Mir M. Ali, PhD
Carnegie Mellon University
2006 RFP Recipient

I'm with the University Of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. I work in different areas of research, tall buildings is one of them. I got this award from AIA as the principal investigator and there is a co-investigator. He is a colleague of mine. We also have two research assistants working with us. Also I have a doctoral student who works in a more or less allied area for her dissertation. Her work is not exactly the topic of the research, but is in a way related.

The topic of the research was an investigative study of integration of physical systems in sustainable tall buildings. We have looked at the issue of sustainability and integration jointly, how we can apply it to tall buildings. Now tall buildings consume a lot of energy as you know. They are in a way particle cities in the sky so when we talk about cities, we cannot isolate tall buildings.

We talk about sustainability in many areas; sustainable cities, sustainable buildings, sustainable agriculture, sustainable development and so on and so forth. So I don't have to go into details of that. Basically the focus of sustainability is developing alternative strategies for energy production and conservation, as well as wise and prudent use of renewable resources, and then finding or designing environmentally friendly buildings. Of course incorporating intelligent building systems to sort of automate all these different aspects of tall buildings is included.

Now in terms of integration, of course, the components have to share space. Arrangements have to be made so that for an architect they're kind of esthetically resolved and they must work together, not compete with each other. So, what we have done basically, we focused on couple of areas.

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