BetterBricks is a regular sponsor of Cascadia’s Transformational Lecture Series (TLS) – an ongoing speaking circuit that invites some of the most accomplished figures in the world of green building to share their insights, wisdom and experience with those in the industry. In addition to funding the series, BetterBricks conducts interviews with some the speakers (see our recent post: an Interview with Guy Battle).

Last year, we had the opportunity to interview TLS speaker Patrick Bellew prior to his visit to the Northwest.  Patrick is the founding director of U.K. based Atelier Ten and is a Chartered Building Services Engineer with more than twenty years’ experience in the design of high performance buildings and their systems.   The following is an excerpt from our interview with Patrick – the full interview can be read here.

BetterBricks: What have you learned from your experience incorporating biomimicry principles into buildings? Any advice for architects? Or engineers?

Bellew: In my lecture I cover my favorite bit of biomimicry, which is the nest of the termite. I talk a little bit about the magnetic termite and the barossa termite. These creatures have an amazing way of constructing their nests, and in particular they use a thermal storage system contained in the ground and the earth tube that brings air into the nest. They also use evaporation of water to provide cooling in these same heat stores to produce an air conditioning effect without actually running any chillers. We have used these principals many times on our buildings to integrate subterranean thermal storage into air conditioning pre-heat and pre-cooling systems to minimize the demands on the air handling plant in the building, providing comfortable conditions with very low energy consumption. So I believe very strongly in the principal of biomimicry as a way of mirroring design techniques.

However, I think there is a limit to the extent to which it can be applied. Nonetheless, I have found it extremely useful in getting across to clients the benefits of certain types of systems, and establishing a clear understanding that it’s physical principles that we are working with and not smoke and mirrors!

BetterBricks: You’ve explored considerably the use of environmental technologies in regard to heating and cooling. How do you convince your clients to adopt these strategies and coordinate with other team members, e.g. engineers?

Bellew: We have explored and developed high performance building technologies over many years with greater and lesser degrees of success with our clients. In every project, we attempt to bring in a degree of environmental thinking; usually phrasing it in terms of ‘no-brainers’ that one ought to do as a matter of course on the building. The next level are things that are slightly more of a stretch to reach, and then on to the more complex things that require a major shift in thinking about how buildings perform. We have been fortunate, however, to work with many clients for whom a push towards more sustainable design has been at the core of the selection process of their design team. In the early days, this type of client tended to be either owner/occupiers of buildings, such as universities and schools, or they would come from the government sector or cultural buildings such as art museums, schools again or public buildings of any kind. These were people who both owned and operated the buildings and, as it’s now phrased, the triple bottom line applied to very well. This means that they were paying the fuel bills, and so the benefits of investment in energy reduction were clearly demonstrable throughout the life of the building. It has been far more difficult to persuade the developers of commercial buildings, who are not paying their own fuel bills, to come to the party and build high performance, sustainable buildings.

This has changed somewhat in recent years, particularly the last two years in the UK, where the corporate social responsibility demands of the potential building tenants have moved our commercial sector much more towards the development of high performance buildings. I would say this has certainly been helped by the emergence of benchmarking rating systems. In the UK this is BREEAM, and in the US this is LEED. The impact of these benchmarking systems has been really significant in encouraging developers to achieve higher standards for their buildings, and recognize that they have a better chance of leasing a building that’s deemed to be high quality, than leasing a building that’s either not certified or of a lower quality. In a way this is exactly what the benchmarking systems set out to achieve in the first place. They are frequently derided by the nay-sayers as being a painful process, involving too much paper pushing, and many other negatives. However, I think they add extraordinary value in providing a level playing field for comparison of designs and design qualities.

Our experiences in the US in recent years have very much paralleled this situation in the UK. Our earlier projects were almost exclusively with universities and one or two enlightened developers, such as Liberty Property Trust out of Philadelphia. The universities were beginning to recognize the benefits of reducing their energy consumption and their infrastructure costs when developing new buildings, if they built them to a higher standard. At the same time, or soon after, the property development sector recognized that there were some pretty big changes on the horizon and started to respond. I wouldn’t say that they are all the way there yet, but certainly a good start is being made in certain parts of the country.

To respond to the second part of the question, about how to coordinate with other team members; the truth is that sometimes it’s very straight forward, and sometimes it’s not. Despite the fact that it is widely recognized that the architecture of the building is a key component of the way that buildings perform, and despite the fact that all the architects that we work with seek to incorporate environmental design measures into their buildings, there still remains a reluctance on the part of many architects to compromise architectural or aesthetic considerations for a technical one, no matter how carefully they are explained!

As the calculation tools have become more user friendly and particularly more graphical in the way that they represent energy flows within buildings, we have found it increasingly viable to speak with the architects at a graphical level, get them to understand the consequences of their decisions, and start to move towards making better buildings. For the most part however, the collaborative relationship within design teams, whether it be architects or structural engineers, has been exciting and for the most part fruitful.

Nonetheless, a realistic look back at many of our projects would suggest that most clients prepare a little bit in their ambitions, but moving them to more innovative environmental ideas still remains extremely difficult. I do think that sometimes we over analyze the things that we are doing.

In the earlier part of my career, we used to do what we called “stealth” engineering where we would simply install something, such as heat recovery, as standard on all the ventilation systems in the building, having satisfied ourselves that the energy efficiency gained was worth having. We wouldn’t necessarily do the detailed life cycle cost analysis to show that the client would realize a benefit over the long term, because we knew it would be so. The minute that you put it up as an additional item in the “green column” of the analysis, it is then a hostage to fortune and to budget cuts, whereas we would rather see it as being an intrinsic part of a good building. So these days, we do a combination of things that we just do as standard, and we then look for areas where we can “push the boat out” to make for buildings that move the debate about green design forward.

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