Kieran Timberlake, PE International develop BIM tool for green building life cycle assessment

Kieran Timberlake and PE International have developed Tally, a new analysis tool to help BIM users keep better score of their projects’ complete environmental footprints. When used alongside other critical studies like daylighting simulation and energy modeling, BIM tools like Tally can help construction professionals move towards data-driven analysis for whole building life cycle assessment, writes TriplePundit.com.

Kieran Timberlake explains Tally:

Quantifying environmental impact typically involves performing a Life Cycle Assessment, which is a relatively new and confounding practice for most architects. Currently, no efficient means exists to evaluate environmental impact of materials during the design and planning process, when it can have the most influence on design decisions and building performance. An architect needs this impact data at the time of material specification, but the laborious process required for calculating embodied environmental impact across a broad range of design decisions prevents this from happening at crucial moments in the design process.

In principle, Building Information Modeling (BIM) ought to enable architects to acquire this information, but in practice, projects are not modeled to a sufficient level of detail to account for all of the materials in a building at their actual volume. In order to address these challenges, we invented Tally™, a Revit app that allows users to imbue each assembly with information about the architectural products it contains. Tally™ quantifies embodied energy along with other environmental impacts and emissions to land, air, and water. It can be used for whole-building analysis or for comparative analyses of various design options, and it can account for the diverse range of material classes defined in a BIM model, as well as materials that are not modeled explicitly.

For more on Tally, visit: http://kierantimberlake.com/pages/view/95/tally/parent:4.

Thanks to a $45 million federal appropriation to the Smithsonian Institution, the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center in Edgewater, Md., has broken ground on what is expected to be one of the most energy-efficient laboratories in the country. The 69,000-sf lab is targeting LEED Gold and is expected to use 37% less energy and emit 37% less carbon dioxide than a similar building.

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Emaar Properties teamed up with LEGO to create a miniature version of the Burj Khalifa as part of the LEGO Architecture series. Currently, the LEGO Burj Khalifa is available only in Dubai, but come June 1, 2011, it will be available worldwide.

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