Hektar

Orbital Stack is an AI and CFD web-based software that provides earlier qualitative guidance, comparing a large number of design options while highlighting any potential wind and thermal comfort red flags. It allows for the realization of a variety of climate-conscious, high-performance developments not previously feasible due to cost and/or time constraints associated with traditional studies. Orbital Stack is the first digital climate-analysis tool built by global leaders in wind and microclimate engineering using real wind tunnel data. It is truly a game-changer for the architecture and building design sector, offering our clients direct access to wind comfort and safety analysis, thermal comfort and shadowing analysis, and cladding pressure simulations. This means architects can run their own wind simulations and quickly understand the climate impacts of their proposed building designs from the start, making decisions that result in higher performing and more resilient projects.

The City Form Lab has released a state-of-the-art toolbox for urban network analysis. As the first of its kind, the centrality tools this ArcGIS toolbox can be used to compute five types of graph analysis measures on spatial networks: reach; gravity; betweenness; closeness; and straightness. Redundancy tools additionally calculate the redundancy index, redundant paths, and the wayfinding index. The tools incorporate three important features that make them particularly suited for spatial analysis on urban street networks. First, they can account for both geometry and topology in the input networks, using either metric distance (e.g. meters) or topological distance (e.g. turns) as impedance factors in the analysis. Second, unlike previous software tools that operate with two network elements (nodes and edges), the UNA tools include a third network element, buildings, which are used as the spatial units of analysis for all measures.