Estudio Norte | Sur

Extraído del blog de Lighthouse (Sustainable Building Centre)

On Wednesday July 11, 2007, the Cascadia Green Building Council hosted a workshop on ‘deep green’ and the ever important Integrated Design Process (IDP). Here are the headlines…

Kathy Wardle of Busby Perkins & Will and Alex Hutton of Stantec presented the newly released ‘Roadmap for the Integrated Design Process’ document that has been put together to assist design professionals. The guide comes in 2 parts and can be downloaded free of charge from the BC Green Buildings or Buildsmart websites.

The second part of the event posed the following question:

Is it true that while you can get away with having a true integrated design process on a ‘light green’ building, it is a necessity for the successful completion of a ‘deep green’ building?

This workshop set out to answer this question through the lenses of three of Canada’s most cutting edge green buildings and the IDP they did or are employing.

The buildings presented were: the Gulf Islands Operations Centre, the Centre for Interactive Research on Sustainability and the South East False Creek Net Zero Initiative.

The Operations Centre, Gulf Islands National Park Reserve
presented by Ron Kato, of Larry McFarland Architects

This is the first building in Canada to achieve LEED Platinum certification.
Key points were:

• Mind set at the initial stages of the project is critical
• Strong vision and goals important
• Thorough site analysis was critical to the success of this project
• An initial ‘Green Building Workshop’ was held for all team members and stakeholders.
• A ‘planning charette’ was held with the Owner to analyze the functional programme and identify potential synergies and efficiencies.
• Three vision statements were produced around the themes of environment, function and architecture.

Other interesting features were the use of a ‘talking wall’ where all the known and unknown variables were posted up and refined as the design process progressed and the holding of an energy performance workshop at the end of the schematic design phase. The workshop used real time energy modeling software so that immediate answers to ‘what if ‘ questions could be provided (eg. The cost benefit of adding an additional 1″ of insulation to the building.) A commissioning agent was brought on board at approx. 50% working drawing phase to go through assemblies, processes etc.
In summary, what worked well:

• Pre-design process
• Energy performance workshop
• Post construction reviews

What didn’t:

• LEED integration into the construction process

The Centre for Interactive research on Sustainability (CIRS)
presented by Dr. John B. Robinson, Professor, Sustainable Development Research Initiative at UBC.

This building will be a living laboratory that pushes the frontiers of sustainable construction materials and building techniques. It is still at the design stage. This building arises out of the belief that it is not sufficient to build green buildings one by one as this results in ‘islands of sustainability’ that can’t benefit from neighbourhood or community scale synergies. This building aims to make Canada a leader in:

• Green building design and building operation
• Visualization, simulation, community engagement (seen as a key to political change)
• Partnerships and strategies at a regional level

The building has a clear and inspirational vision statement. It should enable us to live within our means. The aim was to get:

• All heating and cooling from the ground
• All water from the sky
• All waste treatment from the ground and sun
• Al light from the sun (when available)
• All electricity from the sun (almost- 100% not practically possible at this time)
• All ventilation from the wind

The building should also improve the human environment and be reproducible/smart- ie not unreasonably expensive. They are aiming for beyond LEED Platinum @ $400s/f. With the exception of the monitoring and control system, there are no massive technological jumps in this building. The current design process is characterized by a weekly three-hour all-consultant meeting, the cost of which they hope to be able to document as a cost saving when the overall process is complete. Lessons learned:

• the IDP process is costly and time consuming but completely necessary to meet the high design goals for this building.
• The IDP process is a good way to protect against the ‘slash and burn’ of value engineering.
• We must bridge the capital funding vs. operational funding chasm if this process is to become widespread in institutional buildings

South East False Creek Net Zero Initiative
presented by Esteban Undurraga of Recollective Consulting

This building is part of the new Olympic precinct at SE False Creek, and has been selected to be part of the Net Zero Initiative. This means that the building should achieve an energy balance on an annual basis. When completed it will be the first multi residential net zero building in Canada. The building is one of three that sits on top of a common podium (a proposed supermarket) that is not part of the Net Zero Initiative. The other two buildings are an affordable rental housing building and a market housing building. The configuration of the buildings and the associated overshadowing and outlook issues mean that it is not possible for the seniors building to install enough pv generating capacity on site, so the plan is to supplement this with offsite generated wind or solar power. The building will be heated largely using waste heat from the supermarket refrigeration. It will also have a passive solar hot water system. Electrical conservation will also be strongly encouraged. Real time electricity monitors called ‘Powertabs’ developed at UBC will be installed in each suite. The monitors have a surround that glows green if demand in the suite is under the established consumption target and red if its over. Key issues were:

• Need an executive decision maker in such a complex project
• Longer and more expensive front end design
• Difficulty of sharing value driven goals
• Early design stages hold the key.
• Creative synergies deliver a better building- no such thing as a crazy idea- just a series of options.
• Advanced buildings are about more than just design- they must also be business models.

Cascadia’s Buildings in Balance series includes workshops and seminars on the most current and innovative issues in sustainable design. We look forward to the next event!

Trackback URI | Comments RSS