and introduce
myself and just say a little bit about what this unit is trying
to do, mainly because my end of this unit comes first.
So the unit is really about the relationship between the indoor
environment and the outdoor environment as mediated by the
building, okay so the material selection and the overall
performance of the building in terms of energy, carbon, indoor
air quality and so on, is fundamentally determined by this, by
the interface between the indoor air and the outdoor air.
And we as designers, as architects and engineers, that's our
goal. We're trying to change the indoor environment to produce a
healthy, comfortable indoor environment that is also light on
the planet. So a lot of this unit is actually trying to make
that connection between indoors and outdoors.
And you will see that both in terms of just health and air
quality, but also in terms of energy and carbon.
OK, so we're going to start off looking at the broad issues of
climate change. We're going to look at issues around energy
codes and how building design is fundamentally changing all over
the world. I know many of you will come from international
countries. Perhaps you're sitting in an international country
right now and how these changes are also closely tied to
materials and the thermal performance of these materials, but
not just the thermal performance.
It's the broader sustainability issues around the selection of
these materials, their lifecycle costs, the embodied energy and
all of these intertwined aspects.
And you will see that also in terms of how the assessment for
this unit is set up, it is set up in three parts for precisely
this reason, we have aspects of building design, more global
aspects form orientation, massing, all of these issues, but then
that is conditioned by the material choices we make.
So the second part of the assessment you'll be undertaking is
actually looking at how to make clever material choices and
finally determining through hand calculations the thermal
performance of these materials.
Okay, so that's it. I just wanted to say hello.
And so you have a face to relate to when you come in for the
live online interactive learning sessions, I'm sure next told
you all about it, so I'm not going to bang on about it.
See you again in the slides very soon.
Bye Bye.