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)

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

Photo Credit:  Mithun, Juan Hernandez
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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
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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.

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.