Paradise project - a Stavanger Kommune success story

Many countries around the world are known for their windy conditions. The high discomfort generated by heavy winds in some areas can affect people’s daily lives, creating a long-term impact on urban development plans and urban mobility, ultimately impacting real estate owners’ sales and lease price ranges.

Wind conditions in an urban environment can be improved or worsened by the design of buildings and landscapes. The height of a building, shape, or position relative to surrounding elements like parks, fences, and trees all affect wind conditions. This highly local wind data can be used to ensure pedestrian-friendly spaces in tomorrow’s cities and investigate other possibilities related to sustainable urban development.

Until recently, however, it was difficult, costly, and required a background in aerodynamics or computational fluid dynamics to use such data. But it will soon be possible to do so easily and cost-effectively without that background knowledge: architects and urban planners will be able to use data from wind simulations in urban design processes without any training in aerodynamics or computational fluid dynamics.

Imagine being able to quickly iterate your design projects to ensure satisfactory wind conditions for all your outdoor zones and their associated intended use!

Stavanger Kommune used wind data to make informed decisions for the Paradise project

While developing a fully automated tool to assist iterative urban design wind simulations, we have joined one of Stavanger Kommune’s most exciting projects. This year, we contributed to the city’s efforts to determine wind comfort in the Paradis area through new architectural and landscape designs.

The Paradis area is developing to become a densely populated residential area and a busy business district with a clear identity. From early on, the municipality adopted an urban plan for the Paradis station area that allows for extensive commercial development. Business giants have already shown interest in establishing themselves in this part of Stavanger. With this forward-looking development, the municipality hopes to create a district where businesses can thrive while creating a vibrant place for residents to live. We are thrilled to have been involved in this holistic effort by emphasizing pedestrian comfort, and wind flows for the district.

We have performed state-of-the-art wind simulations challenging the boundaries of what is possible with today’s technology. The simulations were performed on a massive area conforming to a cylinder with a diameter of 1,500 m. This is, to our knowledge, far beyond what has ever been performed! We have automatically downloaded local wind statistics and generated surrounding building and terrain models. Further, we ran the wind simulations and the data post-processing, and all these steps were performed directly in the cloud. The results were then presented in an understandable and primarily automatically generated report, with some custom input based on the nature of this particular project, and made available through our interactive platform.

Discover a tool that allows city planners and architects to model wind flows in urban environments

ArchiWind is a tool that removes the need for a CFD expert, often from a third party. It enables the user to report on wind conditions, removing the middleman. The complexity of these simulations is very high. Still, ArchiWind can provide the necessary insight into wind conditions, enabling architects and city planners to make well-informed design decisions that ensure pedestrian-friendly areas around their building projects.

In a nutshell, ArchiWind is a revolutionary new tool providing outstanding levels of efficiency and accuracy. It can produce results in hours rather than a week or more and has a competitive cost-effectiveness due to the whole process being automated.

The best of urban wind analysis and applications is yet to come

Soon, not only will ArchiWind be used by city planners and architects in Norway as we plan to make it available for other parts of Europe and eventually the world. Today, ArchiWind is used by architecture firms, urban development organizations, and the real estate industry. In addition to providing reports required to obtain building permits, it is used during the design phase to optimize wind conditions for pedestrian comfort. In the years to come, ArchiWind will extend to provide complete microclimate analysis. This additional information will enable proper ventilation for urban areas, reducing the heat island effect and potentially saving lives in future heat waves.

There are lots of potential uses for the ArchiWind platform. One could be to find the optimal flight path of a drone through a city on a given day. Another example would be to find the optimal position of a small-scale vertical axis wind turbine and estimate its annual and even daily/hourly energy production.

Investigate future wind conditions based on historical weather data

We aim for ArchiWind to be the most usable and reliable platform for wind assessment in building design and urban planning worldwide. The ideal use is for architects or city planners to upload their building models and press a button on our website. The next day they would have a complete report—showing how their new buildings and changes to the area will affect the wind conditions in the proximity, both positive and negative. Then they can make well-informed design changes and retry them on our platform before submitting the report to local authorities to get building permits.

ArchiWind is already used with selected clients.

Get in touch for more details or a demo!