WIND

Keywords: Trade Wind, Caribbean, Air Pollution, Unpleasant Urban Areas, Wind Tribune,

Earlier design

In my earlier designs I never stood still on the effect wind can have on my design. My current design project is located on the Caribbean Island of Curacao. In this project the need to understand and design with the wind is very important. This is the first time I needed to take this into consideration in my design. In the tropics the wind is more needed for cooling down so I notice that in the tropic it needed to use to wind for a better design. In the climate we know in Europe we need to avoid the wind in public spaces or other types of urban planning so we do not create unpleasant areas in the city. Unfortunately I do not have any design yet from my current project but below you can see the direction the wind blows on the Island of Curacao. For my project this direction is really important because it is a about a heavy industry area (Oil Refinery) and the smoke coming out of the chimney are going now to the suburbs South-West of the Refinery causing many inconvenience and air pollution. My proposal for this project is to relocate the Refinery and rebuild but than 3 to 4 time smaller and cleaner and relocate it to the South-West coast of the Island so the smoke of the new Refinery that will be within the Environmental norms can be blow away to the sea were no one live.

fig.1
an overview of the North-East Trade wind on the Caribbean Island of Curacao, next to the big picture a so call dividivi tree that growth in the same direction the wind has blown true it.  

Future Design

For in the future I believe that it will be very important for us architects and urban planners think more about the wind than we are doing right now. Especially in a country like the Netherlands where the winds is a strong element in our climate. We learn in the course that higher buildings in a row can be effected by the wind in such a way that it can be very unpleasant to walk in a street like that. What many times happens is that wind turbines will be created in the middle of the city. Not long ago in the city center of Almere inhabitants and other visitors were complaining about the unpleasant streets in the new city center. When it is cold and the wind blow with a high velocity the streets turn into a wind tunnel. Now the municipality of Almere and several architects and urban designers are talking about solving this problem. Planting or placing big trees or screens help in many cases.

 

fig.2

A design proposal for the new city center of Almere, more trees and roof screens to break the wind velocity (source: Almere-Vandaag)

 In the excel program Prof. de Jong provide us we can measure the wind problematic for a future design. In this case we can think about the heights of the buildings or the width of a profile. If we go back to the subject plantation we can check what kind of trees we can use to help against wind turbines in existence urban settings



fig.3

In this scheme we can see excel sheet for the Velocity appreciation graph created by prof. de Jong