[ Page 5 of 5 ]

By Nancy B. Solomon, AIA

Building enclosure councils

Last, but far from least, is the May 2004 agreement between the AIA and BETEC to establish a network of building enclosure councils (BECs) in major cities across the United States. These regional groups are designed to:

• provide a forum at the local level for those with an interest in building enclosures and the related discipline of building science;
• encourage discussion, training, technology transfer, and the exchange of information regarding local issues, including appropriate climatic factors;
• initiate dialogue among the design professions and between the designers and all other players in the building process, from contractors and product suppliers to developers and insurance companies;
• facilitate improvements in regard to inspection, approvals, regulations, standards, liability, and other issues or processes.

The new BECs, sponsored by AIA’s Building Science Knowledge Community, will function as committees of their respective local AIA components. AIA will also host the councils’ Web site (www.BEC-national.org). In addition, each local BEC president will become a BETEC board member. Says Anis, who is spearheading this national effort, “We are going to begin to populate BETEC with technically oriented architects.”

BECs are up and running in Boston, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Dallas, Seattle, and Washington, D.C. And the formation of additional BECs is currently being considered for Denver, Minneapolis, Chicago, San Francisco, Houston, Atlanta, Miami, Los Angeles, New York, and St. Louis.

The regional councils are modeled after the Boston Society of Architects’ Building Envelope Committee, which was founded in 1996 by Keleher, with the support of Anis. Keleher’s own inspiration, in turn, had been a network of similar councils already operating in Canada. Because of their climate, explains Keleher, “The Canadians have to build very robust, high-performing enclosures.” Keleher learned about this program while working with Canadians, and reasoned that it would be applicable in the States as well. After all, the basic principles of building science still need to be understood and appropriately applied by architects to achieve the most efficient high-performance envelopes in any climate. Although the winter in most parts of the U.S. is not as severe as in Canada, this country has a wide range of climates—cold, mixed-humid, hot-humid, mixed-dry, and hot-dry—and these differences necessitate different envelope assemblies. It turns out, in fact, that some of the most egregious building-science failures, such as the mold problems in the Southeast, occur in the warmer climates in the U.S. [Record, September 2004, page 171].

“I thought it was a fantastic idea,” says Anis, who has focused his architectural career on the building enclosure and the science behind it. For years, building scientists have felt like they have been talking to themselves. And, until this new initiative, BETEC was largely populated by government and industry representatives, with a very minimal architectural presence. “It’s really the architects who need to learn more and get on board because they detail the enclosures, and it is regarding the building enclosure where the lawsuits are flying,” he adds.

Anis believes the regional BECs will provide architects with the opportunity to discuss locally driven conditions, such as the climate, codes, and readily available materials. The network will also offer a mechanism for individual designers to stay abreast of national and even international initiatives, research efforts, and innovative case studies from other comparable geographic zones and assist architects trained in one region when working on a project located in another. In addition, he envisions the establishment of a dialogue between the U.S. network and that of Canada and even Europe, so that Americans can learn from the experiences of their counterparts abroad.

To give a feel for what a BEC can accomplish, Keleher describes a few of the projects already undertaken by the original Boston committee. In 2001, for example, the local group developed a series of six sample wall details for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts’s Board of Building Regulations and Standards (www.mass.gov/bbrs/sample_details.htm) in support of the state’s revised Commercial Energy Code. This new version of the code, which took effect in 2001, introduced requirements for air barriers within the building envelope to prevent uncontrolled airflow through and within exterior walls, for the first time in the United States. The BEC-developed details illustrate appropriate relationships among insulation, vapor retarder, and air barrier within various assemblies for that region of the country.

And in 1999 and 2000, the BSA committee was the only logical forum of interested architects that BETEC could find to sponsor regional conferences on air barriers. The committee also sponsored a workshop that featured demonstrations of user-friendly design software that had been and continues to be developed collaboratively by scientists at the Fraunhoffer Institute in Munich, Germany, and at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. Called WUFI-ORNL/IBP (relating to “Heat & Moisture Transfer in Building Envelopes”), the Windows-based simulation tool quickly ranks different wall designs for a particular location according to their propensity toward moisture-related problems and evaluates the drying potential of alternative wall assemblies. Now that BECs are popping up across the country, ORNL plans to provide similar workshops that discuss the free WUFI-ORNL software, and the building physics behind it, to other architects and building professionals eager to improve the quality of their building enclosures.