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By Russell Fortmeyer

One nation, under green

Until that happens, public and institutional buildings—where local, state, and federal agencies and nongovernmental organizations aren’t held to the whims of the commercial building market—will continue to be the main laboratory for high-performance sustainable design in the U.S. These projects combine complicated building programs with generally higher budgets, which allow more study behind each architectural decision. For its design of the LEED Silver–rated United States Courthouse in Seattle, NBBJ Architects depended on energy modeling, as well as computational fluid dynamic (CFD) modeling, to deliver the client’s expected level of building transparency (i.e., the glass facade) without producing an energy hog.

A CFD model of the lobby illustrated how air delivered from the floor could pool within the first 8 feet above the finished floor, which eliminated the need to provide enough air-conditioning for the entire space. A conventional design would have dumped air from the ceiling based on the volume of the space; when coupled with the expected heat gain from the glass facade, the demands on the building’s chiller would have been enormous.

United States Courthouse, seattle, 2005 —NBBJ Architects Photography: © Frank Ooms, 2004

The federal government wanted as much daylight as possible in each courtroom, which led NBBJ to rely on complex energy modeling data for implementing a ventilation system that could efficiently accommodate the expanses of glass on the building’s 23 stories. Seattle’s mild climate and sparse sunshine helped matters greatly.

“There seems to me to be an infinite number of choices before the design team and the architect have enormous influence on those decisions,” says Steve McConnell, FAIA, NBBJ’s design principal. “You have to contemplate an intelligent approach to these decisions—it’s not just an aesthetic process.” So while energy modeling justified the in-floor ventilation system, it also helped determine the low-E glass coatings, the low-iron glass for greater transparency, and the control of daylighting. McConnell says such modeling was expected from day one on the project. “In a typical project, it takes an extra effort to package these ideas,” he says.

DWP not DOA

It does seem that engineering is the new architecture. It’s worth considering, not on the literal level of engineering actually replacing architecture, but in terms of how we’ve arrived at a place where design and construction technologies are coming together to address a pressing geopolitical issue—energy consumption—in ways unimaginable 40 years ago. Even the Los Angeles DWP has learned from itself, as lights no longer remain on 24 hours a day, a solar photovoltaic array blankets its covered parking lot, and a 250-kilowatt fuel cell was installed in 2000. And David Martin’s family firm has changed the way it works, having designed the energy-efficient California EPA Headquarters in 2001, which was certified LEED Platinum in 2003. Martin says the DWP was built when technology was perceived as the best thing in the world, but given recent evidence, little about that notion seems to have changed. If anything, it has been slightly altered: Technology is now perceived as the best thing as long as it cuts your energy bill.

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