| Summary: | While the concept of global design has liberated the aesthetic genus of contemporary institutional architecture, it has brought with it a far greater set of problems in energy consumption. In order to build ‘intelligent’ buildings to counter these problems, we often design the problems and then engage into an expensive endeavour of finding possible solutions. This research aims to focus on the recent trends of building institutional geometries for the hot and dry climatic regions and analyse the case study of the east expansion of the College of Architecture in the University of Arizona, located in Tucson. The advent of mechanical cooling has encouraged the practice of building for any place disregarding the regional or climatalogical context. The ‘glass box’ is a common design solution for a day lit, aesthetically appealing post international style approach to commercial architecture. It is the view of the author that buildings born of such ideology has little empathy towards the macro and micro climate considerations. Using the case study of the new architectural expansion building is an attempt to analyze a glass dominated prototype in the desert. The research focuses on the integrity of such designs in terms of energy consumptions, thermal efficiency and comfort. Energy modelling of parametric retrofits suitable to the climate is conducted to study changes incurred from the building’s original state. The objective of this research is to investigate possibilities of globalised architectural solutions but still hold roots to climatological responses. Reference examples of similar structures built in the desert have been observed during the course of the research to benefit the parametric runs. The Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) Green Building Rating System, developed by the U.S. Green Building Council, provides a suite of standards for environmentally sustainable construction. LEED 2.2 Energy and Atmosphere credit runs has been a part of the project goal to gain a perspective from the USGBC LEED certification criteria to determine what can be achieved for optimal energy efficiency in this particular constitution. In particular, the study illustrates the functioning of the case study building in terms of energy consumption for space cooling. eQuest runs when compared to the utility data of similar sized buildings on campus shows an astonishing increase in the chilled water usage. Similarly, the per-square foot usage electricity for space cooling was found to be remarkably higher than the old architecture building. Energy usage pattern reflects a moderate decrease with optimization strategies on the building envelope. The results clearly show a great improvement in the building energy performance for space cooling with glazing changes and shading strategies.
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