About

Background

After completing my studies in Mechanical Engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) in 2006, I began my career in energy efficiency consulting at Transsolar in Stuttgart, Germany. After a year of learning the ins and outs of energy and daylight modeling techniques, I transferred to their satellite office in New York City where I worked for another three years. During this time I developed numerous methods for expanding the usability and scale of energy models.

But over these years it became clear that I should be applying these analytical methods to what I love most – houses.

So in 2011, I transitioned into residential-scale work and moved into independent consulting. Delving into energy-efficient design principles such as Passive House and state-of-the-art mechanical system design, I am now applying these methods to meet the (low) energy needs of the new American home. In May of 2012, I founded Baukraft Engineering PLLC to provide these services directly to architects and homeowners.

Principles

Low-energy design principles, incorporated into the architecture itself, is something I feel is critical to the design of all buildings. But it seems that this has been missing in many designs - probably since the advent of air conditioning. Too often are thermal considerations of the building left to the last-minute for the engineer to simply "make it work." Numerous design strategies exist that enable the design to not only require less energy, but be even more comfortable – before mechanical systems are even considered.

No (good) architect designs a space without considering how light and acoustics behave, and I strongly feel thermal behavior should be part of the design process as well. To support this, in addition to my consulting, I've taught low-energy design principles at Parsons The New School for Design School of Constructed Environments and City College Spitzer School of Architecture in New York City and at the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence, RI.