Developing a Pedagogical Framework for an Integrated and BIM-Based High-Performance Design Studio: Experimental Case Study

As the current environmental crisis and depletion of our energy resources are pushing the Architecture, Engineering, and Construction (AEC) industry toward the design and construction of High-Performance (HP) buildings, new organizational and technological methods of practice, such as Integrated Design Process (IDP) and Building Information Modeling (BIM), have emerged to facilitate this transition. Consequently, Architecture schools are left with the duty of training practitioners with the required holistic vision and technical knowledge for designing HP buildings, technological abilities to work with new BIM tools, collaboration skills to work with cross-disciplinary team members, and theoretical knowledge to run the new processes. Scholars of architectural education are faced with a significant theoretical and practical knowledge gap on how to add all these new layers of knowledge and skills to what is an already saturated curriculum in architecture schools. To address this need, we developed a conceptual framework for teaching an integrated and BIM-based HP design studio for the MS program in Building Science. The experience was successful in creating an effective systematic method for integrating HP design elements in the students’ projects, with all the teams achieving their project performance targets in six distinct HP categories of energy consumption, greenhouse gas emissions, health and wellbeing, water management, and resiliency, while meeting reasonable architectural qualities and economic criteria. The key elements of this pedagogical approach, including teamwork, a structured and iterative design process, decision-making mechanism with a high level of attention given to various performance metrics, the use of related BIM technologies, and the evaluation techniques, are introduced, discussed, and recommendations are proposed for future applications.