[ Page 3 of 4 ]

By Russell Fortmeyer

From style to substance

In his essay in the American Institute of Architect’s recent Report on Integrated Practice, Thom Mayne writes that the work of his firm, Morphosis, has moved away from “styling” to focus instead on “embedding tectonic, constructional, and material design parameters.” This is the key difference in much computer-enabled design and represents, at least for many engineers, the final frontier in working with those architects who generate bloblike forms with no relationship to the site’s environmental conditions. “Education across the board is needed,” deSouza says. “It’s not being used to its full potential, by architects and engineers.”

Not many firms have invested in the training and technology needed to efficiently implement energy modeling on projects. While DOE2 costs nothing to download, designers proficient in both its use and the productive interpretation of its data are rare and expensive to employ. For the vast majority of buildings, owners seldom know how a building will perform and, since electrical engineers design around projected maximum power use, they don’t know how much energy it will consume until the building opens.

Source: Department of Energy

The Department of Energy’s 2005 energy-consumption reports illustrate how overall energy use continues to climb, even though on a per capita basis it has leveled off in progressive states like California and New York. Renewable energy sources for electricity remain in a minority when compared to coal and nuclear power.

Leon Glicksman, director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Building Technology Program, loves to point out that buildings consume more energy than anything else, including automobiles (according to the Department of Energy, buildings account for 70 percent of electricity use). Glicksman is trying to focus attention on building energy use among designers by developing free, simple tools to help architects make quick, informed decisions early in the design process (see http://designadvisor.mit.edu/design). “People usually fall back on what they did the last time, even if it’s for a totally different climate,” Glicksman says. “The architect usually does his thing for a number of reasons, not including energy efficiency, and then throws the drawings over the transom to the engineer. Engineering shouldn’t be the only thing that inspires design, but it should be toward the forefront.”

Education, like it or not

Like Arup’s deSouza, Glicksman points to a lack of education—further impaired by funding shortages for research—as an impediment to widespread implementation of energy-efficient-design strategies. Architects and engineers, however, have had to educate themselves to the issues as some state and local regulations have forced the use of new technologies. For example, two decades ago, incandescent downlights were standard practice in residential kitchen construction. Today in California, only energy-efficient compact fluorescent downlights meet the state’s Title 24 energy code for that use. Title 24 regulates building-envelope ratings, lighting-power densities (watts per square feet), and building-equipment operating efficiencies, among other things. It is often used as a benchmark, like ASHRAE 90.1, against which designers measure the sustainable performance of projects. The U.S. Green Building Council’s LEED rating program relies on such standards for weighting its points system for sustainable design.

The USGBC, ASHRAE, and the Illuminating Engineering Society of North America (IESNA) are collaborating on Standard 189, which would eventually act as an enforceable green building code. In addition, the American Institute of Architects issued a sustainable practice position paper in late 2005, which became the framework for the U.S. Conference of Mayors’ 2030 Challenge. The Challenge calls for a 50 percent reduction in consumption of fossil-fuel energy for all new and renovated buildings, accompanied by a 10 percent reduction in consumption every five years until 2030, when conceivably the country would be carbon neutral. It’s an ambitious proposition, but it will have to wind its way through the legislative process before it can be enforced.

ADVERTISEMENT