Building Blocks

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Chapter 5

• Building Blocks

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Greener Communities

• Mixed housing on light, narrow streets
• Abundant open space, with greenways
• Natural surface drainage instead of concrete
• Vegetative shading to reduce urban heat islands

• Granny flats
• Clustered housing
• Restored watersheds, more porous surface area to
  absorb rainwater
• Brownfield site redevelopment

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Where Americans spend 90 of their time
BUILDINGS
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Eng Lock Lees typical large building project
process ...

• Take previous successful set of drawings
• Change the box that indicates the name of the
  project
• Submit the drawings to client
• Building is constructed
• Client gripes about discomfort
• Wait for client to stop griping
• Repeat process

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By skimping on design ...

• Building owner gets
• Costlier equipment
• Higher energy costs
• Less competitive comfortable building
• Tenants get
• Lower productivity
• Higher rent operating costs

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Green Building Design

• Focus on human comfort and productivity
• Workers want thermal comfort
• Lighting to see what they are doing
• Can hear themselves think
• Working conditions can substantially affect
  employee productivity satisfaction

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Some Characteristics of Green Buildings

• Site placement for solar gain and deflect of
  unwanted heat or wind
• Improved insulation airtightness
• Superwindows
• Passive heating/cooling systems
• Use of plants

• Daylighting
• Toxicity is designed out
• Local construction materials
• Water conservation reuse
• Energy efficiency
• Power generation

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Superwindows

• Keep people warm in winter, cool in summer
• Have invisible coatings to allow light but
  reflect heat
• Contain heavy gas fillings to block flow of heat
  noise
• Newest ones maintain comfort between -47 degrees
  115 degrees without heating or cooling
  equipment
• Can be adjusted for various sides of a building

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Keys to Successful Green Buildings

• Highly integrated design process with diverse
  skills perspectives
• Stakeholders collaborate in a charrette
  process-a short intensive teamwork effort
• Develop synergy between design elements
• To yield big energy resource savings at the
  lowest possible cost

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U.S. Green Building Councils Leadership in
Energy Environmental Design (LEED)

• A rating system which provides a national
  standard for evaluating and comparing green
  building performance

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EcoWal-Marts Experimental Eco-Store in Lawrence,
Kansas

• Unique daylighting system installed in one half
  of building, regular fluorescent for the rest
• Higher sales on daylit side
• Workers preferred the daylit side

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Obstacles to green home construction

• Fragmented regulatory jurisdictions
• Obsolete building codes
• Uninformed building inspectors, home buyers,
  appraisers real estate agents

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Refrigerators

• Use a sixth of U.S. households electricity
• Most ones in-service now
• Poorly insulated boxes
• Uses so much electricity, the coal burned to
  generate it would full up the inside annually
• Inefficient compressors mounted at the bottom (so
  heat rises up into food compartments)
• Undersized, dust-clogged, fan-cooled condenser
  with leaky air seals internal heaters to prevent
  sweating caused by thin insulation and
  inefficient lights, fans defroster coils that
  generates even more heat

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EPAs Energy Star Labeled Appliances

• Can save the typical U.S. household about 30 of
  its energy bills