As an architect observing the latest trends in building design, it’s likely that at some point, you’ll integrate a brise soleil into your CAD designs. While solar shading is an attractive, functional and relatively unusual design feature to include in building design plans, it can prove complex to draw up in CAD to illustrate how the end result might look. Thankfully, BIM can aid this process greatly.
Before we discuss how BIM is an ideal solution if you’ve not yet considered why you should be integrating solar shading in your building design, here are a couple of reasons.
Brise soleils are beneficial regardless of climate
With solar shading, buildings in warmer, sunnier climates can consume higher levels of cooling energy, while those in temperate and cold climates experience the benefits of winter sun, streaming in through windows facing south.
From an architectural perspective, having external shading on windows is advantageous during warm seasons as it prevents any unwanted solar heating of temperature controlled or air-conditioned spaces. Solar shading and sun control devices can also act as reflectors, or light shelves, and are specially designed to bounce the natural daylight deep within a building. This is very useful when ensuring buildings have enough natural light. Shading devices on the exterior of buildings are also very effective when used with glass facades.
Almost all climates benefit from the careful diffusing and controlling of natural light to improve lighting during the day.
They offer solutions to problems that can be overlooked
While, as an architect, your aim is to design a building that covers all bases – such as aesthetic appeal and usability – brise soleils provide an all-encompassing answer to more specific problems for building occupants. For example, solar shades dramatically reduce the building’s peak heat gains, and cool equipment needed.
Solar shading and sun control devices are also useful for improving the visual comfort of occupants, through a reduction of contrast ratios and the control of glare. This leads to the enhanced comfort, productivity and satisfaction of those occupying the building. Solar shading also allows for opportunities to differentiate between building facades, providing both human scale and interest in an otherwise homogenous design.
So, with all these pros in mind, it makes sense to join the solar shading movement and integrate brise soleils into your building design. As a standard tool in the architecture industry, it’s highly likely that you’re using CAD to draw up your ideas and create scale models. However, as a somewhat complex feature of building design, utilising BIM is, we’d argue, a necessary step to presenting an accurate, scalable and complete representation of your prospective building. Let’s discuss why this is:
Simple visual integration into your current building design
By incorporating a pre-designed BIM solar shading model into your current CAD building drawing, you have the versatility to adjust the material to match your current building and integrate the brise soleil into your plans seamlessly. Rather than having to do guesswork based on research from architectural louvre supply sites, you can get the model you need to instantly get an impression of how the final build could look. This also allows you to put a complete design together for your client/s that looks professional and will impress. Equally, solar shading will form part of any Planning Permission requests – so it’s essential that you include such a vital part of the external appearance and represent this area of the build as close to its prospective finished result as possible.
It makes the technical measurements and scaling less complex
One of the key challenges of designing a commercial building is the measurements and scaling. Particularly when developing a model of the building, accuracy is key to ensuring that clients, contractors and councils have a to scale visualisation of the building you have designed. BIM models of louvres and brise soleils can be quickly and accurately integrated into your pre-drawn CAD file, including the exact dimensions and measurements to ensure precision when construction begins.
Similarly, by using BIM, architects save time, as what is still a fairly non-traditional feature of commercial buildings doesn’t have to be painstakingly drawn up. Instead, you can obtain the correct type of solar shading – whether it’s aluminium, fabric, glass or stainless steel – in a simple-to-use BIM file that can be downloaded and used when needed. By having BIM models at hand, there are no further delays to the design process, providing quicker results for your clients.
Get in touch with us
If you’re in the process of designing a building for a client and have decided to integrate brise soleils in your design, contact the Solinear team for SOLBIM files today. We can also give you further advice and recommendations on types and materials to use, and answer any questions you may have about the use of our BIM models.
