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Emotionally Durable Design

In 2018 it’s almost a given that buildings are designed with LEED standards in mind, but by 2050 the meaning of sustainable design with extend beyond standards that make buildings more energy efficient to buildings that are energy proficient. Sustainable design is more than just building a rooftop garden and catching the suns rays with solar panels, it involved a careful selection of materials in order to reduce the impact of the construction and operation of the building. Sustainable design in the year 2050 includes ambitious and smart building design to strive for zero-net energy, zero-net water, and zero-net resource. But it also involves thinking on a micro level, such as sourcing materials and labour locally.

By 2050 over 75% of the U.S. population with live in cities so places like Boston in particular will need to adopt to a new culture of sustainability. The main driver for sustainability will be to completely rethink how shelters are built. Michael Green in his Ted Talk proposes engineering new ways to build taller, larger buildings out of wood. He suggests that wood is the solution to our sustainability needs because it is the only building material you can use that grows from the energy of the sun. Mitchell Joachim n his Ted Talk thinks that buildings in the future need to 100% come from the earth. He does research in “growing” homes and enven villages by mixing biology and architectural practices.

I think an important driver to sustainable design that isn’t talked about enough is emotional durable design. Research shows that an emotional connection or attachment to items ensures a more involved relationship with those items. People are less likely to be wasteful or destructive towards things they’ve formed a meaningful connection with. What if building were designed with emotional durability? That means not succumbing to the trendiest architectural fad that is out of style in the next 10 years. How can architects design places that last, and people want to last?

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Sustainable Urbanism

Sustainable architecture on a micro level is concerned with energy efficient systems and building practices, but what happens when sustainability mixes with an entire community? The answer is mixed-use developments and they are the key to more sustainable communities. Mixed-use developments fall under the umbrella term of sustainable urbanism and is defined by walkable and transit-served communities integrated with high-performance infrastructure, compactness (density), and biophilia (human access to nature). According to the article, Sustainable Urbanism: The Grand Unification by Douglas Farr, “concentrated mixed-use development can support district energy systems, reducing carbon generation by 30 percent and energy consumption by as much as 50 percent.” This is because the building envelope of a mixed-use development works more efficiently compared with detached single-family housing. Mixed-use developments are essentially centralized communities that meet the daily needs of a neighborhood over a lifetime. A well-designed mixed-use development encourages people to meet their daily needs on foot and reduces a reliance of gas and electric fueled transportation.

Mixed-use development is just a fragment of sustainable urbanism which has the potential to improve the quality of life of cities. Life lived in sustainable urbanism is healthier, happier, more independent and not least at all longer. People in sustainable cities have abundant opportunities to walk, ride, bike, and even use a wheelchair around the neighborhood, as well as having access to good transit service to adjacent neighborhoods and regional destinations. Starting at an early age, kids can get daily exercise and gain some independence by walking to school on a grid of safe, narrow streets. Additionally, the sidewalks and close quarters typical of urban neighborhoods encourage sociability.

An example of a sustainable urban improvement is the public transit system in San Francisco, according to researched, John Holtzclaw, “San Francisco’s higher density and better transit service shortened trip lengths sufficiently to allow one mile on transit to replace eight miles of driving,” as compared to outlying suburbs.”

Sustainable urbanism also connects people to the outdoors (biophilia) and to the resources they rely on. Sustainable urbanism believes that human settlements need to be designed to make resources flows visible and experiential. For example a wastewater system that extracts nutrients to grow food in one’s neighborhood creates an incentive not to dump toxic chemicals down the drain.

Boston has some examples of sustainable urbanism by design with biophilia and connecting people to the outdoors. For example the Charles River Esplanade is a landscape of greenery and paths along the Boston side of the Charles River Basin where people walk, and play. According to Douglas Farr’s article, “A disconnect from nature is increasingly thought to contribute to a number of psychological harm such as increased stress and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder.” The design of the Esplanade keeps Bostonians healthy both physically, emotionally, and mentally.

Reference: Sustainable Urbanism: The Grand Unification (Farr, 2008): Pages 41-59, 103-107, 113-119, 125-131

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What’s the deal with energy modeling?

Something I never understood is the temperature control in all the office building’s I’ve ever worked in. For example, in the summer, you sweat during your entire commute to work but once you sit at your desk, you’re shivering because you thought it would be a good idea to wear short sleeves. From what I gather this is a common thing and I wonder if building control systems are being designed on par with the building they are being implemented in. I think that comfortable inhabitants and sustainable buildings could and should go hand-in-hand!

The solution to creating a comfortable environment inside a building is to find the limit where the temperature and internal climate are desirable to the inhabitants - no more and no less - so that the building system is running as efficiently as possible. A simple strategy to achieve is to quickly source feedback from those who experience the particular  building’s climate on a daily basis. Designers may think they’re creating an optimal internal environment, but the employee of an office building who inhabits that space every day can quickly and easily tell you if they find their space too hot or cold. Mechanical solutions can also be utilized such as building sensors that focus temperature and climate regulation units to turn on or off in only utilized areas. Additionally, personal customizable units on a smaller scale can be installed at desks or smaller huddle areas.

In addition to designing more comfortable spaces, it is important for sustainability designers to utilize benchmarks and targets when analyzing actual building performance data. Traditionally, goal setting for new buildings has focused on using a certain percentage less energy than the prevailing code. Additionally, the typical practice is to use a rule of thumb or repeat past practice when designing buildings with sustainability measures. However this can result in designing with excessive margins of safety and misallocating project resources to the larger systems within a building. The remedy to this is to integrate infrastructure and building design and use a progressive sequence of targets when setting building performance goals. By balancing building form, envelope elements, air conditions, lighting design, and building controls, designers can optimize energy performance and set firm targets for building loads. Eventually the hope is for these design requirements to become standards for design.

An important tool for designing sustainable buildings is energy modeling, but traditional energy modeling has limitations for predicting actual building performance. The intent of energy modeling is to assess the performance of a building relative to targets as operated (measured) in addition to as-designed (modeled). However, energy modeling during design has become decoupled from actual measured performance of new buildings:

Models are only as good as the assumptions about operating conditions and building management practices and designers often lack feedback from existing building performance when they are in the design process. Furthermore there is no expectation for analysts to have their models tested against actual building performance; this is clear because analysts adopt caveats to their predictions and despite these caveats, modeling is still widely used to estimate actual future energy use. Instead designers should have access to operation data for existing building which will allow them to focus on getting modeling inputs accurate without using assumptions as a crutch. If designers were able to rely on experience and judgement instead of algorithms and code there would be a significant impact on the prediction results of energy models.

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Designing for Comfort

In commercial building architecture the overall look of the building often overshadows the interior design details. This can be detrimental to the comfort of those occupying the spaces in these building particularly in the lens of indoor environmental climate and air quality. However there are several firms and organizations tackling the issues of indoor environmental quality within the field of sustainable architecture.

One of these organizations is the University of California, Berkeley Center for the Built Environment (CBE), which is working to take research innovations from their labs into the real world. They are using design for improved indoor environmental quality to achieve energy savings with web based applications and user-responsive personal comfort systems. The CBE has designed devices to be embedded in chairs, foot warmers, and fans to be used at individual work stations. These devices target the most thermally sensitive parts of the body (such as the face and head, torso and feet) instead of trying to control one temperature for an entire building or floor. These devices cut the use of natural gas by 39% and electricity by 30% compared to standard building climate control practices. Edward Arens, a professor of architecture and direction of the CBE describes the devices as, “it’s even better than having a thermostat at every workstation!”

Another consideration for building design is the indoor air quality of a space which also has a drastic impact on the comfort of building inhabitants. Unfortunately, the indoor air quality is often not considered during the design and construction of a building and particularly HVAC design is not prioritized during the process. However, there is an easy fix to improve the indoor air quality of a building! In the design phase site selection, building orientation, location of outdoor air intakes, should be considered in addition to how the building will be heated, cooled, and ventilated. By tailoring the architectural design of a building to the HVAC design, improved indoor air quality is guaranteed.

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Going Green

There is a change in the design industry towards standardizing information disclosed around “green” practices and building products. It is commonplace today in the AEC fields for manufacturers to make questionable marketing claims about their products such as “BPA-free” or “50% recycled content”. However this “cherry-picking” style of labeling is dangerous because it misleads designers and building owners into using products that aren’t as environmentally friendly as promised. Now there is a market demand for healthier building products, as green-building advocacy groups, construction and design professionals, and manufacturers push for the standardization of ingredient disclosure of all building products.

The effect of requiring ingredient disclosure on products (both building products and other) is met with some concern. If all the ingredients of a product need to be disclosed then there is a greater possibility of information overload - is it really an architects or specifiers job to scrutinize every ingredient? There is also the concern that if you were to dissect every single product used in a building project then some common practices need to be thrown out (for example PVC and  bisphenol-A are common materials found in furniture manufacturing) and as a result the cost of a project can increase drastically. I believe that it is important for the information to be available in the form of full ingredient disclosure, even if most building professionals do not have the time or expertise to process the data themselves. If the information is public, then experts can serve as a lens for interpreting the information. Additionally, once a light is shed on common environmentally-unfriendly building products, then there will be pressure and incentive to find alternative better practices.

Another concern of design professionals is the embodied energy of products which is a important focus for the architecture and engineering profession as the field strives to continue to drive down the energy that buildings consume in their operations through initiatives like AIA 2030. The embodied energy is defined as the energy used to harvest, manufacturer, and transport a material to a project site. As buildings consume less energy in operations, the embodied energy in the building’s materials will become increasingly important as a percentage of a building’s total energy footprint. Furthermore a recent study shows that embodied energy accounts for the majority of a building’s energy footprint for approximately the first 15-20 years of a building’s life cycle.

One leader and advocate in the green building field is Google, which is a proponent for both the standardization of ingredient disclosure and consciousness of embodied energy. Other institutions should follow Google’s example to hold sustainable building practices to a high standard! For example, the Boston Architectural College in Boston, Massachusetts has undergone some renovations in the summer of 2018. If the BAC wants to maintain a healthy workplace, such as Google, they should do the following:

1. Advocate for a stringent building product selection criteria

2. Avoid substances on the Living Building Challenge Red List and the U.S. EPAs Chemicals of Concern List

3. Encourage transparency from manufacturers by requiring full participation in the Healthy Building Network Pharos product ingredient and hazard screening tool

4. Strive to achieve at least LEED Gold certification on all products used in construction, including mandates for recycled content and regional materials

5. Question manufacturers and contractors’ use of formaldehydes, PVC and bisphenol-A as common building and furniture products

Anne Less of Mary Davidge Associates (a consulting firm that supports Google’s sustainable facilities program) sums up the importance of institutions, like the BAC and Google, taking the lead in sustainable building practices. She states that, “If we had more partners in [the sustainable building] effort there would be a lot more leverage!”

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I looked at Moscow Russia as a case study for cities located in climate zone Dfb! Check it out: https://youtu.be/iszcQteVoRo

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Water and Energy (mo money mo problems)

In design school, blossoming architects are given case studies to review and design problems to solve. They’re asked to design buildings that consider structure, aesthetics, social and financial impact and --- wait for it -- that magic word sustainability! But how complete is the architectural education concerning sustainability? If you slap a green roof on your studio project, do you get to check the “sustainability” box for your next crit?

There are design problems that architects don’t know they have. These problems are energy and water.

In 2020 the world population is expected to exceed 9 billion people (according to the EPA - holy cow). 6 billion of those people are going to be in cities (more than double the number of people currently living in cities). A hot topic in the architecture community is the migration of people settling in cities instead of suburban areas and everyone is aware of the land restrictions and financial implementations that really make this a problem. But if we’re focused on making buildings taller so that even more people can live in Manhattan, we also need to focus on how to provide heat, light, and running water to these people, all while being environmentally responsible.

It’s a common misconception that designing a building to be green is “expensive” - and this is often true for retrofitting existing buildings that weren’t designed to have natural irrigation or passive cooling systems. But if every building from here on out was created with the design team thinking about recycling, reducing, and reusing water and energy than these “green” buildings would not cost more to build and design than the current status quo AND the additional efficiency of the utility systems of this buildings would actually save money in a matter of years!

But what about the buildings are already built? That’s where monitoring energy and water usage is key. Let’s look at the Vancouver Island University Cowichan Campus as a case study for energy and water monitoring. The Cowichan Campus was designed to be an incredibly sustainable building and without getting into too much detail, the energy model used to predict the building’s energy usage reported more than the measured first year of energy/water usage. A variety of factors could explain this discrepancy, but regardless Vancouver Island University has been monitoring its energy and water usage in order to reduce its consumption. By using smart systems such as lights that only turn on in occupied rooms, and internal temperature systems that utilize the outside weather to keep occupants comfortable, they’re well on their way to meet sustainability goals. My favorite monitoring strategy of the Cowichan Campus building is that a display monitor at the entrance of the building shows the current weather conditions of the region with the buildings corresponding energy/water performance. This technique ties in a social aspect to sustainability - it reminds occupants to use energy and water responsible. It’s only a matter of time before The Vancouver University Cowichan Campus reaches its sustainability goals, and more designers should use the lessons learned here in their own sustainability design.

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First blog post (I’m not nervous... you’re nervous!)

To whom it may concern (or does this thing just get lost in internet outer space?) I am a graduate student at the Boston Architectural College working towards my Master of Architecture degree! This semester I’m taking a class in Sustainable Systems and a requirement for this course is to maintain an online blog to document my work for the semester.

Regrettably, I don’t know much about sustainable systems (and truthfully wouldn’t be in this class unless is was required for my degree). I work for a large infrastructure firm in Boston as an architectural designer and in my experience “sustainability” is a buzz word. No one really sits you down and says “this is what sustainability is...” the term is just thrown around the office or class room whenever you want to sound fancy. Well, I guess my qualms are being addressed because for the next three months I will in fact be sat down and explained “what is sustainability.”

Buckle up nerds, it’s going to be wild.