Tribute to Godfried Augenbroe
Tribute to Godfried Augenbroe 1948 - 2021 Godfried (Fried) Augenbroe, Professor Emeritus of Building Technology at Georgia Tech, passed away on May 14th 2021 at his home in Tucson, Arizona. He leaves behind his wife, Maria, his three daughters Ellen, Claudia and Anneke, and his granddaughter Mia. He was born on 15 November 1948 in the Netherlands. Fried earned his Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees from TU Delft and served as an assistant/associate professor in civil engineering at TU Delft from 1976-1996. In 1997, he moved to Georgia Tech in Atlanta, USA and founded the Building Technology lab, later renamed as the High Performance Building lab. Fried retired in 2019 after 22 years of teaching and research at Georgia Tech, only to be diagnosed with gastric cancer towards the end of the same year. In December 2020, he moved from Marietta, Georgia to Tucson, Arizona for his retirement. Unfortunately, the cancer recurred aggressively soon thereafter and his health declined quickly. Fried passed away at home surrounded by his loving wife and three daughters in the early morning of May 14 2021. Fried is known as a distinguished scholar in building simulation, building physics, performance theory and process-centric interoperability. In the late 1980’s, he developed a commercial building energy simulation tool called BFEP using the finite element method. Since the early 1990’s, Fried has coordinated four major EU-funded academic-industry consortia, in the fields of design tool interoperability (most notably COMBINE, 1990-1995), energy performance simulation, outsourcing and project planning (e-HUBs 2002-2004). It is noteworthy that he started to address the concept of interoperability (now called BIM) almost thirty years ago. In the 1990’s, Fried realized the importance of normative energy calculation, especially for building energy performance assessment. He identified the need for an objective and transparent performance assessment toolkit. With this in mind, he initiated the Dutch energy performance standard called NEN 2916 which was later adopted as the baseline for the ISO-CEN 13790 method. The philosophy of NEN 2916 was also successfully utilized for the US federal General Services Administration (GSA) as part of the GSA building performance toolkit during 2002-2007. The toolkit was successfully applied to many GSA buildings, Georgia Tech and UPenn campus buildings. It was further modified to become part of the government of Qatar’s sustainability assessment toolkit during 2008-2012.
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volume 31 number 2
