ROUNDTABLE OVERVIEW

Sustainable architect Bruce Haxton and ED+C’s Michelle Hucal organized the Net-Zero Energy Buildings (NZEB) Roundtable IV: Interactive Design Sessions

“Imagine the end in the beginning,” says Tom Kubala, TKWA. “What is the process by which a human organization, the land on which it finds itself, a builder and an architect might collaborate to create a living whole?” Image courtesy of TKWA.

to present the latest techniques and information regarding NZEB interactive design sessions, plus the rationale for making specific NZEB design decisions, with the understanding that each project is site, program and client specific.

Below is a short set of excerpts from the teleconference, but a complete transcription is available here: COMPLETE TRANSCRIPT. In addition, a set of NZE resources and “Lessons Learned” are also listed online.

Two specific recent buildings are cited as examples in the roundtable discussion:

1) The U.S. Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), Research Support Facility (RSF) in Golden Colo. (presented by Haselden, Stantec, RNL, AEC and their consultants), and;

2) The Aldo Leopold Legacy Center in Baraboo, Wis. (presented by The Kubala Washatko Architects team including consultants).

To these examples, a wealth of information is added from Perkins+Will Architects, EHDD team, The Rocky Mountain Institute and The Integral Group (Peter Rumsey). Software manufacturers Autodesk, Bentley Systems and IES shared their expertise regarding software’s interface with the NZEB design process; and the NREL team shared their renewable energy research. Special thanks to Russ Drinker from Perkins+Will, San Francisco, who hosted this (and previous) NZEB expert teleconference for ED+C.

To begin, Bruce Haxton asks the U.S. Department of Energy’s NREL participants to set the stage of their work in creating the environment to allow the RSF project to come to fruition.

Ron Judkoff (NREL):Going back quite a few years, DOE and NREL were grappling with how to vastly improve the energy efficiency of the commercial building sector. To gain more insight, NREL got involved in several projects where we played an energy consulting role. As part of that role, we participated in a number of charrettes for projects where the owners expressed interest in creating extremely energy efficient buildings. We discovered that, very often, design decisions were being made about energy efficiency with little or no quantitative data to support rational decision making. We decided to try and inject energy modeling into the charrette process.

John Andary (Stantec):The first (NREL) charrette was three full days with the entire design/build team. For most of our other clients that aen’t quite as savvy in low-energy, high-performance design we typically do an “eco-charrette.” The eco-charrette is normally a well-orchestrated process during which we do a lot of storyboarding and “no bad idea” sessions to get the participants excited about ideas for energy conservation and other sustainable goals. Then we do voting sessions to get people to buy into ideas. It’s really about motivating them to set aggressive goals and then develop strategies around those goals. We went into the first three-day session with our pre-concept modeling in-hand and described with the team how we thought we could hit NREL’s goals based on the work that we had already done.

Perspectives: The Interactive Design Session Process

Brad Jacobson (EHDD): We like to start by defining the problem as broadly as possible at first and really try to understand what we are shooting for before we start to think about strategies or technologies. In the big picture, then, we’re trying to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. So, we try to start not only by understanding where the energy is going in the building but where the carbon emissions are generated in the organization or community we are working with.

Susan Seastone (Perkins+Will):In the master planning phase of the Ohlone College Newark Center project, we identified four alternative energy strategies we were interested in pursuing. During schematic design, life-cycle costing was completed and three systems were chosen to be incorporated into the project: geothermal (ground-coupled heat pumps), enthalpy wheels and rooftop photovoltaic panels. Wind dropped out of contention. These systems, once installed, would reduce energy costs over the building’s life, thus reducing this building’s impact on the college’s operations and maintenance budget — and constant challenge in the community college system.

Building Performance/Operations

Mike Utzinger (TKWA Team): What we have done on a couple of different projects is a programming charrette with the team and client rather than a design charrette. On the Aldo Leopold Foundation building, for example, the foundation board and the client met with the entire design team, the commissioning agent and Pliny Fisk from Maximum Potential Energy. We set a building energy utilization goal for the building. That goal was based on our knowledge of the performance of buildings we had designed and the performance of buildings reported by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory.

Peter Rumsey (Integral Group): We found that when we’re starting to think about sustainability and energy, [it is best] to organize the charrette around systems. So we talk about architecture, and everybody participates in that discussion, but the architect starts to talk about the building envelope and building orientation. Then the architect will talk about building materials, and then the structural engineer can pipe in, the mechanical engineer can pipe in and the daylighting guys can pipe in; so you get feedback on structure. Then the lighting people and electrical engineers can start talking about their systems.

We know a lot of the things that lower energy use are not a secret. We’ll start with, in essence, a beginning of a design, and then we’ll go back and we’ll start modeling it. The idea is that in that preliminary charrette we can come up with some alternatives. So, we’re modeling in the schematic design phase with a schematic level energy model, a rapid energy model, a variety of different options, and then we come back to the second charrette.

There’s this rapid iteration on the model in the schematic phase, and ideally we’d like to do it right then and there.

Visit www.EDCmag.com for the full Expert Roundtable IV on Interactive Design Sessions. And coming in July: Don’t miss the expert roundtable on NZE schools.

© Copyrighted November 2010 Bruce Haxton. This work may not be reproduced in whole or in part without written permission of Bruce Haxton. All rights reserved.