Two significant design workshops were scheduled, very early in the development and design process, to facilitate critical energy performance decisions by the project team:

An owner/user visioning charrette, held prior to the selection of a design team:

• Selected design-build for project delivery
• Set a performance target of 50 percent less energy use than a facility built to meet the then current energy code (ASHRAE 90.1-2001)
• Established Silver as the minimum level of LEED certification

A schematic design charrette, attended by multiple design and construction disciplines, applied an integrated design methodology to:

• Explore climate-responsive design strategies;
• Consider internal loads, daylighting, and visual and thermal comfort as additional space organization and planning criteria;
• Adjust the Energy goal adjusted to 35% better than the updated, more stringent code ASHRAE 90.1 2004; and
• Commit to ongoing analysis of energy performance and LEED-related costs and benefits.

The case study reviews lessons learned by the project team, including:

• Benefits of design build project delivery
• Success of the collaborative integrated design process
• Daylighting of laboratory, atrium, and office spaces
• The need for additional energy modeling iterations to track and inform evolving design/project team decisions
• The importance of commissioning sophisticated laboratory systems, as well as typical building systems
• Development of measurement and verification processes and procedures that effectively calibrate design assumptions with accurate representation of building, occupancy, and weather during the performance period.

Among the results, the project has received LEED Gold certification, and after two years, energy performance is tracking at 36 percent better than the modeled code baseline. Download the case study here .

Once the building is occupied and performance is tracked, you might feel more like Sisyphus than Atlas. Although you strained and sweated to push the energy performance rock to the top of the hill, your efforts can be easily undone by operating decisions and occupant behavior. And who gets blamed if performance is not as predicted? It’s been hard to find good research investigating the relative impact of design, operations, and tenant behavior on building performance, but a July 2011 New Buildings Institute White Paper goes a long way to help.

Sensitivity Analysis: Comparing the Impact of Design, Operation, and Tenant Behavior of Building Energy Performance, by Jonathan Heller and Morgan Heater of Ecotope and Mark Frankel of New Buildings Institute, compares the relative magnitude of modifications to design, operation and tenant behavior characteristics on the total building energy use of a mid-size office building. Twenty-eight distinct physical and operational building characteristics that affect total building energy use were identified for study purposes, each with a range of performance values representing poor, baseline and good practice with respect to building energy performance. To represent interactive effects (i.e. impacts from interactions between systems such as cooling and lighting), good and poor practice packages of measures were also analyzed. Weather data from 16 different cities represented the range of U.S. climate types.

The authors identify the general perception that “the responsibility for building energy performance is in the hands of architects and engineers and is relatively set once the building is constructed.” They explain why this research should serve an important function and overturn that assumption.

“This perception represents a significant barrier to broad societal goals to substantially improve building energy performance and reflects an extremely inaccurate perception of how buildings work. In fact, a significant percentage of building energy use is driven directly by operational and occupant habits that are completely independent of building design, and in many cases these post-design characteristics can have a larger impact on total energy use than many common variations in the design of the building itself.”

The study deserves a broad, diverse set of readers. As the authors suggest, the implications of their work extend far beyond the interests of the design community:

“While the results of this study are informative to the design community in prioritizing energy strategies for buildings, they have even more significant implications on how buildings are operated and occupied and on how design teams should communicate information about building performance to building owners, operators and occupants. The results of this study can provide a broader perspective on how buildings use energy and on what aspects of building energy performance deserve more attention in design, operation and policy strategies.”

The white paper discusses some of the more significant implications related to energy modeling, energy codes, operation and occupancy assumptions and decision making, and climate responsive design strategies. Extremely useful graphics of the relative impacts will help spread these messages. Download the document here.

What is your overall approach to designing buildings in the 21st century?

We at Ingenhoven believe form should follow performance. You’ve probably heard that form follows function, but we feel it’s important to go beyond that.

I also believe that nature is the great role model. While human engineering is amazing – nuclear submarines and iPhones – if you think about the wonderful ways your hands and eyes work, for example, it’s really amazing. Nature has very efficient forms and great beauty and aesthetics that go hand-in-hand. That’s something we aim for.

Your firm has designed numerous buildings around the world with double-skin facades, like RWE Essen in Essen, 1 Blight Street in Sidney, and the Breeze Tower in Osaka. Is this the wave of the future?

I don’t know if there’s any other firm in the world that has had to deal with all the different sustainability rating systems: Australia and New Zealand, the United States, Japan. We have buildings in all these system rated at the top.

The space between facades acts as a thermal buffer in winter and summer. The first skin is airtight and the second is not. It’s similar to how clothes help us adjust to seasons. A shirt will keep us warm in winter and shade us in the summer. It’s not just the fabric itself; it creates a layer of air between the clothing and the body.

The other major advantage of double skin is it allows you to have stack ventilation, a chimney effect. It works without any mechanical means. You can get an airflow that will pull the exhaust air and make it disappear into the sky.

Along with double-skin facades, another key to Ingenhoven achieving non-air conditioned buildings seems to be creating intensive stack ventilation effects.

For 1 Blight Street, the building was raised by three floors at the bottom. The raising on stilts allows the public realm to find its way back onto the site. Operable glass louvers will serve as air intake. The air will moves up and pulls the exhausted air from the offices with it.

But in the case of other projects, like the Stuttgart Main Station, you couldn’t employ that same stack ventilation strategy because the building is underground. Is it true that the trains themselves help ventilate the space?

Yes, it will be neither heated nor cooled. The trains will push and pull air out of the station. If you do it right, the trains can provide air conditioning for your building.

The station itself also has an intriguing form where it reaches the surface. Was that a case of bio-mimicry?

The unique shape came about through the famous German engineer Frei Otto. It’s a high performance concrete. They use nets and fabrics to weight the concrete and see how they want it to behave. It’s shapes that find their own way, just like nature does, a kind of bio-mimicry.

Europe has more stringent rules about offices and daylight. How much does that help efficiency?

One of the contradictory demands of sustainable design is you want light to penetrate your whole room but not summer sun. Having a double skin façade protects the inner façade from these elements.

In Europe, no desk may be further than about seven meters from the façade. In America they use these deep floor plates which are good for real estate investors but not for sustainable design and the occupants access to daylight.

In your lectures, you often suggest there may not even be such a thing as sustainable design. What do you mean?

The more I study this, the more I believe designing buildings in an energy efficient manner is great but it’s not enough. If we all saved 20 percent of our energy consumption tomorrow, we’d still be causing a lot of trouble for the planet. I think looking at building performance is not enough. We should look at how our cities are designed. Both booming cities and shrinking cities are inherently unsustainable. This is a bigger issue than what architects deal with.

Even shrinking cities are exploding two-dimensionally. Sprawl has even accelerated in some areas. If we allow this kind of dramatic loss of urban fabric replaced by big boxes and parking lots-we create problems as architects we’ll never be able to fix.

In the last 60 years, the U.S. population has doubled, and the urbanized population has tripled. Yet urban density went down dramatically.

If architecture can help to save some of the mess we’re in, I think it involves reinventing urban design. All through the 20th century it was done using color markers on paper-residential here, industrial here. Frankly, that no longer works. We have to think in 3D. Urban design is a dead profession. We have planning, but planners are not designers.

You may think this is not a problem in Portland with your Urban Growth Boundary. But living in the Midwest [in Kansas and Nebraska], I can tell you that it is a creeping problem. Portland is the laboratory nationwide but it still has to deal with the same problems.

What can be done to green urban design?

There are a lot of things you could do. You could disallow above-ground parking garages. Why not prohibit one-story buildings altogether? We have restrictions to prohibit the height of tall buildings, but I think prohibiting low buildings should happen instead. Make Portland car free and build more rail lines. Don’t slow it down.

How would you characterize the best approach or strategies to get to net-zero carbon buildings? What do you think our greatest challenges are to getting there?

Ultimately, I think the rating systems are great but they have their limitations. They’re voluntary. Why should sustainable design be a rich man’s toy? Why isn’t it a prerequisite for everything we do? Why can’t we make LEED platinum our code? We have rules for our car performance. Why not for our buildings?

Read the full interview at the BetterBricks website >

Oregon Health and Sciences University

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)

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.

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.

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.

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