05/14/08-C-Green Strategies that cost less

[Cristina Villanueva-Meyer]

Speaker: Michael H. Nicklas, FAIA, Innovative Design Inc.

This session focuses on the key lessons learned at Innovative design by our on 99 green school and educational facility projects as well as observations we have made from the industry as a whole. IT will also focus on the categories in which theses mistakes fall into.

Myself and Leslie will be posting some comments and notes that are taken through the session in the following hour. Hope you enjoy it and post some comments too.

[lesley hayes]

Mr Nicklas feels that LEED is forcing people to implement strategies that they are not capable of designing. Hmmm, is that where hiring a consultant comes into play? Is the whole idea not to work together towards one ultimate utopian goal?

[lesley hayes]

He finally gets to a point- not all our methods are evaluated correctly. LEED does not encourage us to look at the synergies between our strategies. This is where us as architects have to research.
‘Do more- not less’
Look at all your options - compare and contrast, and don’t rule out any method because you think it might not be feasible.

[Cristina Villanueva-Meyer]

We will see in the next hour.
One of the main things he consider important and is going to talk about are:

-The whole-building, whole-site integrated design process-
-A successful model for capturing the synergies
-Metrics for evaluation- Strategies that cost less
-Importance of skill driven process versus metric driven process
-Daylighting/energy analysis and water analysis

[Cristina Villanueva-Meyer]

Orientation!!

How important is the orientation? It is something crucial in the design of the building.

Mr. Nickas reminds every architect, if your building is facing east and west there is going to be a problem. Not even with shading devices it will work, so they would have waste a lot of money. One sees this all the time on people missing the orientation aspect.

Do you think this applies for every project? What if there is a great view at the east or west? Would you sacrifice that for the higher costs in energy?

[lesley hayes]

Innovative Design Inc does not accept clients who are not compliant with energy efficiency and more specifically the 2030 challenge.

Is it even possible for everyone to take on this same value? Is Integrated Project Delivery the only way we can force owners, construction managers, and architects into this?

[lesley hayes]

Learn from your mistakes-
-Track everything
-Track actual energy performance of every building for years
-Know before the owner knows when there is a problem with a building
-Assess and improve

[lesley hayes]

All daylighting simulation is done in office- using the following software DaySim [http://irc.nrc-cnrc.gc.ca/ie/lighting/daylight/daysim_e.html]—then they import into Equest [http://www.doe2.com/equest/].