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When future visitors stroll through the Clinton Presidential Center in Little Rock, Arkansas, they’ll have little idea how much of their physical comfort depends on what’s underfoot. A special floor slab will house an exotic heating and cooling system that will variously circulate hot or cold water throughout the museum to regulate the indoor temperature according to the seasons.

But the floor won’t be the only environmental regulator. Streaming sunlight from an all-glass, west-facing wall will enter the space to help heat the interior and create buoyant layers of air and comfortable surroundings for guests.

This intricate dance of temperatures and air currents hasn’t been left to chance. Engineers are spending months poring over sophisticated computer models that forecast the temperatures at every point within the building for each season of the year, and for specific times of each day. The environmental model has became an essential component of the design process.

Architectural Engineering Corporation used CFD software called Airpak to analyze airflow and temperature variations inside the Tropical Forest Building at the Phipps Conservatory, in Pittsburgh.

At the heart of this model is the arcane technology known as computational fluid dynamics (CFD), whose complexity makes it a highly specialized calling with the reputation of something bordering on Black Magic. By first simulating a proposed design of the library and then breaking up the 3D model into thousands of tiny cells, CFD software lets engineers map, in great detail, airflow characteristics and temperature variations, and pass those analyses on to architects. In the case of the Clinton Presidential Center, the firm Polshek Partnership, in New York City, uses these full-color animations and diagrams to revise various interior configurations and floor plans, like partitions and elements of a mezzanine, to achieve the right airflow for comfortable temperatures year-round.

“There was no way we could do a radiant floor slab in the Clinton Center without extensive CFD simulations,” says Daniel H. Nall, AIA, and senior vice president of Flack + Kurtz, the New York City engineering firm that performed the CFD analyses. “It allowed us to see what’s important for creating comfort in the occupied zones and what happens to this comfort level when we start messing with the design.”

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