 Welcome, everyone, to tonight's TREMCO Sustainable Partnerships lecture. It's my pleasure, and has been my pleasure this afternoon, to be with our guest speaker and introducer to you tonight. Marta Bouchard is an associate and environmental designer for Atelier 10, which, if you don't know, is an office that began as a one-room business in London in the 1990s and has since grown into a global leader in environmental design thinking with offices not only in London but in San Francisco and New York and elsewhere, and projects ranging all around the globe. So I'm really amazing work. The name Atelier, which means workshop, more or less, in French, I think is emblematic of the way the office approaches design challenges, namely that they really work at them and seek out opportunities to oversimplify here, to do more with less in making critical relationships between architecture and environment. As an associate in the New York office, where she journeyed from today to be with us, Marta manages projects that integrate high-performance, sustainable design principles with an emphasis on human experience. So it's not just the building, it's experience. She provides environmental design analysis and lead consulting services for really a tremendous range of projects, commercial, institutional libraries, laboratories, theaters, courthouses, interiors, education facilities, multi-family housing across the spectrum. Marta's become one of the firm's lead leaders during her 10 years there and has managed over 20 different lead applications, which can be quite involved and supported many more than that within the Atelier 10s three other offices. And she takes a kind of a keen interest in the human experience, as I mentioned earlier. Of the architectural environments and seeks to incorporate issues affecting occupant experience into the sustainable design project. She's a lead accredited professional and holds a national council for interior design certificate as well as a BS from Cornell in design and environmental analysis. And please join me in welcoming Marta. That was one of the better intros I've ever had, so thanks, Nate. It's a pleasure to be here tonight. Thank you guys so much for having this lecture series and for finding Atelier 10 as a compelling speaker to be here today. So I just sort of find my space here. So I'm gonna share with you all the joy I get in my job. And I hope for all of you, you find a job like this too. I work for Atelier 10 and my core team in New York is about 40 people, but we are a global office and we offer a lot of different environmentally focused services, which I'll explain. And we come from a lot of different backgrounds. The couple of core things we are driven by is collaboration and integration. And we bring a diverse background to our approach to architecture and construction. We really try to come at design with a bit of an enlightened perspective and in thinking about people and the environment. And fundamentally, we operate on a few basic principles. These are our foundational sort of way that we approach our work, which is have your buildings and landscapes do more and have your mechanical systems do less. Try to be as pragmatic as you can and design from first principles, which you'll see as a bit of a thread throughout all of the conversation tonight. We start by setting goals. This is a key approach and a lot of tonight is gonna be talking about how do we strategize, how do we approach this stuff? We set goals, you have to start somewhere. And in setting those goals and setting targets, metrics, we then iterate. That's a design process and it's about exploring technologies and strategies and design opportunities to get to those goals that we set. And then at the end, we try to benchmark it. We try to measure our performance against what we said we were gonna do. We do have an international presence. We have a main office in London and some offices in Australia and San Francisco and Glasgow. And who knows where the next one might pop up, but we do love to work all over. And our services are varied and unique, but yet integrated. The main issue, the main sort of service we offer is environmental design, which is just about really thinking about buildings in a very pragmatic and holistic way. Alongside that is energy analysis. This is fundamentally energy modeling, but iterating through energy solutions and finding out how to optimize design. Sometimes we call it optioneering. Lighting design, a specialty that we think is really critical in a high performance and sustainable building is to really focus on design and recognize how that interfaces with occupants and the experience of the building. Master planning, sort of scaling up on environmental design principles. Benchmarking, of course, which is sort of keeping ourselves honest with what we set out to achieve. I'll talk a little bit more about that later. Carbon management, for those that are trying to really put a CO2 emissions profile on their buildings or on their institutions. Facade optimizations, sort of drilling down into building facades. And of course, not forgetting the importance of the simple truth of healthy buildings. And the fact that there are people that need to be well and fit in the spaces that we live and breathe, so that gets tied into a lot of this. And last but not least, something that's becoming more timely in buildings and operations is verification, this idea that after you design and build a building, you walk away as a construction design team and it's incredibly important to go back and verify what you did. So it's a service we offer primarily on the energy side of things to see how a building is operating year after year. Helps us learn and it helps us keep everybody honest about how buildings function. So I'm here today to talk about high performance, the path to high performance. How do we get there? What does it mean to be net zero? And I'm really gonna emphasize our approach. I'm gonna end with a case study that just sort of just gives you a flavor of one of the many projects that has really dear to me. And I think it's cool because it's a design studio building and so hopefully you can appreciate that. I come from a design background and sort of nostalgic to be in a studio. So it's exciting to talk to you all. So what are the drivers of change? Well, let's not all pretend that we don't know what green is. There's a lot of conversation about green. And we think about it sometimes almost as dinner conversation, but there's a lot of attention to it. Primarily because there's both sort of topical issues and real performance issues in terms of our earth and climate change, global urbanization, the fact that around the world the forecasted urbanization is skyrocketing and population growth is increasing and climate change is warming and extreme weather events are more and more frequent. And as a partial response to that, our energy standards and many other, this is an example of ASHRAE, but our energy standards are getting tighter because we need to deal with these realities. So these drivers are sort of why my firm is here and what we do is really drive this home. So when we talk about sustainability, obviously today we're talking about it in the built environment. One of the challenges with this word sustainability is it's wildly up for discussion in terms of its definition. There's about 200 definitions globally and we tend to really like the front-line version which is about the simple concept that you meet the needs of the present without compromising the needs of the future. A really simple principle that it's really hard to achieve when you really get down to it. So another big issue around sustainability, we often call it the triple bottom line, is this sort of interrelationship between socioeconomic, environmental stewardship, this sort of idea of our earth as a resource and yet we're people on this earth and how do we really deal with these interacting drivers? And what's interesting about sustainability, especially because I've worked on a lot of different projects is many people approach it from one or more of these but not all at once, right? It's usually it's either a cost driver or maybe a very strong ethos about just environmental stewardship and it's some sort of mishmash of these things often with a dominant driver. But when it comes to buildings, we have a lot of work cut out of us as designers because buildings are an enormous component of our global footprint in terms of carbon before transportation and before industry. It's a big energy consuming part of our world. And so buildings create a great opportunity for us to do better in terms of energy use, in terms of carbon emissions, which is something we'll talk about a little bit today, in terms of water consumption, we're incredibly wasteful with water and in terms of solid waste, whether it's just the construction waste that happens in buildings or the demolition or the recycling of old spaces after you renovate and just waste in general is a huge opportunity. So green buildings can be a huge contributor to trying to get these numbers down. And last but not least, we spend 90% of our time indoors, give or take 2% depending on who you ask. I think the latest number was 92, which is sad. But we are people on this planet and it's incredibly important to think about green buildings as a space to live and work and play and to make them as responsible as we can. So when we talk about environmental design, I want to talk about our approach, sort of building a bit more on our ethos really. But so our environmental design approach again comes from first principles and it's really important that we respond to climate and landscape and where we are and to recognize that there are these sort of natural cycles that actually coexist and how do we sort of capture that opportunity and build upon it and not try to fight it. So I mentioned before, it's hugely important to set goals. If you don't know where you're going, you don't know how to get there. You might as well set your goals. And they're varied, right? Because everyone sort of might think about a green building with different ambitions. This list here in no particular order is certainly not the end of the list. Some folks are really motivated by operations and maintenance. A green building to them is one they don't have to tinker with and constantly fix or pay to repair. Or a green building could be all about, you know, really creating an experience that educates the occupants inside. Maybe an academic institution, for example, really wants their students to know what it's like to be in a green building so they can go out and promote that. There are a lot of different drivers and often they come with metrics, but you gotta start asking some smart questions. And so one of the first things we do is say, okay, what are we here to achieve? We're hired often, I'm a consultant so I'm hired by a design team, usually an architect, sometimes an owner or developer, and they say, okay, Atelier 10, you guys are really good at this environmental framework, big thing, help us get to our green building ambitions. And we'll say, okay, let's actually define what that is. So we'll ask a whole bunch of questions and try to figure out what can we do here? What are the opportunities we have? What are we trying to achieve? And this is a smattering of questions that might come up in a workshop, but what we'll do is we'll get a whole bunch of different people in the room and say, what moves you? What matters to you? And the facilities engineer answers that question very differently from the faculty who are gonna be teaching in the space or from the owner who pays the bills. And all of those people matter in defining what that project takes shape as. And that's a scalable issue, right? And that's true for a project as small as a residential home or a master plan as large as an institutional 20 year plan for 50 or 100 buildings. It's a very scalable exercise and it's important to recognize that this is the message I hope you take away from today is applicable to many, many cases. So then we have a defined design process. So we're not talking about buildings here, right? So we're gonna look at a lot of sections and details when it comes to buildings and equipment and the people that are in them. But you always start with the concept and you try to think about how the designers and the sort of professional practices come together to create that building. Conventionally, we have our energy systems and our engineers come in and they follow an engineering path and they know exactly how to design mechanical systems and lighting systems and controls. And we have the designers that think about the people and the program and the necessary equipment and demands on the space that define those energy loads. And the more we get those systems to be talking to each other, the better that system can be. So we really advocate for the integrated design process and IDP is a bit of a catchphrase these days but it's real and it matters. And hopefully I can emphasize that to you today. So there's some major benefits with integrating early. There's been countless studies done about the cost savings alone that come with early integration from working backwards change orders in the field of, whoops, we forgot to talk about that or figure that out sooner. And there's a lot of costs in construction if you have to make changes from what the design was meant to be. But moving back, there is a lot of optimization that comes the sooner you start thinking about those design issues, answering those tough questions that you set out to answer. And the high performance of that building directly relates to the early integration of those collaborative integrated conversations. And there's different roles to be played by the various stakeholders from the design team to the owner to the construction team. And they come in along this timeline at different points but the sooner the better in terms of cost savings and design performance. And so fundamentally where we come in is sort of this blue curve. This is where my firm's best work really shines is coming in early and really scrutinizing and questioning and iterating early so that by the time you get to the later phases of design and you're starting to price and start putting together construction budgets, you've already figured out what you need to optimize your building design. So I'm gonna talk about that sort of early phase design analysis and this path to high performance. So this path is unique in every way. There is no perfect path. And if there's anything you can take away from today, there is no silver bullet. If there were, we probably wouldn't all be here. So when I say that, there's no silver bullet. What I mean is there are many different ways to get to an end goal. And high performance, as I mentioned, just like sustainability has a broad definition, high performance can be defined in many ways. And there's no one thing that gets you there but there is a series of trade-offs and decisions to be made and along that path you keep sort of whittling away at the options. You start with the big stuff and you get down to the fine details. So conventional design is maybe not thinking about these issues but the first thing we try to do is just how do we minimize energy consumption? We think about massing and orientation. How do we respond to our climate? We start thinking about envelope and then we start thinking about systems and loads inside the building and controlling it and responding to building schedules and occupancy patterns. And then once we really start to be efficient in our building operations, we then start to think about renewables and ways to sort of drive that energy profile down further. And as we get closer and closer to a carbon zero or a net energy zero target, that's when you get into the fine details of carbon trading, the last bits of offsets that you might need to get to something zero and then there's the super ambitious effort of possibly becoming climate positive. This idea that you create a building that actually gives back. Obviously that's at the far end of the spectrum. So when you put this all together, this is the story I'm telling today, this path to high performance really starting with the big stuff before you get into the details. And I mentioned before the importance of benchmarking. So this is the holding ourselves accountable to what we set out to perform. If we set these goals, we wanna be energy efficient or we wanna save a certain amount of water or we wanna make sure that the indoor environment has certain indoor air quality and acoustical and lighting and other visual objectives that we set out to achieve. Well, there's many ways to measure that. This is a reminder of just how global sustainable benchmarking is. There are energy standards, there are performance benchmarks, some are mandatory, some are optional. Some come with incentives and payouts. Some are, some are self-directed. They don't come with a logo per se. States and institutions have their own, sometimes unique ways of approaching this. If you look around the globe, there are benchmarks that actually are sort of unique to every major continent and a lot of major cities. I won't go through all those today but LEED, leadership in energy and environmental design is a big one here in the US and something that I'm personally really familiar with and our firm does a lot of work in. Something I think, frankly, we can't escape right now in the architecture industry. It's maybe not for everyone but it's certainly a prominent benchmarking system and it works. It sets up a good framework and it holds people accountable because you have a third party review that looks at the work that you set out to achieve and checks some boxes to say that you did it and while it's not a perfect fit for every project, what's really good about LEED is the fact that it's a menu of options and you can pick and choose from that menu of things that make sense for your project. There's literally no way you can do them all. It's designed to be not perfect in that way and the whole aspect of design and iterating in design is an exercise that you can sort of use the LEED framework as a tool and you, at the end of the day, get a rating. Certified, silver, gold, platinum and there's different versions of LEED. There's a LEED version four that's out right now and it's really raised the bar in the world of design and construction to challenge the industry and keep everybody on their toes. So LEED is one of a few different benchmarking systems and when it comes to this getting to zero or carbon neutral, different benchmarking systems, different targets have a different ability to get you there and I want to just be very frank that LEED is not the only way to do that and it certainly doesn't get you to net zero. So it's a tool, it's a resource and a framework but net zero is a whole other animal so I want to just sort of contextualize net zero because I think it's another phrase that gets thrown around a lot and is an important one to define. So net zero energy cost is as simple as that. It's actually trying to make sure that you don't have costs associated with owning and operating a building. Outside of first cost of course, it's sort of operational costs and it's fairly straightforward and the owner ultimately benefits. They don't have to pay the bills, so to speak. Short of utility rates are being off the grid. You know there are some margins in there but that's a very simple straightforward way of understanding net zero. Then there's net zero site energy which is really looking at your energy profile, not your cost. So for example, putting some PVs on your project might offset your cost but it doesn't necessarily mean you use no energy unless your PV truly offsets your exact energy demand. So it's fairly straightforward to measure but you don't necessarily give complete control to the owner of that building. But it's an energy metric and some people are highly motivated by that alone. Then there's net zero source energy which really goes beyond the scope of your building and it's immediate sort of use and demand onsite and goes back to where that energy comes from. This is the utility issue of your electrical grid, your local power plan and how it's operating. And that gets tricky because you now need to account for things you don't have control over but that's a different type of net zero energy. The GSA, Government Services Institute that own like hundreds of thousands of buildings across the country, they actually use the net zero source energy metric as a target for their buildings which I find really compelling because it raises the bar in terms of accountability for these things. And last but not least, net zero carbon. Not the same as energy but an important sort of unitary difference about measuring carbon emissions or greenhouse gas. You hear like GHG emissions a lot as a greenhouse gas acronym. And it's a very wide accounting because you now need to translate to a new metric. You're not just dealing with energy and KBTUs or MMBTUs you're dealing with CO2 and how do you quantify that? And there's a whole school of thought on that which I won't get into. So when it comes to defining net zero I just want to really emphasize that it depends what you're really talking about. So I'm going to talk today about this path. It's hard to get to net zero. It's really hard. And there's a few projects out there that are doing it but this is the story I'm going to tell about sort of really trying to ratchet down across all these different sustainable design issues and trying to get as close as we can. So along that path this is what we do. We start with being responsive to our climate thinking about where we are on the globe and all the climatic conditions that come with it. And from there it's the first step in understanding passive design strategies as opposed to active and passive design is all the free stuff. This is the stuff that we want to take advantage of. You want to lasso as much passive potential as you can because you save at the end and that's that sort of exponential curve I was describing before about where you really get the bang for your buck, right? So it's dealing with solar conditions, wind conditions, water, lake effect or sort of lake cooling effect that might come or different sort of topographical issues if you're in the mountains or in a valley or in a field. Thinking about how your building responds to all those conditions, prioritizing orientation and massing, really thinking about how your building is either nestled into the earth or maybe is very prominent and what that has to deal with when it's prominent. So in facades we start to think about solar and wind and the impact on those facades. What are we fighting, right? We have to deal with outside and inside and our facade is our critical line of defense. So how do we start to think about that? And we'll set some goals about solar exposure and who's on what side of the building when and if that's okay. Thinking about natural ventilation and when the windows can open and can it cross ventilate or can you have a stack effect or what does your facade do in terms of breathability? And something I love to talk about is the importance of our building envelopes. We're starting to move down the path here. It's like, okay, you sort of size your building, you mass it according to your program and you really respond to your site conditions and then you have your envelope which does all the heavy lifting. It keeps the inside in, it keeps the outside out. So how do we really talk about all these issues from views outside? There's like this beautiful symbiotic balance that has to happen between nobody wants to live in a concrete insulated block. You wanna look outside and be a part of the world and at the same time if everybody lived in an Apple store we would have a really big carbon problem. So how do you strike that balance? And your envelope is this amazing opportunity to optioneer that, all these issues about heat gain and thermal bridging and natural ventilation and of course aesthetics and building expression and having a presence in your community or on your campus. Then you get into your active energy issues, active strategies in terms of heating and cooling and offsetting your interior internal loads, thinking about changing seasons and big conferences in the middle of summer and school going on break and how do you keep the building warm enough but all those things and looking at different equipment. We work really closely with engineers to think hard about this and to think about equipment decisions and controls and heat recovery options and different ways depending on the program of a building you can really fine tune that. And of course sort of last resort in the world of energy systems is offsets, renewables. How do you again lasso the climatic opportunities on your site to offset what you still need to use in terms of demand, energy demand. And wind energy is great in some applications and are really hard to make appropriate for buildings. Solar thermal, great when you have a lot of hot water demand but not always needed. Photovoltaics, a really rapidly growing industry that is excellent when it comes to net zero targets because you can offset your energy sort of KBTO consumption right there on your site. And then of course some, depending on where you are in the world, geothermal. This idea that you can capture the earth's energy as a way to preheat or pre-cool your building or even better yet if you're near the water there's always title or sort of lake or ocean conditions you can take advantage of. And then in your site, I love this graphic because it's pretty amazing to think what buildings do to the earth. This is an issue called heat island effect. This idea that all this concrete and hardscape across our planet creates a global warming effect in and of itself and this is a false color image just showing you what sort of that footprint looks like and how do we try to reduce this heat island effect? How do we think about storm conditions? This is Hurricane Irene. This is a great aerial satellite view of what's called stormwater runoff. Massive runoff and the fact that the water ecosystems had to deal with this unexpected runoff. And then there's also stormwater quantity. When you have so much hardscape that the earth can't absorb it. It literally had so much construction in roadways in Houston that that water had no place to go. How do we not let this happen again into their buildings in our site, in our site ecology? So we gotta think about the site and buildings and landscape, they talk to each other and they feed off each other. And so responsive, sustainable design is definitely thinking about the ecology and using rain gardens and sort of appropriate plant species and designing for places for water to go and habitat to thrive and thinking about that dynamic. Of course, in an urban center, you're maybe limited in these ways but then you have to think about what conditions you're facing and do the best you can if you don't have the ability to do certain landscape strategies. But you certainly have to deal with rainwater and there's rainwater and stormwater. Both can be valuable assets in a sustainable design story. You can use this water for something and not just assume it goes down a drain and into an infrastructural system that disappears and someone else deals with it. One of the very critical benchmarking issues and we're on the East Coast so we don't really feel this as much but on the West Coast, where drought and water conservation is an enormous issue. The water restrictions and water conservation issues are so strong that there are efforts being made to not only capture rainwater, but to capture stormwater across a parking lot because you can't waste that precious resource and so we think about that and we do a lot of graphics and sort of conceptual diagrams to start to talk about this idea of water flows on your building, on your site, capturing it, reusing it, repurposing it and thinking about not only just reducing your demand, it's not just don't let the water run while you brush your teeth. We're talking like a much bigger scale here. How do you reduce it, reuse it and treat it and fundamentally manage it. This is a big word being kicked around in my industry right now, this idea of managing water, which means don't give it to someone else to manage. Like your stormwater treatment plant down the street or your neighbor. So we'll look at water sources and water demands and try to do what we call a water budget. Try to balance this out. You've got rain, it ebbs and flows across the year. It depends on where you are in the world and you've got needs from your cooling equipment to your plumbing fixtures, to your toilet flushing and how do you think about that and we'll iterate, we'll study fixtures and equipment and sort of ratcheting down some of the performance values of water issues. Energy, so another way to iterate is looking at different design options and looking at ways to get your energy profile down. This is an E-Quest energy model graphic with some reporting metrics that we use to show how energy consumption can be studied and daylight, a daylight model taking an architectural design and really looking at it exclusively to understand the performance of solar and daylight and what that means for the interior and the envelope controls of that daylight. There's other performance tools we use. CFD modeling, computational fluid dynamics, comprehensive daylighting to look at average annual illuminance or other sort of daylight metrics for understanding solar and of course, responding facade response to daylight in terms of opening size, glazing type, mullions and baguettes and fins and devices that can be put on your building to control that daylight or welcome that daylight. And of course, inside your building, there's a host of issues about making those buildings healthy and sustainable both in the resources that you buy and put into them as well as the experience that you have by sitting in that chair and walking around this building and breathing this air and making sure that that is all keeping you sustainable too. The story of materials is interesting. I won't go too deep, but I'm gonna touch on it because I think it's hugely important. If you were in Washington DC, for example, how do you find materials that are local and what does that mean? And this issue of sourcing local and recycling, everything that you use on your site is a big conversation in sustainable buildings and not to be overlooked, but a complex one that requires your contractor to be involved. And most interestingly, finally, we are coming around to what the rest of the world is doing which is thinking about toxicity of materials and chemical transparency and thankfully in lead version four, this is now a forefront and something that our architectural design teams are having to respond to. Our UK brethren, for example, and everyone in the EU has been dealing with this for over a decade now when we here in the US have a sort of different approach. Basically, we don't call things harmful until we have proof that it causes harm as opposed to gee, maybe we should test if it's harmful before we use it. And so there's a huge push right now to think about sort of transparency of building materials and understanding the chemical makeup and the health impacts from carcinogens and other sort of environmental toxins that are going into our earth, whether it's the ecosystems or our interior spaces. And of course, pulling that all together and thinking about health and wellness, the idea that you feel productive and enlightened in the spaces that you work and in the place that you go home to and making sure that you balance these issues about daylight and acoustical comfort and thermal comfort and the interplay of design and construction with health and wellness. And you bring this all together into a variety of buildings. This is an architectural graphic section. We call it an environmental section. I'm gonna show you four of them just because the breadth of these is countless but small project where certain strategies made sense for this climate in DC as opposed to a lab in Arizona where we had a variety of issues to deal with in terms of high energy lab consumption. This one outside of Chicago has designed studio that face some other challenges and high rise building in Florida that was mostly office space and had to deal with a completely different climate. So we use graphics a lot to communicate the fact that there are many different ways to design a sustainable building and every building ends up being quite unique in its own right. I'm gonna tell you for about 10, 15 minutes or so and then I'll wrap up about this project as a case study and just sort of walk you through one project. I'll try to be quick so I don't run out of time but I wanted to introduce to you one project of many that tells this story and it's in Massachusetts and it's a design studio and one I've been working on since 2013 and it's done, it's built, it's constructed and it's about to get its lead certification but it started just as I've described today. It started with a workshop. A bunch of people in a room with some markers and some PowerPoint slides and we did some goal setting and we were there for about four hours as the owner and the design team and my boss at the time and we formulated that into some very articulate goals and on this project, one of the ones to make note of is really early on they wanted to make a statement with building design and materials because at the University of Massachusetts Amherst they house in previously three buildings and now in this building three programs. They're a landscape architecture program, they're building construction and technology program and they're architecture program and those three were previously sort of disjointed and they brought them all together in this beautiful building and materials was a really big deal. They had a lot of faculty involved that wanted to drive this story. So out of our goal setting workshop we started to conceptualize this with the architect, Lears-Weins-Apple Associates out of Boston and started to visualize what these ideas could be and then we looked at climate and we looked at what do we do with Massachusetts weather and how do we take advantage of this condition? We looked at the potential for natural ventilation and using a classic psychometric chart which you should really get to know and love. It's a real valuable resource in environmental design. We thought about, gee, could we open the windows and save on some heating and cooling? We did a study to look at the potential for natural ventilation and the blue was areas where it could be a nice day, open the windows and it was a percentage study of whether it would work and it turns out it's pretty cold up here in New England. It wasn't quite appropriate given the massing and the way the building took shape, but it was a study. And we looked at an earth duct. This did not make it into the project so don't get too excited, but we did, we looked at it. We said, gee, what if we had this long, long concrete tube underground that takes advantage of the steady temperatures of the earth? You bring air in from one side, you basically pre-temper that air then it constantly comes in at around 55 degrees and then your air handling equipment is constantly dealing with a steady state of air intake. We studied that and we looked at the, don't have to really read this graph, but the concept here was say, when is there free heating and when is there free cooling and does it add up? And it did, but it didn't. They didn't go with it. It had a lot of other issues going on in terms of its application on the campus. We looked at rainfall and we said, how can we be really pragmatic about water? Water wasn't a particularly precious resource in the sense that they needed to save money and it's hard to save money on the east coast with water conservation issues because water's pretty cheap here, but we said, what can we do? This is an architectural building, we got an opportunity. So we talked about collecting storm water and we thought about, gee, we've got this big roof. How can we use that water to flush toilets? And that was turning out to be a challenge to really meet the demand. So we said, well, what if we just size that tank a little bit smaller and just meet a primary stack of toilets? A main area of the building, make it really prominent, not try to run a bunch of plumbing all over the building just to feed a little toilet here or over there. And this had legs for a while. It didn't make it into the building. But we iterated on this. We showed how different water reuse strategies could make sense. And we talked about site and storm water and there's a green roof on this project. I don't have a photo of it just out of time, but they did some incredible site design, beautiful landscaping that was all native species, requires no irrigation with the exception of just the, they have both an intensive and extensive green roof on this courtyard in the middle of the building that did require some irrigation to keep the extensive trees alive. But part of the story, and then the really cool part about this project was in early DD, the building construction technology group, who had been sort of behind the scenes proposing this idea that rather than a steel and concrete building, what if we did a timber building? This came to light and there was some beautiful exercises done by the design team with a structural engineer out of Vancouver and our team looking at the energy potential savings of this and most importantly driven by the owner, the university and the BCT program had the faculty on hand and the research on hand to really drive the story that if we did a timber building, we can really make a statement with materials, that goal that they set out to achieve became a reality and it's a great story to tell because at the end of the day, they actually got the Athena Institute to do a life cycle assessment to show, if you just look on the right hand side column, you can see that they were looking at, compared to a steel and concrete building, there was a measurable difference in terms of global warming potential and eutrophication and acidification, all these critical environmental attributes that truly affect our globe, all reduced because of the trade-offs of timber versus the energy intensity of steel and concrete. Timber is an incredible resource and the technology that came out of the institution up at UMass Amherst was a huge driver. This is the first building of its kind in the country that actually put to test the research that was coming out of BCT. This is a screenshot from their website where they talk about their research and this composite construction type of concrete and sort of CLT, cross-laminated timber coming together with these sort of laminar forces being perfectly balanced with the right amount of concrete and the wood and I won't get into the technology too much but they basically laid these layers of CLT with an inch or two of insulation primarily for acoustics and then these little metal strips, the sort of wire mesh that essentially just keeps the concrete in place and that became the structural system for all the flooring and the roofing. It's absolutely gorgeous and the timber is exposed. They've got this beautiful truss system on the left here that creates this gorgeous lobby space which was an engineering feat in and of itself and the design studios are delightful. They have the timber exposed and they got to really sort of tell the story to the students. Along the way we analyzed the envelope performance. We looked closely at insulation types and where the air barriers and the vapor barriers are gonna be and how to study the different sort of performances. We set some targets, window to wall ratio of less than 40% and had some early R value targets and we were benchmarking this along the way. I mean I calculated that wall half a dozen times from SD through CDs and even in construction they were dealing with some issues about should we get another half an inch here or can we do some spray foam to deal with these issues and at the end of the day they pretty much hit their targets. They had an R26 and R31 wall value and a roof that went up to R48. This is the back side. This is the north facade of the building that you see here and on the energy side they're on a central plant, pretty efficient cogen plant so we got to really explore how the building, you can see the sort of red box around this is understanding that difference between source energy and site energy and what we can control versus what we're sort of subject to in terms of being on a central energy system, district energy and we studied what the design team could control in terms of energy efficiency measures which effectively is a series of studies around heat recovery or lighting power density targets or different equipment choices looking at higher performing or lesser performing equipment. They do have cost issues associated with them so we iterate on that while the cost engineer is costing it. We did a load of glare and solar studies to really optimize this envelope the building is effectively a donut an infill donut where the middle sort of compressed down and that's where the green roof courtyard is and there was a critical campus issue about being seen on this there was sort of two primary axes and so we were dealing with this typical challenge of you really want your facade to be prominent in these view corridors on campus and yet it was these south southwest facing facades that were dealing with solar could you know on studio surfaces all day long and how do you balance that so we did some solar studies and some glare studies these are images of a simulation program that look at solar conditions across the course of time and the neon colors don't mean anything except that they're bright spots in someone's field of view and it was a way to start to articulate to the design team what issues might be had at different times of the year in terms of visual comfort and glare and we spent a lot of time exploring different facade strategies how to shade it and put like these different horizontal and vertical elements to manage the solar conditions we studied it at morning noon and night and on different facades and all sorts of iterations to come up with a perfect hybrid solution on these unique orientations they never did it this is not there now but it turned out to be wildly costly and we couldn't substantiate the first cost of this sort of comprehensive exterior very customized shading sort of grid relative to the performance impact so instead what they did which is really clever is they got in touch with some engineered glass folks who said why don't we do some electrochromic glazing to control our solar and they got a really good deal in the fact that the company at hand was willing to price match electrochromic glazing which is effectively glass that can basically have a shading element electrically like how do I describe it like sunglasses on a building it's a small electric charge it does have a tiny electric component but effectively it's a stepped sunglass system that's built into the glass and so instead of this very comprehensive shading design they were able to get a really great dynamic glazing solution for these southwestern facing facades not to forget the daylight studies I don't want to quickly mention we studied average annual luminance this idea of really knowing how much daylight do you get measured in lux or lumens on a work surface and then we also looked at useful daylight which is a different index it's a different lighting index and there's different metrics to solve different problems but you can see let me flip back for a second average annual luminance is one way to sort of across the course of a year look at the average light levels that you might see say on your desk but useful daylight index really tells the story and this is how we said gee guys we really got to think about the visibility of this glazing and how we optimize the glass choice because when it comes to the primary times of day that people are in this building and these are our target light levels we want to hit how do we control that and how does the lighting design respond to that this is a great exercise as a classic studio you can see sort of all the studio layouts on a sort of southwest facing facade and the lighting was obviously responding to the furniture on the program but it had to be flexible and it had to respond to the daylight so we did this exercise of measuring on the x-axis the light levels from the perimeter as you get into the space and obviously light has a drop off you know the further deeper you get into a building some of this is pretty intuitive but it was a great exercise in figuring out where to put the solar controls on the ceiling luminaries basically where is a daylight sensor useful and at what point is it not useful because of this like cut off this sort of fall off of daylight so that we could control the lighting in a way that was super smart relative to real daylight conditions and then in terms of lighting design you know of course there's lots of concepts and design iterations this was one of the early renderings we did of the trust system that was in this main entry lobby which they use as a pinup space and started to explore there's some skylights and some daylighting effects happening and this is in real life this is it, this is how that sketch turned to reality where we have this balance of daylight from these skylights and there's different glazing on different facades different surfaces of the skylight plus the downlighting that needed to meet ambient lighting for say night time because it's an active building at night as you can imagine and last but not least I just want to mention that we are doing measurement and verification this is the follow through of energy modeling we did all this energy analysis we got it down to a energy use intensity of just above 40 which is pretty remarkable for a building of this intense use sort of around the clock architecture students like yourselves in a building we had to account for that in our energy predictions but we are now right smack in the middle of a performance period of monitoring the energy of this building and reconciling that with our predicted energy use and so probably around Q1 of next year we will take the old model plug in real energy data and hopefully get a little bit of information from the owner about real occupancy patterns how many hours the students were really in the building and they can glean that from some of the lighting data and other metrics about actual building use and then we'll recalibrate the model and see how it's performing and it's a great way to verify performance or if things are a little bit off kilter to engineer it so it's working better you usually correct a lot of errors and sort of construction issues as well as recognizing different controls and set points in your building that maybe could be fine tuned to really tamp down your energy consumption and this was driven by the fact that UMass Amherst said we want this building to really be a case study for our students so that they're living and breathing in a building that talks the talk and lastly we are benchmarking it against LEED admittedly we are teetering between gold and platinum as we speak about to hit the submit button on the LEED application and we're right on the edge there just because LEED is a series of choices and not everything can happen they had net zero aspirations but knew that they had no budget for net zero and they said if we get LEED gold we'll be so happy and if they get LEED platinum it would be a silver lining so it's a great building if you get a chance to check it out it's an excellent version of New England at least this incredibly unique timber construction and you can see how other design studios are working in a really high performance building so that's a case study about what we do and hopefully a bit of inspiration to you all about how this is very scalable and very appropriate to all building types I'll stop now and you guys can ask some questions anything, any questions? That's an awesome question so what kind of things do I wish architects knew more about? I wish architects would ask me how I could help them because I think what they don't realize is we can be incredibly resourceful for them and a lot of times what happens is we get really excited we kick things off and we get underway and I have to work really hard to remind them that we're here to help so it's a... I don't want to go so far as to say it's an ego thing but I think that there is an element of recognizing that you can do better with more sort of cooks in the kitchen in this type of environment that there is no... but sometimes the way you did it before isn't the way to do it again and what you maybe come in as a preconceived notion maybe could be tested to not be the case and that we could really bring a lot of scrutiny not because we want to be right and show somebody that they're wrong but because it brings a depth and a breadth of critique and questioning that I think could enhance the process I'll never answer yeah in this example at the University of Massachusetts Amherst we were hired by the design architect Lears-Weins-Apple Associates out of Boston worked with them on a few different buildings and they brought us to the table when they knew that this institution had some pretty ambitious objectives so yeah, I was contracted directly with the architect yeah yes a few I wouldn't say that's the norm I say most conventional projects were trying to make that happen in not a formal way there's there's a few projects that are trying to truly hold themselves accountable to IDP as a process, as a framework for making decisions and for frankly, recording decisions that's a big part of it keeping on track but not as many as you'd think yeah yeah I have a question for the architect do you find that there is a particular thing that is overlooked often by architects in terms of doing all the analysis architect often that's a great question, is there a common thing that architects miss in getting to these high-performance goals? yes and no it's interesting how different architecture firms they come from a they all have their own sort of philosophy and approach and they really do bring their own strengths to sustainability sometimes it can be as simple as they're just really good at keeping an integrated design team on task there's a huge aspect of just design team management that can be both asset or a major fail in terms of what they bring to the table or on the flip side maybe having some experience that can be leveraged again can be a great asset but I would say one of the I don't know if this is probably an unfair universal statement but I think one of the big challenges that we see a lot certainly in the New England region I have a lot of experience here so I'm a little biased in this way but I'd say in the east coast cold climates, heating dominated build, you know, conditions there is this very big challenge in designing a high-performance envelope I didn't talk about passive house as a concept today at all but structurally there are these pretty well-known ways to build envelopes and they sort of max out at a point of performance and to get to that next threshold of really high performance which is literally just bigger walls bigger insulation or you know double walls or more aggressive envelopes I think there's a major hurdle that needs to be made to get past sort of I don't want to say convention because that there's a lot of great design that happens in sort of conventional construction methodologies but it is not easy to get an architect to go the extra mile and really think hard about how important their envelope is and that you know sort of standard construction doesn't really do it but it's a huge opportunity that I think doesn't get taken seriously early enough and then it has cost issues when you know in late DD or early CDs you get into the details and you're like two inches of insulation isn't going to isn't going to get you there and then they've got cladding issues and challenges that come with the realities of trying to get a better high-performing wall glass two, glass goes with that I definitely don't think it's aesthetic because I think aesthetics are often driven by aesthetics without thinking about necessarily the the depth and the sort of makeup of the wall and I think cost is often not an issue either I think there's a few design architects that will set out really early and say we know that to get a high performance building we've got to start with a super smart envelope and we're going to build a high sort of cost per square foot budget for our envelope itself but that's not normal and so it's not until halfway through design where you look at I don't have an image of it but we'll do sort of an energy profile of a building to help an architect and an engineer really understand the demands like K-12 school has a very different energy profile than a high intense research lab right in terms of loads and demands and you can then break that load profile down into what the driving forces are is it outdoor air and like reheating outdoor air or is it conduction losses through windows and we can break that down from energy modeling and it's an excellent tool to say on certain building types hey you know twenty percent of your heat loss is coming from your glass alone you're just losing heat out your windows let's try to scale back and so I think by the time we get to that level of conversation in some cases it's too late because you've set sort of a assumption about your structure or your I mean there's a you know like this this project is a great example of how in DD they literally trashed an entire structural system and brought on a different structural engineer to go from stealing concrete to timber it was a huge decision to make they had you know a lot of reasons for it but um that was a type of rethink that you usually can't afford to do in terms of time and budget and everything so I guess that answer was based on the fact that I think it's one of those early questions that you really got to get out ahead of or else you might be too late in terms of just so many practicality issues it's a great question really good one yeah that's it that's thoughtful yeah so um we're talking about almost basically computer software at this point because the question is about what type of energy simulation sort of predictive modeling tools do we use and how accurate are they um it's a great question um it's a fast-moving industry and there are new tools every year and I will be honest um some of the young fresh just graduated architecture students that we hire know more than I do in some cases about some of these programs because they are outrageously fast-paced um there is a lot of research being done right now admittedly in the academic institutional world about validating performance and predictive models and in our world we have not as big as a portfolio as we'd like to have um because it's really not our business model unless somebody wants to hire us to come back and validate it and that doesn't necessarily happen a lot but um in the few cases that we have gone back one of the things we found has been incredibly solid and accurate our daylight simulations we're feeling very very confident in years of rigorous work around daylighting and now having buildings that are built and we go around with a light meter and we talk to people in those spaces and we look at the way they're exterior shading or interior shading or lighting controls are functioning and we're seeing that the daylight simulations are very very good the energy predictions um what we're finding with some of our measurement and verification which I mentioned this project is doing and we have a few other pretty cool buildings that have hired us to come back and sort of recalibrate predictive models and they've been plus or minus five to ten percent accurate which is pretty good um the energy modeling software of which there's a handful of different ones out there they all have their pros and cons and there's some new plugins and other um little things that are being of evolved as we speak I mean thermal comforts a big one that we're really trying to test and iterate on how do you really measure you know the radiative and conductive effects of the space like I'm freezing right now for example and like how do you I'm like shivering but like how do you deal with the fact that you know this space was designed to have a certain occupancy load and is it is it making people thermally comfortable or not and how do you test that no right me neither and so um thermal comfort I think is and a huge opportunity and something that we're trying to really innovate on right now because it's very hard to know and the software is a little bit um up and coming but I'd say day lighting is pretty good um energy is almost there the biggest issue is trying to calibrate actual behavior occupant behavior is the biggest crux to accuracy in predictive modeling and you know we're a complex species so we're working on that too yeah great talk thank you do you have any approaches to super tall building yet? timber? no not super tall oh just in general um yeah we have um with super tall buildings um we end up doing a lot of facade optimization that's usually a very very big driver um I'm trying to think about some of the real tower projects we've done yeah what we really try to focus on are air issues how is the air moving because you have this verticality that you have to deal with in a lot of tall buildings like to have lots of tall atrium and how do you manage atria and facade and daylight those are the big drivers for tall buildings because usually the footprint you know floor plate to floor plate is not so much our bag if you will but we're there to say you know tall buildings are sort of an animal of their own and um often we come in to really think about um pressure differentials from the top to the bottom and ventilation and conditions that happen that really vary at those different heights yeah so it is scalable but it's it's a tricky type for sure yeah yeah mm-hmm so we do not do cost estimating but boy do we have a database of reports from cost estimators that we so desperately want a software program to like you know sync together because we've got hundreds and hundreds of projects where we'd like to tap into that better um it's fundamentally hired by a cost it's a cost estimator that's actually nine times out of ten hired by the owner and completely sort of disconnected from the construction team in some cases if they don't have a third party cost estimator um the construction manager if they're brought on early is the person doing that oh like the earth dot concept yeah yeah oh yeah yeah yeah yeah so that's a great point and actually it touches on a sort of a sore spot because we really struggle with the challenge of accurate cost estimations especially when and this is like the world that we play in you have a typical sort of very specialized or maybe customized or just unconventional solutions and you're dealing with very an industry that desperately wants convention and cost per square foot and linear takeoffs and we really don't play nice with those types of rules of thumb because rules of thumbs can just absolutely blow an idea out of the water and one of the challenges we have is trying to communicate early on a super you know unique or customized or complex strategy that doesn't just get you know number signs in somebody's eyeballs because they don't understand and so we have to spend a fair amount of time articulating what it is which means sort of roping in your engineer or your structural engineer your design architect a little bit early to say you guys have to define this more than a you know I'm forgetting the name of the cost estimation book that everybody loves so badly but um you know we have to break ourselves out of that mold of just going to these takeoff values and it takes work up front to communicate that so going back to that earth duck example you're right we had to um it was a slide actually cut out where we did some studies on trying to so an earth duck being a big concrete tube underground it's actually outrageously simple um a labyrinth is another one that basically is an earth duck sort of accordion folded on itself and we have a few projects that we've done around the world that have these labyrinth basements they're basically these zigzagged um concrete shafts that allow um air to with a fan on one end that literally just pulls air through this concrete bunker um it's not really accessible unless you need to get in there but we've done all these studies and concrete's a really simple thing but the idea can be scary and so we have to get in the room with the cost estimator or the contractor and sometimes a structural engineer and be like guys break it down this isn't that hard this is a very simple concept and on the example in this project where we did the the sort of tubular um earth duck concept we looked at we got some uh we had some precedent projects thankfully that helped that allowed us to say this is the exact dimensions of the thickness of the concrete this is the diameter this is the the length this is the depth that needs to be buried this is the unit that goes at the end so that the contractor was more informed and they wouldn't just sort of out of you know in their minds try to make something up which can be very risky I don't know if that answers your question but it's hard when you turn over a building and you're thinking that you know what is the competence of let's say the staff at the university facility at the university because that would be the reverse of what I would have if you could convince them to build it and even if you convince them it's not that expensive right so it's good to look at that and say no thank you I'll just take a chiller and you know you can add additional units and we're good but that's what I do know how to take care of and that's what they know how do you overcome the owner basically I'm not going to be able to sell this to the people that have to be seen yeah that's a great question it touches on one of the most important realities of environmental design and something that we do which is owner buy-in there's sort of two schools of thought you either have an owner that's really committed to sustainability and they usually define it in certain ways and operations might be one way they define it where they want set it and forget it kind of building that could very well be their end goal and there are facilities and institutions that are like they don't have the resources the manpower whatever but they have to at least buy into it and if they're not buying into it they at least need to recognize and this is a real challenge that maybe they don't know what they don't know and at least go in with an open mind and allow the design team and often times the way we get over that I think to answer your question is we will try to get those owners who are at least willing to consider something you know a little atypical or a little more cutting edge visit a project that has that so the earth duct one for example that exists in the Kohler Center in Wallingford, Connecticut which is a little science building that's absolutely not zero at the Chote-Rosemary Hall boarding school and they did it and so we said to UMass Amherst go drive 45 minutes down the road and take a look at it see how it's working their facilities team was worried about it they didn't really know what to make of it but as much as we can I mean this is true for chilled beams and you know electrochromate glazing you know you name the technology if it's sort of different and you haven't seen it on your campus or in your you know experience most people are afraid they put a cost premium to it and they need to be convinced so as much as we can we really encourage precedence as much as we can we take we really try to lean in in trying to explain our analysis and to substantiate with different case studies what we've done the end of the day if you you know there's always the fear factor that you cannot control but um we try hard to get over that it's a reality though I mean it sometimes it just comes with the team was it it means oh that's yeah yes the means estimate book is the big one with all the takeoffs I agree it's a default um so you know I will say not to put a plug for good builders but your contractor really matters getting a good smart contractor that wants to play nice it has a contract that allows them to play nice with the design team is huge so um pick them wisely yep no not when this like some of these they didn't come on it was I don't know if it was a CM at risk or not but they were hired by the owner and they came on in late CDs sort of classic timing um everything before that was done by you know faithful and gold sort of a really good cost estimator around here and they did everything as a third party and one of the reasons that the contractor was selected was this was timber construction so they had a very specific um set of tech technical experience that needed to come with it and you know the contractor had to bring on there's some folks out in southern southeastern Canada that do this timber thing and with an outfit in New Hampshire and they're like the guys that do this you know those guys yeah they're very good yeah great questions guys I love it they're really good ones tonight I know I'm like it's alright what's your cost you know obviously if you're not in the mix an architect is doing the enforcement sometimes they may not have to go to the extent of what you do right it's an extra bottoming it's things that are more unique but you know you're hired by the architect right 6, 7, 8% of the whole contract value percent wise but where is your where's our fee range in there it's I don't know a quarter to a half a percent it's less than 1% usually yeah of the architect's fee so I don't know our fees are pretty scalable and they really very widely depending on how we get involved at the end of the day in terms of all the soft costs were often a drop in the bucket and if an owner's committed to any sort of benchmarking you know whether it's the energy star program to lead to a living building challenge which is pretty aggressive in terms of like net zero water and energy and whatever they have on their pedals to be met it scales up with a degree of complexity because there's more metrics that need to be generated to prove that you've met your goals and so if it's just hey could you give me some ideas on you know this facade that's a much smaller scale than a sort of full full services so it's hard to put a number to it in fact it's a funny question because years ago when we wrote contracts we used to calculate our percentage of the total fee and it was always like this fractional percent and we found that it was a useless number nobody cared because it was so infinitesimal compared to their other construction budgets that it didn't matter the bigger challenge we have is our fee is really part of the architect's eight to six to ten percent and whatever they can afford is what we get and that's the hard part because the owner might say I want this and the architect has to figure out of their fee what they want to give us so that's the biggest negotiation point for us is reconciling the owner you know what's in the RFP what came out as an owner objective for example if they say we want a living building challenge project we're like okay we know what that means many times the architect does not know what that means and they're like could you do that for half the price we're like no because we know what this is all about and we really need you to embrace the realities of this you know commitment the owner says I want we have to have that conversation is that answer yeah okay thanks guys thank you so much