COTE Meeting Minutes for July 2000 Meeting Notes: Courtney Miller, AIA
Focus Topic: The Art & Architecture of Green Building with Courtney Miller, AIA Introduction:
There we were about ten people in attendance at the last of COTE/ BSA's summer meetings. There is no meeting in August. On September 26th, Elizabeth Cordero from MIT will present her comparitive study of green building guidelines issued by states, cities, and regions around the country. The Art & Architecture of Green Building: For many of us who are scrambling to comprehend all the complexities of high performance building, it is easy to lose a sense of the broader objective of sustainable building beyond the light sensors, and integrated PV features. We are afterall talking about a revolution in our approach towards the built environment that elicits all of our talents in designand knowledge of the building sciences. I started by taking everyone on a tour of the Carnigie Mellon Intelligent Workplace, and it's off spring (Stephen Lee, senior researcher at the IW also consulted on the DEP project), The DEP Southcentral Headquarters in Harrisburg, both projects that speak about the state of green building in America, and to what degree design played a role in their inception. I was pleasantly surprised to find that the Carnegie center had a great many things to recommend it architecurally with natural daylighting winning the day with an array of beautifully designed tinted glass exterior shading devices. For all of it's emphasis on controls, the architecture works. The wide open interior space with views out on the Carnegie campus is a huge success. The natural ventilation of this office space, on the hot summer day I was there, was nothing less than miraculous. Yes, I did run into a researcher who complained about the tyranny of pushing the comfort zone, but the rewards of seeing people dress appropriately for seasonal changes walking around in casual dress would seem to suggest a coming social transformation in the way we create workplaces, of a more residential character. The IW was intimate and small scaled enough to suggest individual control and flexibility that was the intention of the project - Flex space. Yes, there were all the other features as well - raised floors, Personal Environmental Modules, etc. Please contact me if you have any questions about any of other of the building's features - many described on the web site of the IW: http://www.cmu.edu/home/news/intel_workplace.html The DEP Southcentral Headquarters in Harrisburg The DEP Southcentral facility is a great trest bed for all of us to go and visit, goivemn it;s ambitious effor to include many of the goals of green building theory. For starters, the building, as we noticed in the video completely ignored the car oriented impact all together, which is no surprise considering how lax most states are on the Smart Growth agenda. The raised floor system was very quiet. That says a lot. Just take in the sounds effects of the typical office HVAC system - usually incredibly loud. I hated the ubiquitous floor diffuser disks though. These diffusers were popping up everywhere.I began to wonder, all benefits aside, whether rasied floor systems really make any sense? We need to introduce different kinds of floor diffusers in different rooms. I imagine that we will invent ceramic raised floor diffuser tiles. We already have floor diffusers made in matching hardwood varieties. I did show the Bill McDonough GAP headquaters building with it's hybrid HVAC system. Some of the lobbies and large meeting spaces were supplied from overhead slot diffusers in key lobby spaces to avoid the ubiquitous floor diffuser clutter. All in all, a great first step for PA, with the valient leadership of Jim Toothaker, the Director of Office Systems at the DEP in PA.See their web site at:
http://www.gggc.state.pa.us/ European Examples of Advanced Green Buildings
I showed some examples of European and Canadian buildings using very elaborate exterior sun shading devices, with PV integrated into several of them. Germany has a code that requires that people have access to natural light in buildings. I showed the Science & Technology Park in Gelsenkirchen (Germany). It's a masterpiece in engineering and design with a huge reflecting pool stretching along the west facade of this reseach facility. It opens up in summer, has exterior blinds that block excessive solar gain, the office are all naturally ventilated with narrow footprints. And it's architecturally magnificent, of a caliber that suggests a new architecture connected to it's natural surroundings - mind you, with a heavily mechanized design theme probably replicable only in Germany - the retractable west facing curtain wall, for example.We talked about the challenge of Boston's humidity, compared to Europe and it's certainly much easier to talk natural on one of the coolest summers on record in this region. The piece de resistance is clearly the Inland Revenue Headquarters Building in the UK designed by Michael Hopkins & Partners, and engineered by Ove Arup & Partners. The building features are too immense to ellaborate on. Simply put, it's the most astounding use of natural ventilation in a large commercial buildsing that is also an architectural wonder. This is a must see building.
Building features * Solar Chimney Stack-Induced Cross Ventilation * Using the building envelope itself as a climatic modifier * Maximum daylight and natural ventilation * 7 free-standing "L" shaped courtyard buildings each with a dominant corner staircase tower* Fresh air entering the building through occupant controlled tilt and slide windowsand under floor inlets passes through office space abd full height corridors to leav ethe building via the solar assisted stair towers* Fabric roof umbrella of each ventilating tower can be raised and lowered to control the rate at which air is exhausted* External walls of the route are kept open by using emergency released magnetically released catches on all fire doors between offices and the stair towers* Glass blocks allow added solar gain to boost the stack induced cross ventilation rate * CFD computer modelling using saline fluid method to study warm airmigration* Tower had to be 7 meters taller* Triple glazed with mid-panel blinds* Glass light shelves shading perimeter but not at the expense of daylighting deeper in the room
* Blinds in the clerestory windows set at optimum angle to allow reflected light but excludes direct solar radiation* High efficiency lighting with daylight dimming* Projecting external brick piers provide lateral solar shading * High thermal capacity exposed concrete soffit that acts as a heat sink absorbing excess daytime heat gains* Occupant controlled fans below the floor perimeter to allow thewindowsbe closed in winter, or on noisy east andsouth site boundaries* Perimeter fans allow night time flushing of building to purge excess heat
* Vaulted ceiling to proviude accoustical dampening * Building management system that sets default control settings for heating, ventilation and lighting * Occupant override control of lighting, ventilation, blinds, and heating