My OperaI believe it. Also, Gutters and Downspouts
Saturday, October 21, 2006 7:18:57 PM
If you just want to see some photos (I understand), click here or on sidebar photo:
http://my.opera.com/LagomArchitecture/albums/show.dml?id=150941
There is a man who retired from IVL recently but still spends quite a bit of time there; every once in a while he stops by my desk to say hello and muse about things that he finds fantastic or interesting, such as an incredibly lush golf course he saw in the Nevada Desert. While at home we tend to just shake our heads at such things like you would at a cousin who has no money or work but charges an expensive satellite dish on his credit card, things such as a golf course in Nevada are true phenomena to people over here who work with water management and other ecological issues. I was telling him what I was working on, and he looked at me and asked me “do you really believe in these eco-communities, do you really think it can work?” I didn’t know if he was testing my commitment or really just unsure himself about the reality of creating actually sustainable communities. It was the first time anyone asked me this directly, and I answered that it absolutely can work without a doubt, but I wouldn’t have said this quite as convincingly a few months ago.
I’ve read in many articles over here that buildings (both their construction and the use of them over their lifespan) consume 40% of all of our resources, and the construction industry is referred to as the 40% sector for this reason. If anyone had just told me that at school, I think I would have paid even more attention to sustainability because it’s a pretty easy way to understand the impact that architecture has on our ecology. One article says that “whereas buildings consume half of all environmental resources, they either house the space where the other half is consumed or form the destination for the essential journeys required for human connection”. If our built environment alone is contributing to 40% or more of our resource use, then our profession really can do something to affect change. Obviously the majority of people in the profession are on board with sustainability as a general principle at this point in time, but I think part of the confusion over sustainable issues has been all of the arguments and counter-arguments regarding what it truly means to be sustainable.
The three communities I’ve looked at to this point have different ideas of how to reduce their impact and move towards sustainability. In Kronsberg, a new development in Hannover, Germany, the goal was to reduce carbon emissions of the new neighborhood by 60% compared to traditional city living. This goal was achieved through a combination of renewable sustainable energy supply such as wind power and bio-fuels, more efficient use of non-renewables such as CHP or combined heat and power, and adherence of all buildings to the LEH or Low-Energy House standard. (Tor, my connection in Malmo, gave me a video done by Greenpeace concerning de-centralized combined heat and power, which the Dutch are using everywhere; small coal and natural gas energy plants which are currently only about 30% efficient can achieve 85-95% efficiency this way- these plants can be more locally placed since they are smaller and very clean, so that power doesn’t get lost to long transmission lines. This also has the added benefit of not tying everyone throughout huge regions to the same tenuous grid system. For a quick link to a CHP website see here:
http://www.aceee.org/energy/chp.htm
Back to architecture/ planning:
LEH construction is something that everyone is working on in Europe, because it is a remarkably simple way to reduce the energy consumption of buildings. Part of the push to develop this relates to legislation by the EU to reduce carbon emissions in all EU cities. Similar ideas are the passive house and the zero-energy house. They all focus on the elimination of thermal bridges in construction, high insulation values including triple-paned windows (triple-paned glazing is now the standard in new construction in Sweden), and forced ventilation with recovery of previously heated air. I’ve been skeptical of super tight building shell construction because it has been my understanding that this leads to ‘sick house’ syndrome as well as problems with materials and mold, but the idea is that the forced ventilation provides really fresh air exchange for a healthy indoor environment without the loss of all the heat energy of a typical building shell; also, this construction is coupled with methods to prevent mold and mildew problems from occurring.
Kronsberg was part of a World Exhibition, and so extra incentives, funding, and a necessity to complete the project on time that allowed codes to change quickly and bureaucratic difficulties to be dealt with efficiently allowed this project to happen successfully. Bo01 was also part of an expo, this one all about housing, in Malmo Sweden. Bo01’s idea of how to achieve sustainability was different. Their goal was “100% locally renewable energy”, but they wanted to do this in a way that the residents of the community didn’t feel like they had to give anything up in achieving this goal. Deadline issues won out over standards for efficient building construction, and architects were determined to design fashionable buildings with huge glass facades regardless of energy efficiency goals. A lower energy consumption goal was set for Bo01 than for typical residential developments, but then no controls were in place to insure that these goals were achieved. The overriding idea was that as long as the development produced all of its own energy, it didn’t ultimately matter how much energy the buildings or residents used. Bo01 is attached to the city power grid and district heating system, so they don’t have to store the energy they create or worry if they are under-producing for periods of time; they make up for it over the course of the year. Here are some photos of Bo01- it is still a massive construction site:
Another development I looked at was outside of Helsinki, called Viikki. Their approach was to determine a set amount of energy use for all units, and make certain that between the LEH building details, energy produced on site, and active participation of the residents, energy use of the community would be around 30% less than that of similar developments. They didn’t actually achieve this, but did achieve around 20% less consumption than a typical development. Viikki didn’t have the luxury of being a high-profile expo project, although the EU and the city government did chip in funds to develop certain projects. A photo of Viikki here:
What is really developing between projects like these are the codes, types of cooperation, and integrated design and planning strategies and experience that are necessary to making communities have significantly less environmental impact.
For my project here, I’ve been mostly concerned with the urban planning issues and larger-scaled applications of sustainable design; but being something of an architecture snob in the midst of building systems and efficiency people, I’ve been looking pretty carefully at what’s been produced from an architectural standpoint as well. I can’t say I’ve seen anything that has blown me away first from an architectural perspective and then impressed me with its energy efficiency as well (Hammarby Sjostad has been the most exciting, but underperfoms) and I think this may be the next really big challenge for architects- which when you think about it is an exciting prospect. In the article “Snakes in Utopia” that we read in Brian’s 560 class, the authors make the point that “in our multicultural society meaning in its broader sense has to have wider appeal… sustainability offers the chance to unify values around common environmental goals, bringing shared agendas back onto the architectural stage.” (This statement also has a lot to with cultural sustainability and once again creating architecture connected to place and memory…but that’s a topic for another discussion).
The big issue from an architectural standpoint with Low Energy House design is that it means limiting to some extent the amount of glazing, watching where you put your glazing, as well as using relatively thick walls with high insulation values. So the fear from an architect’s standpoint is that the reduction of materials and open facades that began with modernism and are still in vogue are not compatible with energy efficient construction. I’ve been on the hunt for buildings that match the passive house standards as well as show some signs of ‘modernist’ leanings, and one firm that I’ve discovered that has a few hits along with a few misses produced this house: (link below to their site)
http://www.architekt-wamsler.de/index_startseite.htm
Roofing and drainage systems have been catching my eye quite a bit lately, and I've been appreciating how the course of water is traced out over the roof, down the building, and into the street. Roofs are designed drainage first, it seems, and then whatever field is left is barrel tiled or standing seam or shingled.
http://my.opera.com/LagomArchitecture/albums/show.dml?id=150941
There is a man who retired from IVL recently but still spends quite a bit of time there; every once in a while he stops by my desk to say hello and muse about things that he finds fantastic or interesting, such as an incredibly lush golf course he saw in the Nevada Desert. While at home we tend to just shake our heads at such things like you would at a cousin who has no money or work but charges an expensive satellite dish on his credit card, things such as a golf course in Nevada are true phenomena to people over here who work with water management and other ecological issues. I was telling him what I was working on, and he looked at me and asked me “do you really believe in these eco-communities, do you really think it can work?” I didn’t know if he was testing my commitment or really just unsure himself about the reality of creating actually sustainable communities. It was the first time anyone asked me this directly, and I answered that it absolutely can work without a doubt, but I wouldn’t have said this quite as convincingly a few months ago.
I’ve read in many articles over here that buildings (both their construction and the use of them over their lifespan) consume 40% of all of our resources, and the construction industry is referred to as the 40% sector for this reason. If anyone had just told me that at school, I think I would have paid even more attention to sustainability because it’s a pretty easy way to understand the impact that architecture has on our ecology. One article says that “whereas buildings consume half of all environmental resources, they either house the space where the other half is consumed or form the destination for the essential journeys required for human connection”. If our built environment alone is contributing to 40% or more of our resource use, then our profession really can do something to affect change. Obviously the majority of people in the profession are on board with sustainability as a general principle at this point in time, but I think part of the confusion over sustainable issues has been all of the arguments and counter-arguments regarding what it truly means to be sustainable.
The three communities I’ve looked at to this point have different ideas of how to reduce their impact and move towards sustainability. In Kronsberg, a new development in Hannover, Germany, the goal was to reduce carbon emissions of the new neighborhood by 60% compared to traditional city living. This goal was achieved through a combination of renewable sustainable energy supply such as wind power and bio-fuels, more efficient use of non-renewables such as CHP or combined heat and power, and adherence of all buildings to the LEH or Low-Energy House standard. (Tor, my connection in Malmo, gave me a video done by Greenpeace concerning de-centralized combined heat and power, which the Dutch are using everywhere; small coal and natural gas energy plants which are currently only about 30% efficient can achieve 85-95% efficiency this way- these plants can be more locally placed since they are smaller and very clean, so that power doesn’t get lost to long transmission lines. This also has the added benefit of not tying everyone throughout huge regions to the same tenuous grid system. For a quick link to a CHP website see here:
http://www.aceee.org/energy/chp.htm
Back to architecture/ planning:
LEH construction is something that everyone is working on in Europe, because it is a remarkably simple way to reduce the energy consumption of buildings. Part of the push to develop this relates to legislation by the EU to reduce carbon emissions in all EU cities. Similar ideas are the passive house and the zero-energy house. They all focus on the elimination of thermal bridges in construction, high insulation values including triple-paned windows (triple-paned glazing is now the standard in new construction in Sweden), and forced ventilation with recovery of previously heated air. I’ve been skeptical of super tight building shell construction because it has been my understanding that this leads to ‘sick house’ syndrome as well as problems with materials and mold, but the idea is that the forced ventilation provides really fresh air exchange for a healthy indoor environment without the loss of all the heat energy of a typical building shell; also, this construction is coupled with methods to prevent mold and mildew problems from occurring.
Kronsberg was part of a World Exhibition, and so extra incentives, funding, and a necessity to complete the project on time that allowed codes to change quickly and bureaucratic difficulties to be dealt with efficiently allowed this project to happen successfully. Bo01 was also part of an expo, this one all about housing, in Malmo Sweden. Bo01’s idea of how to achieve sustainability was different. Their goal was “100% locally renewable energy”, but they wanted to do this in a way that the residents of the community didn’t feel like they had to give anything up in achieving this goal. Deadline issues won out over standards for efficient building construction, and architects were determined to design fashionable buildings with huge glass facades regardless of energy efficiency goals. A lower energy consumption goal was set for Bo01 than for typical residential developments, but then no controls were in place to insure that these goals were achieved. The overriding idea was that as long as the development produced all of its own energy, it didn’t ultimately matter how much energy the buildings or residents used. Bo01 is attached to the city power grid and district heating system, so they don’t have to store the energy they create or worry if they are under-producing for periods of time; they make up for it over the course of the year. Here are some photos of Bo01- it is still a massive construction site:
Another development I looked at was outside of Helsinki, called Viikki. Their approach was to determine a set amount of energy use for all units, and make certain that between the LEH building details, energy produced on site, and active participation of the residents, energy use of the community would be around 30% less than that of similar developments. They didn’t actually achieve this, but did achieve around 20% less consumption than a typical development. Viikki didn’t have the luxury of being a high-profile expo project, although the EU and the city government did chip in funds to develop certain projects. A photo of Viikki here:
What is really developing between projects like these are the codes, types of cooperation, and integrated design and planning strategies and experience that are necessary to making communities have significantly less environmental impact.
For my project here, I’ve been mostly concerned with the urban planning issues and larger-scaled applications of sustainable design; but being something of an architecture snob in the midst of building systems and efficiency people, I’ve been looking pretty carefully at what’s been produced from an architectural standpoint as well. I can’t say I’ve seen anything that has blown me away first from an architectural perspective and then impressed me with its energy efficiency as well (Hammarby Sjostad has been the most exciting, but underperfoms) and I think this may be the next really big challenge for architects- which when you think about it is an exciting prospect. In the article “Snakes in Utopia” that we read in Brian’s 560 class, the authors make the point that “in our multicultural society meaning in its broader sense has to have wider appeal… sustainability offers the chance to unify values around common environmental goals, bringing shared agendas back onto the architectural stage.” (This statement also has a lot to with cultural sustainability and once again creating architecture connected to place and memory…but that’s a topic for another discussion).
The big issue from an architectural standpoint with Low Energy House design is that it means limiting to some extent the amount of glazing, watching where you put your glazing, as well as using relatively thick walls with high insulation values. So the fear from an architect’s standpoint is that the reduction of materials and open facades that began with modernism and are still in vogue are not compatible with energy efficient construction. I’ve been on the hunt for buildings that match the passive house standards as well as show some signs of ‘modernist’ leanings, and one firm that I’ve discovered that has a few hits along with a few misses produced this house: (link below to their site)
http://www.architekt-wamsler.de/index_startseite.htm
Roofing and drainage systems have been catching my eye quite a bit lately, and I've been appreciating how the course of water is traced out over the roof, down the building, and into the street. Roofs are designed drainage first, it seems, and then whatever field is left is barrel tiled or standing seam or shingled.
danjoh99 # Tuesday, October 31, 2006 4:25:25 AM
I've enjoyed reading your blog and I'm jealous because I want to hang out at IVL and chat with folks too. We are dealing with a lot of these issues at my firm right now too.
Have you heard of Ed Mazria's Architecture 2030 Challenge? www.architecture2030.org. I was ho-hum about it after returning from Sweden because over there the countries have agreed-upon national goals for CO2 reduction targets from the building industry. Over here we have to have a celebrity issue a "challenge" to achieve something less substantial. But the AIA has picked it up and it's now the target for best practice in architecture. This is significant. But we're still working on LEED to raise their requirements to those of European building codes, let alone exceed them!
On the Passive House standard and superinsulation, we're trying to achieve this standard of about 10Watts per square meter of peak space heating/cooling demand with our projects here. In California, and most of the US (outside of Wisconsin et al.), you can do it with conventional wall thicknesses and good double-pane windows. Granted we also point most of the windows south, but I see this not as a limitation to architecture, but as something that makes design actually mean something, like there's a POINT to it and it's not just arbitrary egoism.
We're also seeing we can knock 40-50% off energy use just by re-thinking the mechanical system.
On those Dutch local power plants, the big loss from centralized plants is not transmission on lines--that's only about 3%--it's the waste heat generated from passing steam energy to turbines making electricity. A fossil fuel electric plant converts its fuel into about 30% electricity and 70% waste heat that must be dissipated in cooling towers. (That's why nuke plants have those big narrow-waisted towers.) By making the plants small and local, they can send the heat out in district heating systems to radiators in homes, thus putting the 70% to work.
On the subject of building tightness, I was once skeptical of tight buildings and mechanical ventilation too. The argument that got me is that US buildings for the most part rely on leaky construction for air quality. It is totally uncontrolled and unresponsive to interior activities or exterior conditions. Once you install a heat recovery ventilator, you can tighten the construction all the way up, using plastic sheeting in the walls and roofs, without sacrificing air quality. In poor weather you run the HRV on a CO2 sensor or continuously. They about 70% efficient, so you can crank it up and get BETTER air quality than a US building, but still be saving heat/cooling energy. The European standard for fresh air supply to each occupant is 40-50 cubic feet per minute, while the US just recently RAISED their standard from 15 to 20. And the reason for it being so low is concern for energy conservation! They don't want to heat all that outside air. Give me a break. Send them all to Sweden and show them what's up.
I'm still trying to sell my bosses on tightness. They believe in "breathing" or some hippie nonsense. Even a tight building can open all the doors and windows in good weather. I'm trying to show that tightness ENABLES the California ideal of indoor-outdoor houses. When I was at IVL I was interested in writing about the tectonics implied by the Passive House standard. But I've seen a quote recently that "superinsulation is a system of design, not a style." (As opposed to traditional US passive solar design). In other words, you can have the house any architectural style you like, just make it tight and very well insulated. It frees the designer, versus other passive design methods popularized in the 1970s.
People here balk that it's a mild climate, not Sweden or Wisconsin, so why do you need triple pane windows. I reply that because of the mild climate, you can throw away your whole heating system if you have triple panes.
In Sweden you can get a package unit about the size of a refrigerator that continuously sucks stale, damp air out of your bathrooms and kitchen, transfers this heat to incoming fresh air from outside (70% efficient), and uses the leftover heat (30%) as a source to make your domestic hot water and water for radiant floors or radiators. I'm trying to find a similar unit here, but so far no luck. They aren't made here.
I like your point about looking for architecture that grabs you and then determining if it's efficient or not. I'm more mechanically inclined and I have been taking the opposite approach. Good reminder.
Have fun,
--Dan