Green Building and Biodiversity: Facilitating Bird Friendly Design with Building Information Models

Green buildings should respect nature and endeavor to mitigate harmful effects to the environment and occupants. This is often interpreted as creating sustainable sites, consuming less energy and water, reusing materials, and providing excellent indoor environmental quality. Environmentally friendly buildings should also consider literally the impact that they have on birds, millions of them. A major factor in bird collisions with buildings is the choice of building materials. These choices are usually made by the architect who may not be aware of the issue or may be looking for guidance from certification programs such as LEED. As a proof of concept for an educational tool, we developed a software-assisted approach to characterize whether a proposed building design would earn a point for the LEED Pilot Credit 55: Avoiding Bird Collisions. Using the visual programming language Dynamo with the common building information modeling software Revit, we automated the assessment of designs. The approach depends on parameters that incorporate assessments of bird threat for façade materials, analyzes building geometry relative to materials, and processes user input on building operation to produce the assessment.