Rethink Energy and Design » Design and Construction

Performance-Based Design

Naomi Cole — Wed, 18 Aug 2010 20:38:55 +0000

Authored by “The Dream Team” at The Cascadia Center for Sustainable Design and Construction

The Cascadia Center for Sustainable Design and Construction strives to be the first of its kind: an urban mid-rise Living Building^TM. The vision of the Bullitt Foundation and its director, Denis Hayes, is to develop a game-changing place that creates a ripple effect to change the way designers, cities, and occupants think about their buildings.

One of the many unique factors of the project is the development process and the fact that the players have been willing to think differently at each step of the way. In essence, the team that enables this kind of performance includes the designers/developers, the tenants, and also the city. “We all feel like we have a chance at promoting much larger change if we can get others to do this kind of building,” says Chris Rogers, principal at Point32, the project’s developer .

The Cascadia Center is a 50,000 SF commercial structure in Seattle’s central district slated for completion in late 2011. The team includes Point32, The Miller | Hull Partnership, PAE Consulting Engineers, and general contractor Schuchart as well as the University of Washington’s Integrated Design Lab with support from the BetterBricks initiative of the Northwest Energy Efficiency Alliance. The Bullitt Foundation is the anchor tenant, but will only occupy half of one floor; other leases are in negotiation.

A Performance Driven Team

The process was almost entirely driven by the project’s energy goals, which are to meet the net-zero energy imperative of the Living Building Challenge.

Rogers says that these energy goals were the “most intriguing part of the process and has influenced every step of the design.” Before the design team was even hired, the Integrated Design Lab was engaged to develop an energy profile for the hypothetical building.

When the Miller | Hull/PAE design team began its work, aesthetic design was not up for discussion until every aspect of the technical performance was understood. Craig Curtis, partner at Miller | Hull, says the team refers to it as “performance-based design.”

Big ideas about how to reduce and capture energy drove the highly iterative design process. According to Rogers, this was largely due to the openness of the team. The architects were willing to let the performance vision drive the design, allowing for a highly collaborative relationship where the engineers were as much in the drivers seat as the architects.

Similarly, the contractor was brought on early and was able to weigh in regularly with cost checks to keep the concept within a reasonable budget.

Major energy savings will be achieved through a highly efficient envelope (preassembled and delivered to the site air tight); automated shading; and heat recovery on the mechanical and ventilation systems. As the architecturally imposed loads headed towards net zero, the internal equipment load took over. The team realized they needed an expert in computer and server loads.

The building and systems designs were so highly calibrated that every tweak threw the energy concept slightly out of balance. Joel Loveland, Director of the Integrated Design Lab, explains the need for a “facile modeler as part of the engineering team to pick up the results of small and nuanced energy changes during Schematic Design.”

The performance requirements even affected the program. Early plans included a coffee shop on the ground floor, but the internal loads were too high to meet the net zero goals, so a restaurant tenant was out of the question.

Loveland describes Miller | Hull and PAE as a dream team. “Everyone has been incredibly dedicated, way beyond the call of duty. It is pretty exceptional.”

An Open Minded City

In addition to the highly capable and dedicated design and development team, the City of Seattle has made the unique process all the more manageable.

Last fall, Seattle passed an ordinance that allows twelve projects to go through a process that identifies regulatory obstacles to achieving the Living Building Challenge. Rogers characterizes it as the city essentially saying, “Let’s use the Cascadia Center and 11 other buildings to explore how our current codes and methods for supporting the building design and development process could be modified to achieve better performance.”

Part of the process is for the design team to help the City to think differently about its regulatory structure and to understand performance-based design. In the case of the Cascadia Center, the City will allow a zoning exemption for a larger rooftop solar array (essential for meeting net zero targets) than is typically permitted in urban areas.

The idea is for the building to not only be a point of departure from a performance standpoint, but also from a regulatory perspective for the local policy agenda.

This is essential because, as Curtis points out, “everything about the design is unique to this particular location in the world.”

Flexible Occupants

The final members of the performance team are the occupants. Design and technology can only take the performance so far; the final increments of energy savings depend on the tenants of the building.

Occupant behavior is a fundamental factor in meeting the net zero goals. Plug loads are the primary occupant-imposed energy loads and are expected to be half of typical building use.

The design team developed a survey for prospective tenants, to determine how many people expect to bike to work, shower at the office, and the length of each shower. The energy and water impacts of these habits will ensure availability of excess water for irrigation and the ability to not exceed energy use allotted to water heating. In this way, every individual action plays into energy assumptions, to ensure adequate resources to meet other needs. If someone takes too long a shower, the plants in the greenhouse will bear the consequences.

Given that the major energy consumers are expected to be the computers and server systems, the team is exploring new ways of sharing these services across companies with the expectation that tenants become more collaborative.

One idea that is being explored is an internal cap and trade system among tenants, by which a high energy user may be able to trade credits with a light energy user.

The Opportunity

Ultimately the goal is a building that inspires more of its kind. While some may dismiss Living Buildings as one-off solutions, only possible with an owner who values innovation and is willing to pay more for it, The Cascadia Center team is committed to a design solution that is broadly applicable to the industry and thus has the potential to be transformative. At every decision point, the team was thoughtful about the replicability of a particular design. The initial design concept included an unusually shaped floor plate with atrium to optimize solar potential, but the shape would be difficult to emulate (and far exceeded average construction costs) so a more conventional floor plate was selected to fit the urban grid and still maximize daylight.

As Rogers says, “The goal is for the building to become a catalyst, not to stand alone” The project is being designed for a 250-year lifespan, to adapt to evolving needs and technologies, chances are it will soon be standing among similar buildings that it inspires.

OHSU’s Center for Health & Healing Building Wins Toby Award

John Jennings — Tue, 20 Jul 2010 18:11:06 +0000

Oregon Health and Sciences University is once again taking center stage for its super efficient Center for Health & Healing building in Portland’s South Waterfront district. The Building Owners and Managers Association International recently honored the building with its Outstanding Building of Year award. The Center for Health and Healing building won in the medical office category.

Through its BetterBricks initiative, the Northwest Energy Efficiency Alliance provided support to fund the district airflow studies for natural ventilation analysis, charette support and post-occupancy evaluation for OHSU’s Center for Health and Healing.

“NEEA was a big part of our success,” said Dennis Wilde, a principle at Gerding Edlen Development. “The technical assistance and POE were very valuable in the buildings overall success.”

Completed in 2006, the 412,000-square-foot buildings received LEED platinum just a year later in 2007, which was the first medical facility of its size in the world to achieve this level of certification. OHSU’s Center for Health and Healing is also the first Oregon property to win a TOBY award from BOMA.

The TOBY awards recognize excellence in building management and operations and are broken down into seven categories. A total of 94 buildings from across the globe competed for a chance to win this coveted award.

Here’s a list of related reading on OHSU’s Center for Health and Healing:

Case Study on the BetterBricks website
Post Occupancy Evaluation Summary (pdf)
Post Occupancy Evaluation Full Report (pdf)

NW Integrated Design Projects

John Jennings — Thu, 08 Jul 2010 22:51:51 +0000

The aim of Rocky Mountain Institute’s Built Environment Team (BET) is to transform the built environment into a sustainable and regenerative global ecology. With an emphasis on achieving energy efficiency through integrated design, the BET has contributed to numerous high-performance projects throughout the world. Two of the projects they’ve worked on happen to be in our backyard here in the Northwest:

1. Starbucks Retail Store in Hillsboro, Oregon, which was awarded LEED Gold for Commercial Interiors. NEEA’s BetterBricks worked on the store prototype development.

2. Oregon Health & Science’s Center for Health & Healing in Portland, Oregon, which recently won BOMA International’s Outstanding Building of the Year award. NEEA’s BetterBricks provided support of this project including funding the district airflow studies for natural ventilation analysis, charette support and post-occupancy evaluation.

The following are short video case studies for each project.

Oregon Health & Science’s Center for Health & Healing, Portland, Oregon

Watch the video case study

Download the Rocky Mountain Institute case study

Download the BetterBricks case study

Starbucks Retail Store, Hillsboro, Oregon

Watch the video case study

Download the Rocky Mountain Institute case study

For a complete list of Rocky Mountain Institute BET video case studies, check out their website.

What Makes It Green: Winners Revealed

John Jennings — Fri, 04 Jun 2010 19:51:38 +0000

The Northwest Energy Efficiency Alliance’s BetterBricks initiative congratulates the Seattle AIA 2010 What Makes It Green Award winners and the Seattle AIA and Seattle COTE for an outstanding program and process. The program culminated in the 11th annual awards event held in Seattle on June 2^nd. This came off as one of the most exciting, interesting and inspiring sustainability awards programs I’ve see in a while. Not only were the projects diverse and serious about engaging sustainability, even the process itself was very effective in educating and motivating everyone from those submitting projects, to the broader design community to even the AIA staff and COTE committee members themselves.

NEEA’s BetterBricks was happy to be a major sponsor this program. This year the focus was on energy performance and water performance. For the first time, all projects were required to provide an energy consumption measure, the energy Use Index or EUI, which seems small but, in fact, is a huge step to getting all entrants to think about energy performance. In addition, the only other mandatory requirement was to describe the project team’s integrated design approach, a key process to achieve high performance buildings.

I’ll get to the award winners in a minute. First I want to share what I find stimulating about the awards process itself. To start, the jury consisted of leading sustainability experts, and not just architects. People like Bob Berkebile FAIA, Founding Principal, BNIM Architects and co-founder of COTE nationally, Don Horn AIA, Assistant Director, GSA Office of Federal High-Performance Green Buildings, Claire Johnson, Associate Director, Atelier Ten, San Francisco, and ALEX STEFFEN, Executive Editor, Worldchanging. The jury was moderated by Nadav Malin, President, BuildingGreen, Executive Editor, GreenSource.

The Awards process began with the submittals but led to a public jury panel discussion that was videotaped for later posting on the AIA website, followed by a public jury interview of the finalist teams. Then the 11 finalist projects were printed on panels for public display and eventual shipment for display around the region, further extending the impact of the lessons generated by these projects. The Awards ceremony allowed a public discussion with the winning project teams and in the near future there will be a set of case studies and a small booklet and an issue of Seattle AIA Forum magazine describing the projects. So if you missed the other public opportunities you still have many options for viewing the projects. Web images and descriptions of these and all submitted projects can be found at http://wmig.aiaseattle.org/2010_gallery.

Finalists and Winners

Now for what you’ve been waiting for. The jury selected two Gold-level projects, one Silver, and two Honorable Mentions — one for Rural Housing and one for Cultural Sensitivity.

GOLD
King Street Station Rehabilitation, Seattle WA
ZGF Architects
Collaborators: SMEP Engineer: ARUP; LEED Certification: Green Building Services, Inc.; Commissioning Agent: Keithly Barber Associates

Photo Credit: Seattle Department of Transportation; Museum of History & Industry
_________________________________________________________________________

GOLD
Vancouver Convention Centre West, Vancouver Canada
Design Architect: LMN Architects. (Prime Architects: Musson Cattell Mackey Partnership & DA Architects & Planners)
Collaborators: Mechanical Engineer: Stantec Consulting; Commissioning Authority and Mechanical Commissioning Agent: KD Engineering Co.

Photo Credit: LMN/Studio 216
_________________________________________________________________________

SILVER
Twelve | West
ZGF Architects
Collborators: Gerding Edlen Development Company LLC ; Total Mechanical – M/E/P Engineers, Lighting Design

Photo Credit: Timothy Hursley, ZGF Architects LLP
_________________________________________________________________________

Honorable Mention for Rural Affordable Housing
Common Ground, A Co-op Neighborhood
Mithun
Collaborators: Lopez Community Land Trust.

Photo Credit: Mithun, Juan Hernandez
_________________________________________________________________________

Honorable Mention for Cultural Sustainability
Northwest Maritime Center
The Miller|Hull Partnership
Collaborators: Mechanical Engineering: Ecotope, Inc; Sustainability: O’Brien and Company

Photo Credit: Nic Lehoux
_________________________________________________________________________

During the awards ceremony, there was an open Q&A session with project team members and the audience. Below are some of the interesting ideas from NEEA’s BetterBricks’ point of view:

- Integrated design proved to be a key process to attain high performance.

- Thermal comfort expectations can and should vary by seasons, by use and by zone.

- Green BIM tool advances are really helping.

- District-level awareness and connections are key to advanced sustainability.

- It is important to explore all the energy options early and seeing where they might work or even influence the design scheme.

- Some new products were developed or introduced into the US via some of the projects thus making it easier for future projects to take advantage of.

- It was essential to either have a client that was interested and even aggressively pushing the energy and sustainability goals or have the architect effectively convince the client of the importance.
So go check out the detailed project information at the Seattle AIA website, and look for the video trailer http://wmig.aiaseattle.org/2010_gallery.

Spoiling Students with Natural Light & Fresh Air

Elaine Miller — Mon, 24 May 2010 20:58:44 +0000

Students in one Portland, Oregon middle school just earned some serious bragging rights among their peers. The Evans – Harvard High Performance Classroom at the da Vinici Arts Middle School was recently awarded LEED platinum certification – the first K-12 public school building to achieve this level of certification. The classroom features natural daylighting, passive cooling systems and solar roof tiles that help it track toward net-zero energy use.

What better way to bolster student performance than by flooding a classroom with natural and fresh air?

The classroom was designed by SRG Partnership and constructed by Todd Hess Building Company. SRG Partnership worked with the University of Oregon’s Energy Studies in Buildings Lab (ESBL), part of the Northwest Energy Efficiency Alliance’s BetterBricks Lab Network, to design the 1,500-square foot music classroom and fine tune a unique natural lighting system called the “Halo”. The brain child of SRG and ESBL, the Halo provides enough natural light, even with overcast skies, so there’s no need to turn on a light switch at all during the school day. The system acts as a large central skylight with louvers that automatically rotate to control light levels. The sun’s rays pass through the skylight, hit the louvers and bounce natural light evenly throughout the room.

The Halo was originally conceived as a daylighting strategy for the Mount Angel Abbey’s Annunciation Center for the Theological Studies in Mount Angel, Oregon. In both the Mount Angel project and da Vinci Arts Middle School, a rigorous, iterative design process was used to maximize climate resources and minimize building energy loads. To read more about the integrated design process from the perspective the Mount Angel team members – including Kent Duffy of SRG, Charlie Brown of ESBL, Mike Hatten of Solarc and Father Mee of Mount Angel – check out this interview series. There’s also a terrific Mount Angel case study on the BetterBricks website.

Portland Public Schools plans to rebuild or remodel every building in its portfolio over the next 20 years and hopes to integrate as many green features as possible. The da Vinci addition is a pilot project for the district to decide which new technologies will be included in future sustainable classrooms.

Project team key players included Portland Public Schools; SRG Partnership; Todd Hess Building Company; Energy Studies in Buildings Lab at the University of Oregon which is partially funded by the Northwest Energy Efficiency Alliance’s BetterBricks initiative; PBS Environmental; Bonneville Environmental Foundation; Solarc; Greenworks; kpff; Listen Acoustics; and Green Building Services.

Northwest Architects Keep Their Green Cred

kyles — Wed, 19 May 2010 23:52:12 +0000

Portland is once again on the national stage, but this time it’s not the New York Times touting the city’s epic eateries (thanks for the nod, but enough already). Architect Magazine released its second annual ranking of green architecture firms and two of the top ten firms call Portland home.

Sera Architects and Zimmer Gunsul Frasca (ZGF) Architects both earned a well-deserved seat among the nation’s most sustainable-focused firms. Sera, coming in at No. 3, is behind the city’s greenest projects, including the Oregon Sustainability Center, which aims to be a net-zero high rise and is catching the attention of designers and developers the world over. ZGF, coming in at No. 10, gained acclaim for its commitment to sustainable projects like the rain gardens at the Oregon Convention Center and its own offices at Twelve West in downtown Portland. Perkins + Will came in as the number one green architecture firm according to the magazine. While the firm is based in Chicago, the work coming out of the Perkins + Will Seattle office is on the cutting edge of green design (and of course adds to the sustainable cache of the Northwest).

On a related note, Clark Brockman of Sera Architects and a cadre of current and former ZGF architects, including Amy Cortese, John Breshears and Naomi Cole, have all been recognized with a BetterBricks Award over the years.

The other eight firms that made to the list include:

Perkins +Will , Chicago (No. 1)

EYP Architecture & Engineering, Albany, N.Y. (No. 2)

PGAL, Houston, (No. 4)

Cook+Fox, Chicago, (No. 5)

HOK, St. Louis (No. 6)

FXFOWLE, New York (No. 7)

Anshen + Allen, San Francisco (No. 8 )

DLR Group, Omaha, Neb. (No. 9)

Targeting 100! How New Hospitals Can Use 60% Less Energy

John Jennings — Fri, 14 May 2010 16:55:11 +0000

A groundbreaking new research effort reveals how hospitals, which account for four percent of all energy consumed in the U.S., can achieve a 60 percent reduction in energy utility use by redesigning the way they use energy. A newly constructed, code-compliant hospital in the Northwest following the process and employing strategies identified in the research can expect to save around $730,000 a year. Savings in other areas can be higher where utility prices are higher. All sectors of the medical industry are tackling issues of sustainability as providers continue to be asked to do more with less and lighten their impact on the environment. This work represents one of the latest contributions to the ongoing push to green America’s hospitals and build healthier communities. The most salient outcome of this work is the definition of a process that brings together architectural, mechanical and central plant systems to deliver significant efficiencies. These strategies include heat recovery, daylighting, and thermal energy storage, which when integrated at the very beginning, can reduce up to 60 percent of a new hospital’s energy use. This approach resulted in a full hospital prototype that has been modeled for energy use as well as cost of construction and can be implemented for less than three percent of the total project’s cost, an incremental cost that is expected to be recouped through energy savings and utility incentives within the first five-to-eight years of a building’s life depending on local utility costs.

The study was presented at the CleanMed Conference in Baltimore on May 11, 2010. To read an executive summary of Targeting 100! click HERE. To request a copy of the full report, click HERE. For Energy in Healthcare Fact Sheet, click HERE.

The study, titled, “Targeting 100! Envisioning the high performance hospital: implications for a new, low energy, high performance prototype,” is the result of the close collaboration of the University of Washington’s Integrated Design Lab and NBBJ, one of the nation’s leading healthcare architectural firms. The study was primarily funded by the Northwest Energy Efficiency Alliance (NEEA) through its BetterBricks initiative, with significant in-kind time commitment by NBBJ and others on the research team including engineers, general contractors, utilities, hospital CEOs and facilities managers.

Previous research conducted by the UW’s IDL of Scandinavian hospitals showed that a hospital can achieve an Energy Use Index (EUI) of 100 and still provide patients and staff with an exceptional work and healing environment. An Energy Use Index, or EUI, is the total amount of energy used by a building (electricity and natural gas) per square foot of floor area, measured on an annual basis to establish baseline energy use. The EUI value for a building is used in a similar manner as MPG is used to describe the efficiency of an automobile.

This study shows that hospitals in the U.S. can also aim for an EUI of 100 and achieve similar successful outcomes while fully complying with codes. To put this in perspective, the EUI of an average Northwest hospital is 270 KBtu/sq.ft.yr.

Leading European Architect Addresses Portland-area Building Professionals and Students

John Jennings — Thu, 13 May 2010 23:11:49 +0000

Another great opportunity to hear from a leading European practitioner presents itself for Portland area building professionals and students.

David Cook of Behnisch Architekten, and currently the Pietro Belluschi Distinguished Visiting Professor in Architecture at the University of Oregon School of Architecture, will be speaking at the U of O White Stag Building on Thursday evening May 20th.

David Cook, Dipl. Architekt RIBA, ARB studied architecture at the Polytechnic in Manchester and obtained his Diploma at the University of East London in 1992. Together with Stefan Behnisch and Martin Haas, he has been heading the practice Behnisch Architekten since 2006. He has held teaching positions in Karlsruhe, Stuttgart, and New York and has given lectures in Manchester, London, Aarhus, Cagliari, Miami, and Beijing, among other places.

Behnisch Architekten is a leader in creating distinctive architectural solutions that are environmentally sustainable. The Stuttgart, Germany-based architecture and planning firm maintains U.S. offices in Venice, CA, and Boston, MA. Notable projects include platinum-LEED-rated Genzyme Center in Cambridge, MA; Norddeutsche Landesbank in Hannover, Germany; Cultural District Riverfront Development Plan in Pittsburgh, PA; Unilever Headquarters in Hamburg, Germany; Institute for Forestry and Nature Research in Wageningen, The Netherlands; and the Harvard Science Complex in Allston, MA.

David Cook will be speaking in conjunction with the very interesting and informative exhibit ”Design, Ecology, Synergy” which redefines the term sustainability by examining how people inhabit their built environments. This exhibition which toured Europe, showcases the innovative design approach of Behnisch Architekten and Transsolar Climate Engineering, as illustrated by several international projects and ongoing collaborations. It is a cleverly designed exhibition that demonstrates the human senses to the built environment. Human scale diagrams show our intake of the environment and our reactions to light, material, temperature, air, and sound as conditions determined or often dictated by the enclosure system of the building. The exhibition appropriately features audio, visual, and tactile displays including large light boxes where information on each category (light, material, etc.) is printed on the surface; videos of interviews and projects; project models, and large colorful dome luminaries.

Presented by: U. of Oregon Department of Architecture

Date: Thursday 5/20/2010
Time: 6 :00 pm–Lecture, 7:15 pm–Reception
Free and open to the public

Location :
Event Room

White Stag Building
70 N.W. Couch St.
Portland, OR, 97209

Icebergs and Buildings

John Jennings — Thu, 29 Apr 2010 01:15:07 +0000

A recent DesignIntelligence blog post has an interesting posting relating icebergs to buildings. This is particularly apropos to energy efficiency in buildings. DesignIntelligence is the Design Futures Council’s bi-monthly report.

“Like buildings, icebergs come in all shapes and sizes. They can be beautiful and also a little mysterious. On average, only about 12 percent of an iceberg’s volume sits above the water line. What’s visible is quite small compared to the whole. This is not a bad analogy for how design is often perceived. Architects tend to focus most on form and aesthetics — what you see is what you get. But a building is so much more than that. It’s impossible to tell just by looking at a building what it cost to construct or how much it takes to operate or how efficient it might be in terms of space utilization.”

Read the full post HERE

Integrated Facades in the Northwest – 3 Events Not to Miss

John Jennings — Fri, 09 Apr 2010 15:32:49 +0000

The building envelope is an essential component and area of opportunity in the design, engineering and operation of ultra-low energy buildings. Rather than serving as a static enclosure, it has the potential to redirect and filter daylight, provide natural ventilation, manage radiant heat transfers, and create visual and physical connections between inside and out. Three events in April and May are scheduled to provide professionals and students in the Northwest an opportunity to engage this topic.

For an in-depth look at European examples of high performance integrated facades, check out the Integrated Facades section of the BetterBricks website.

Symposium Webcast – Building Facades: Integrating Comfort and Energy Performance

Innovative and highly energy efficient approaches to facade design are common in European buildings where air conditioning is used selectively. This event in this series is a full day webcast of a symposium in San Francisco featuring leading practitioners from Europe (Transsolar, Sauerbruch Hutton Architects, and Arup ) and a panel of North American design experts who will discuss case studies, performance, and applications of integrated facade design in North America. The symposium is being jointly sponsored by the PG&E Pacific Energy Center (PEC), the Center for the Built Environment (CBE) at UC Berkeley, and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL).

Transformational Lecture Series: Thomas Auer, Transsolar

April 22 – Seattle :: April 26 – Portland :: April 27 – Boise

Sponsored by NEEA’s BetterBricks initiative and Cascadia GBC, Thomas Auer, managing director at Transsolar (Stuttgart, Germany) will speak about how his firm develops climate and energy concepts through the recognition that environmental conditions are influenced by all aspects and states of building design. Thomas will share ideas on how to incorporate natural processes into building design as a way to replace often inefficient and unsustainable mechanical systems, and how to utilize an Integrated Design Process for projects by bringing together architects, mechanical engineers and consultants to better create “High Comfort – Low Impact” buildings.

Seattle Lecture
April 22, 5;30 – 7:00 pm
Seattle Central Library
Register today!

Portland Lecture
April 26, 5:30 – 7:00 pm
White Stag Building
Register today!

Boise Lecture
April 27, 11:00 am – 1:00 pm
Double Tree Riverside
Register today!

Building Facades: A Portland Panel Discussion

May 3, 5:00 pm – 7:00 pm
White Stag Building, Portland, OR
Register today!

The final event provides an opportunity for professionals and students in the Northwest to have a dialogue about the potential, challenges, and realities of applying integrated facade concepts to projects in our region. Highlights from the symposium will be presented and discussed by a panel of regional experts on the subject. Mark Perepelitza of ZGF who has worked closely with PEC, LBNL, and CBE to organize the April 21 symposium will moderate the session. This session is jointly sponsored by NEEA’s BetterBricks initiative and the Portland Building Enclosure Council (BEC). Panelists to date include:

John Breshears, ZGF
Rob Kistler, The Facade Group
Mike Steffen, Walsh Construciton
Alison Kwok, University of Oregon
Mitch Dec, Glumac