Jonathan Natanian

Technion – Israel Institute of Technology | technion · Faculty of Architecture and Town Planning

The imperative shift towards ecological consciousness in architectural design, driven by the pressing need to mitigate energy consumption and carbon emissions while fostering user well-being, has propelled the discourse on sustainable architecture to the forefront of contemporary dialogue. Concepts such as ecological architecture, sustainable, gree...

It is widely recognized that the sustainability of the built environment is one of the key strategies to tackle global crises such as climate change, resource depletion, and human health. An environmentally driven approach to architectural design and urban planning through simulations has been around for many decades. However, architects and planne...

Positive Energy Districts (PEDs) are emerging as a new symbol for sustainable urbanism and energy transition in the built environment. The pursuit of PED development is increasingly rooted in several EU policies and initiatives , sparking discourse on the interplay between governance, technological and non-technological solutions, multiple stakehol...

Urbanisation trends predict that by 2050, 68% of the global population will reside in cities, requiring substantial urban densification, especially in rapidly developing regions like Israel. This paper integrates mixed-use considerations into the environmental design process through a two-step analytical parametric sequence using Grasshopper and La...

By integrating computational fluid dynamics (CFD)-generated wind pressure coefficients (WPCs) into building energy models, recent workflows enable the evaluation of the impacts of local wind on the energy performance of buildings. With the current workflows, however, only manual integration of WPCs into building energy models is possible. This stud...

While mixed-use developments remain one of the preferable strategies for sustainable urbanism, there is a need for design-integrated methods to determine the performative impacts of mixed-use and mixed-building forms. This paper presents a computational method for optimizing the energy balance of mixed-use districts in hot climates. Its methodology...

Despite the global trend toward mixed-use developments as a key strategy toward urban sustainability and compactness, quantitative research on the energy performance impacts of heterogeneous urban environments of different building typologies and uses is currently lacking. This study bridges this gap by offering an analytical method to explore and...

This paper addresses the limitations of existing Solar Envelope (SE) methods to explore the trade-offs of solar radiation and urban shading, and to simultaneously account for several different Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). It offers an alternative parametric workflow-the Solar Block Generator (SBG)-which is based on an additive voxelization me...

This paper explores the trade-off between redeveloping an urban site with higher density and maintaining solar access for the surrounding context in the hot and dry climate of Tel Aviv. Such trade-offs are important for future urban development in the Middle East, where densification is a demographic and environmental need. We explore this trade-of...

For almost two decades, the Zero Energy Buildings (ZEB) standard has epitomized a commitment to the high energy performance of buildings. Nevertheless, the applicability of ZEB in hot climates is currently limited and furthermore, in light of the current limitations of traditional building energy modeling methods, new methods are necessary to effec...

Focusing on the urban block scale in hot climates, this dissertation offers new insights into the nexus between urban form and environmental performance. It introduces and explores a new set of harmonized workflows which by capitalizing on the benefits of a parametric environment open new possibilities in the pursuit of a sustainable urban form - g...

With the rise of awareness of health and well-being in cities, urban environmental analysis should expand from energy performance to new environmental quality-based considerations. The limited potential to annually evaluate outdoor thermal comfort, predominant among these considerations, has restricted the exploration of the interrelations between...

Environmental simulation supports the design of more sustainable, zero-energy neighborhoods, especially when leveraged with multi-objective optimization. This study explores the tradeoff between urban density and energy balance-specifically, monthly load match between energy usage and generation-in terms of courtyard, slab, and tower typologies for...

Despite the urgent global call for an energy transition and the promotion of health and well-being in cities, a holistic approach to evaluating the trade-offs between an urban energy balance and environmental quality considerations is lacking. This paper bridges this gap by introducing a Grasshopper digital workflow through which the impacts of a w...

Although the interrelations between urban microclimates and energy demand have been acknowledged, few workflows integrate microclimatic boundary conditions to predict energy demand in parametric morphological studies. This paper helps bridge this gap by introducing a novel workflow which brings together energy and microclimatic modelling for a syne...

Despite the global call for a paradigm shift towards new environmentally conscious urban planning, little has changed in practice, especially in hot climatic regions. This paper helps bridge this gap by introducing an automated parametric workflow for performance driven urban design. The methodology was tested here in the climatic and urban Mediter...

The regenerative approach to design goes beyond limiting the environmental impact of the built environment and towards the enrichment of the ecosystem, adaptation to climate change, and the improvement of human health. This concept is being applied to buildings through new standards such as the Living Building Challenge, yet examples of implementat...

Despite the recent pursuit towards Zero Energy Buildings (ZEB), their global adaptation is far from complete, mostly in cooling dominated climates which are still poorly prepared for their integration. This paper reports on a research project aiming to build a road map for the local adaptation of the ZEB concept in Israel. The methodology of this r...

As research on the correlation between urban design and environmental performance is still lacking, the following long-standing question still stands – How far can we densify urban districts without sacrificing their energy balance and indoor environmental quality? This question served as the starting point for a parametric typological study conduc...

The need to integrate environmental design into the education of architects has been widely recognized in recent years, leading to the development of different pedagogical approaches. While most studies on this challenge are dedicated to the theoretical aspects of creating new pedagogical frameworks, only few examine their implementation in actual...

This paper reports on recent final-year undergraduate projects completed at the Faculty of Architecture and Town Planning at the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology. The final-year studio, which followed the conceptual framework of Research-Based Design, was entitled 'Articulation, Space, and Sustainability', and focused on the adaptation of...

In Israel, the discussion on Zero Energy Buildings is in its very early stages, and thus the opportunity is there to responsively adapt the term ZEB to the specific opportunities and challenges the local context brings, considering the knowledge which had been accumulated on this topic globally. The research is built from four main sections – the f...

ASTRACT The paper reports on a dissertation project undertaken at the Architectural Association School of architecture towards a Master's degree in Sustainable Environmental Design by the Author. The starting point for the research was the troubling common practice of office buildings in Israel-racing towards the tallest, highly mechanical and full...

Despite the sharp increase in interest and awareness, the implementation level of the Israeli green building code in Israel is still very low. Two of the substantial implementation barriers are the cost and benefit uncertainties associated with green building design in caparison to conventional construction methods . This research aimed to bridge t...