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Understand the Climate - Architecture Registration Exam Webinar Site Planning & Design Exam Review

1,999 views · Published 6 April 2015 · 3:48 · Indexed 1 October 2026

Channel: Black Spectacles · 2015 · Education

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Okay. Understand the climate. So this is fairly straightforward. It gets very, very intense very quickly. I'm just going to touch on it just to remind you of a couple of specific issues. One is when somebody is talking about climate, anything like rain, snow, sun, winds, anything like that, you can break that down into two basic ideas. One is the micro and one is the macro. So the macro climate is the big picture. What happening regionally? I can talk about how much rain we get here in Chicago, or how much we get in Tucson, or how much we get in Seattle. Those are things I can look up and we can find out and we can say, "All right. In this region, the annual rainfall is roughly this." That might be useful to know. Do I need to put covers on patio spaces? Do I need to have really big gutters or can I go with small gutters? There's lots of design decisions that start becoming important about understanding that. Snow, am I worried about snow accumulation in structure and how that works? I can look that up in very clear ways.
The idea of micro climate, though, is, "Well, that's great." I can look that up about wind, about snow, about sun, and have that sort of general information. But at the micro level, meaning on the site, we might be able to talk about certain number of solar hours that you get if you're building a building in Indianapolis. Indianapolis, across the span of a year, will get X number of thousand hours of sunlight averaged every year. You can find that number and know how that's generally going to work. That's a very useful thing, but it's not useful at all if there's a tall building next to you that's shading the site all the time. That's a micro climate issue. 
So there's certain things I can learn from the macro climate, and there's certain things I have to look at from the micro climate. If I'm putting up a wind turbine to generate electricity, I would definitely want to understand what the macro climate wind directions are. Like, is this a place where I have a consistent wind in a consistent direction? That's great, but if I put that then in an urban setting where there's a lot of turbulence because there's a lot of buildings, it's going to be meaningless. It's not going to work. I'm going to have to use a different kind of turbine that isn't mono-directional. So both of those issues, micro and macro, very important. You should definitely understand those things.

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