Green Building Innovations

Expanded use of BIM, along with IPD, provides a successful framework for cost-effective sustainable design

By Robert Carlsen

SmithGroup designed Los Angeles Harbor College’s Technology Building.

Green building is here to stay. And despite the recession – and maybe even because of it – the construction industry is focused on improving sustainable design and building and continued innovation when it comes to being green.

With the advent and expansion of building information modeling, green building concepts are flourishing in the offices and studios of contractors and architects. The challenge right now is convincing owners.

Owners are exhibiting a mixed reaction to green building during this recession, says Lance Williams, executive director of the U.S. Green Building Council’s Los Angeles chapter.

“In general, owners are not spending as broadly as before the recession,” says Williams. “But they understand the importance of energy efficiency in their buildings and this is the reason why the Existing Building certification program is doing so well.”

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New strategies such as monitoring building operating costs, he says, is the main cost-effective component to Existing Building and USGBC’s new Building Performance Initiative (California Construction, October 2009).

The initiative is designed to put in place a comprehensive data collection effort from all buildings that have achieved LEED certification; implement an appropriate analysis methodology of that data; and provide feedback to building owners so they have better information with which to address any performance gaps that stem from predicted building performance versus actual performance.

Numerous things affect the ability of a building to deliver high performance, including energy modeling tools, properly timed energy models, quality building commissioning, proper goal setting/benchmarking, and coordination between design and operation.

The initiative complements the announcement earlier this year that will require ongoing performance data from buildings as part of their certification under the latest version of LEED and beyond.

SmithGroup is designing a sustainable Cathedral Hill Hospital for Sutter Health in San Francisco.

“Gathering data on actual building performance is a very current topic,” says Russell Perry, corporate director of sustainable design for San Francisco’s SmithGroup. “It is a required step in any projects that are certified under LEED version 3, including reporting those data to the USGBC for their collections and analysis.

“By the way, failure to perform as estimated does not include the risk of de-certification, fortunately, or nobody would participate.”

Perry says SmithGroup, along with other large architectural firms, are participating in the AIA 2030 Challenge, which includes an annual report on both green office practices and building performance.

Perry adds that LEED version 3 has recalibrated the scoring to give additional weight to those aspects of building performance that reduce carbon emissions – transit/urban locations, energy performance, commissioning, measurement and verification, renewables and building reuse.

“SmithGroup has renewed focus in meeting these requirements,” he says. “In addition, we have developed a carbon calculating tool for building energy use that we are using to make sure that we optimize carbon performance, while we meet the LEED energy requirements, which are actually cost based.”

Turner Construction Co. conducted a survey last year to gauge owners’ commitment to green building in a “restrained economy,” says Michael Deane, LEED AP, vice president and chief sustainability officer for New York-based Turner Construction Co. Of the 700 respondents, three-quarters says they will continue to build green buildings.

Turner’s green UCSD student housing building.

“A smart owner will make the smart choice: build as green a building as you can afford,” says Deane.

Turner is more than committed to green building, Deane says. It has completed more than 100 green projects so far and Deane says his firm can produce “any greenness you want at any price point.”

He says the big green building innovation these days is making process improvements and focusing on product.

“You’ve got to focus on the supply chain and procurement methods,” he says.

Another important green element is producing less waste on the jobsite, he adds, which BIM can accurately measure.

Deane says Turner’s online Construction Waste Recycling Reporting system for tracking construction waste eliminates the need for the use of paper in the reporting and billing of waste removal on construction sites. Turner’s construction waste recycling program has resulted in the company diverting more than 75,000 tons of construction waste on its jobsites in 2008 and almost 250,000 tons have been diverted since 2005.

BIM is making its way more and more into green building. For example, SmithGroup uses BIM on all projects it designs, says Carl Christiansen, AIA, LEED AP, vice president. With clients such as Kaiser Permanente, Sutter Health and the Veterans Administration, LEED certification or LEED equivalency is the goal.

BIM also helped Turner Construction turn an in-progress non-green school restoration into a LEED certified school, according to a recent article in GreenSource magazine.

Turner was about to begin construction on a school restoration and expansion project in Washington, D.C. when the city government passed legislation requiring all public buildings to achieve LEED certification. Already underway, the Turner school project was exempt, but school administrators decided to find out how much green could be incorporated at this late date.

Using BIM, Turner and its architect, Ehrenkrantz Eckstut & Kuhn, easily upgraded the school’s mechanical systems and acoustics to LEED for Schools standards. Plus, many of the design elements, including daylighting, reuse of an existing building and proximity to public transportation were already incorporated. In the end, a LEED certified rating was achieved.

It’s been about six years since BIM was adopted as shorthand for the complex merging of computer-aided-design and construction databases, according to GreenSource. Technical, legal and cultural barriers remain, and it may be unrealistic to expect a single model to describe an entire building throughout its life. Yet architects, owners, engineers and builders are reporting benefits of efficiency, cost savings and, importantly, greener design.

BIM, in theory, creates a complete digital representation of a building, including physical attributes, geometric form, material descriptions and thermal and structural behavior. Ideally, the model is the joint creation of all design and construction disciplines. It grows throughout design, informs construction and continues to serve facility managers during post-occupancy operations.

BIM has been accepted as key to integrated project delivery in which the owner/designer/builder team cooperates in shared risks and rewards. And by stressing multidisciplinary cooperation early in design, BIM also provides a framework for sustainable design, reports GreenSource.

Meanwhile, LEED is heading into new directions with new certification programs for homes and neighborhood development.

The LEED ND rating system, for example, integrates the principles of smart growth, urbanism and green building into the first national system for neighborhood design, according to the USGBC. LEED certification provides independent, third-party verification that a development’s location and design meet accepted high levels of environmentally responsible, sustainable development. LEED ND is a collaboration among USGBC, the Congress for the New Urbanism and the Natural Resources Defense Council.

One of LEED ND’s first pilot projects is the NBC Universal Evolution plan for its 391-acre Universal City property, according to Lance Williams, executive director of the U.S. Green Building Council’s Los Angeles chapter.

The plan includes upgrades and improvements to its studios and production facilities, Universal Studios park and CityWalk retail mall along with the addition of offices, parks and housing. The “walkable” neighborhood development, all connected to transit, will include 2,900 lofts, townhomes, apartments and condominiums; a town center with restaurants, shops, cafes and neighborhood-serving businesses; and 35 acres of public open space, parks, hiking trails and bike paths.

In other sustainability news, the Portland Cement Association and Ready Mixed Concrete Research & Education Foundation has teamed up with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to form the Concrete Sustainability Hub to address the sustainability and environmental implications of the use of concrete as the backbone of housing, schools, hospitals and other built infrastructure, including highways, tunnels, airports and rail systems.

Concrete is the most widely used building material on the planet; however, the production of some of its component materials accounts for up to 5% of global carbon dioxide emissions annually, the PCA says.

The research center was established with the goal of accelerating emerging breakthroughs in concrete science and engineering and transferring that science into practice, will provide $10 million of sponsored research funding during the next five years. Researchers from MIT’s School of Engineering, School of Architecture and Planning and Sloan School of Management are expected to participate in the CSH’s research activities.

The launch of CSH incidentally coincides with the recent announcement that the EPA is moving to enact rules that would curtail greenhouse gas emissions from power plants and large industrial manufacturers. If enacted, these rules would likely impose regulations on all 118 cement plants in the U.S. The RMC and PCA leaders are hopeful that research results emerging from CSH projects will help ease the way for the industry to meet any changes that would be required by those new regulations.

CSH research will initially be organized around three focus areas: concrete materials science, building technology and the econometrics of sustainable development. The first two projects, “Green Concrete Science,” and “The Edge of Concrete: A Life-Cycle Investigation of Concrete and Concrete Structures” are already underway.