Dr. Atif, project manager for the multi-disciplinary research effort, says IRC will monitor several atriums to gather data, and then analyze those data in order to assess the environment within the atriums, including heating, cooling, daylighting and electrical lighting, acoustics and smoke control. When it's done, the results should provide engineers and architects with the tools and rules of thumb needed to design atriums so they can optimize thermal and daylighting performances of new, retrofitted and converted commercial and office atrium buildings. Dr. Atif is a researcher with the Building Performance Laboratory. He says that although the final report on the study isn't expected until the end of 1997, there already has been widespread international interest.
Atriums take different forms depending on the type of building they show up in.
They can be the major organizational space of an office building, or over an entrance, and are sometimes over a food court in a mall. They also can be used to provide daylight to underground malls and libraries. Often, atriums are introduced in renovated or converted buildings. The first part of the study, Atif said, was a search of all available literature on the topic, and the result showed that not much information useful to practitioners existed. What does exist is sometimes flawed.