GREEN BUILDING

Every Building Is an Experiment

Evaluation Is the Key To Maximizing Our Green Dollars’ Impact on Green Buildings

In the United States buildings account for approximately 38 percent of all carbon dioxide emissions, and globally, studies place that value anywhere from 30 percent to 50 percent.^[1] If we are to effectively reduce our greenhouse gas emissions to levels proposed by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and other organizations, we will have to decrease our built environment’s carbon footprint, and sooner rather than later. The IPCC has conservatively estimated that these reductions must occur within the next ten to twenty years in order to avoid “dangerous” and “irreversible” changes to our climate.^[2] Relative to the built environment, some of these reductions will come through the conversion to renewable energy. But because we have limited time, most will have to come through a reduction in building energy consumption—via behavioral changes and more efficient buildings.

The building construction industry has already been proceeding down this path, albeit more slowly than is needed. LEED and other green building certification systems, the 2030 Challenge, the 2010 Imperative, Green For All, the Mayors Climate Protection Center,^[3] and similar programs are all steps in the right direction. And the Recovery and Reinvestment Act provisions devoted to greening our built environment will increase the pace of this green “revolution.”

Yet with all of these efforts fundamental changes to the building construction industry’s standard operating procedures are still needed if we’re to succeed. The New Building Institute released a study last spring comparing the performance of LEED to non-LEED facilities.^[4] While the average performance of the former was better than the latter, on an individual basis the LEED facility performance was widely scattered, with 30 percent performing significantly better and 25 percent performing significantly worse than expected (21 percent worse than the predicted code baseline modeling). We’re simply not reducing the amount of energy consumed by our buildings as fast as needed. Why?

We generally don’t view buildings as experiments, even in the building construction industry, but that is essentially what they are.

The proximate causes can be attributed to many aspects of development, design, construction, operations, and general use that vary depending on the specific situation at hand. But the ultimate reason consists largely of the lack of a consistent, systematic process for evaluating and verifying the efficiency of all building projects—residential, commercial, governmental, or otherwise. We generally don’t view buildings as experiments, even in the building construction industry, but that is essentially what they are. They’re “laboratories” where we test a) the performance of materials and building systems, b) theories of organizing space relative to human physiological, psychological, and social/cultural needs, c) the process of design, d) construction methodologies, e) the implementation of codes, regulations, and standards—and the list goes on.

Unfortunately we generally do not collect and analyze data on buildings to see what works, what doesn’t, and why within a given setting. There are of course exceptions. “Post occupancy evaluation,” a somewhat generic term, refers to the process of evaluating a facility’s performance and effectiveness with regards to such things as energy performance, productivity, safety, and security. “Retrocommissioning” is the process of identifying low-cost facility, operational and maintenance improvements to existing buildings that will enable them to meet their original design intentions, or the current usage needs if they are different from the original design scope. “Built environment ethnographies,” a term my former business partner, Robert Leonard, and I coined, refers to post-occupancy evaluations that focus primarily on the occupant side of the equation. And perhaps most notable is the growing use of “evidence-based design” in the health care sector, a more comprehensive and integrative design and evaluation process in which the design team works closely with the client, contractor, and specialists to makes decisions based on the best information available from research, project evaluations, and evidence gathered from client operations.

An example of this process is the 2006 Heart Hospital addition to St. John’s Mercy Medical Center in St. Louis, Missouri. The design team, hospital staff, and supporting specialists made use of design efficiency modeling and previously conducted research to inform the initial hospital design. Subsequent surveys, interviews, observations, and data collection were then performed six months after occupancy to determine how effective the initial design was and fine-tune it based on the unique staff culture of the Heart Hospital. Successes and improvements achieved from the initial design process and subsequent evaluations included (but were not limited to): a) a significant reduction in the noise level occurring in the patient rooms, b) improvements in nursing efficiency by reducing the miles walked per nurse over the course of a shift, c) a reduction in staff turnover, and d) an increase in patient satisfaction.^[5]

But as I indicated, these are the exceptions to the rule. The reasons for this are many, and the most often cited is cost. With prices for effective evaluations ranging from $0.10 per square foot to over $4.00 per square foot, the relevant parties involved (private and public building owners and/or tenants, the design team, the contractor[s], and the tax payers) are often hesitant or unwilling to justify or pay for what is incorrectly thought to be an unnecessary expense with limited benefits.

However, without systematic evaluations we cannot achieve the full benefits of green design and construction. Such benefits are manifold, and include increased energy and water savings; decreased impacts on the environment; decreased operations and management costs; increases in occupant performance, productivity, and health; decreases in tenant and employee turnover rates; and increased real-estate values and occupancy rates.^[6] In properly functioning green facilities the total financial benefits can be well over ten times the average initial investment required to design and construct such facilities. And energy savings alone exceed the average increase in green building costs, which on average are only 2 percent to 3 percent of conventional building costs.

This need for evaluation relative to energy performance is illustrated by a high performance elementary school in Albuquerque, New Mexico that was underperforming its peer group schools in terms of energy performance, in part because of the use of segmented light shelves. A light shelf is a horizontal architectural element typically projecting both inside and outside of an exterior wall directly below a clerestory window, the vertical window near the top of a wall that is installed specifically to allow daylight to enter high up in a space. Daylight penetrates the clerestory window, hits the interior portion of the light shelf, reflects back up to the ceiling, and then back down into the room further into the space. A segmented light shelf simply refers to the shelf not being a solid piece, in this case with gaps running down the full length of the shelf to allow a small portion of the direct sunlight through to create aesthetic light/shadow patterns on the wall.

As a high performance, green school, the architects incorporated daylighting into the classroom design, making use of clerestory windows and these segmented light shelves to bring daylight into the space. However, the segmented light shelves (as opposed to completely solid light shelves) allowed direct sunlight to reach the eyes of the students in the south side classrooms during the winter months. As a result, teachers closed the automatic blinds over the clerestory windows and turned on the lights, greatly reducing the energy savings that the design team had intended. The fix was relatively simple—replacing the segmented light shelves with solid versions that eliminated the penetration of direct sunlight down to the occupant level. But the real lesson from this was that some type of evaluation was necessary in order to find the problem and rectify it.^[7]

Southside classroom with clerestory window and light shelf

In addition, the financial benefits incurred from improvements in occupant performance, productivity, and health are substantial. A few examples include:

• A Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory study, summarized in a report to California’s Sustainable Building Task Force,^[8] found that improvements to indoor air quality could save U.S. businesses as much as $58 billion in lost sick time and an additional $200 billion in worker performance.
• A study by office furniture company Herman-Miller showed up to a seven percent increase in worker productivity following the move to a successfully functioning, green, day-lit facility.^[9]
• And among the hundreds of studies on health and human benefits of successfully functioning green buildings reviewed by researchers at Carnegie Mellon University,^[10] they found a 74 percent reduction in the incidence of headaches from replacing noisy magnetic ballasts with noise-free electronic ballasts in fluorescent light fixtures and therefore a reduction in lost sick time (a ballast starts and controls the voltage, or regulates the current, in fluorescent lamps—magnetic ballasts use a magnetic core to do this, sometimes producing an audible hum in the process, while electronic ballasts use quieter, solid state electronic circuitry); 14 studies that link personal temperature control to performance gains of between 0.2 and 7 percent; and 12 studies indicating that improved lighting design enhances individual productivity between 0.7 and 23 percent.

These occupant factors comprise a large portion of business operating expenses. Over the span of about 20 years, the ratio of building construction cost to building operations costs is about 1 to 1.5, but the ratio of construction costs to business operations is on the order of 1 to 15. So the occupant-related financial benefits of successful green building far outweigh the energy- and operations-related benefits. But the only way to ensure that the interface between green facilities and occupants operates successfully is through evaluation and verification, and this expense is but a fraction of the long-term business operations costs.

However, human interaction and decision making (at the individual and group level) doesn’t operate purely on a financial cost/benefit basis, particularly if the benefits come five or more years down the road. Human interaction is a complicated, messy process with multiple competing interests and benefits that occur at the various levels of individual and group interaction involved in any given situation. This, along with the hierarchy of variables involved in our consumption, conservation, and self-preservation habits can elevate short-term considerations above medium- or long-term considerations.

Fear is one these variables. We live in a very litigious society, and the historical structure of the design/construction process has encouraged finger pointing among all of the relevant parties involved. This is exacerbated by the erroneous expectation among the general public that buildings are “end products” to be occupied and used without any further adjustments to the facility or how it should be used. In such an environment, the design team and contractors have become wary of evaluating their work, fearing what they could be held liable for (legitimately or not), and afraid of what that could do to their reputation. As well, building owners and maintenance personnel are hesitant to open up what they fear could be the floodgates of complaints from their employees, occupants, patrons, and tenants.

We must create a selective environment that encourages evaluation and verification. A full discussion of creating such an environment is beyond the scope of this article, but the following three items would be part of this process:

1. Education. We must continue to educate building owners and occupants, the general public, policymakers, and even members of the building/construction industry themselves that the combined built environment/occupant “system” represents a constantly evolving experiment that requires evaluation and modification, as opposed to an end product of a linear process. Such a shift in viewpoint would go a long way to making evaluation and verification standard practice. Occupants, building owners and the general public would then come to expect evaluations facilitated through federal, state, and local regulations and codes.
2. Integration. Designers, contractors, owners, facility managers, tenants, and occupants must all be on the same team—when there is a single group with clear objectives, there is uniformity, unity, and a sense of the common good. This reduces the impact that fear can have for over-inflating short-term considerations. Integrated design, a multidisciplinary process involving all of the key stakeholders and design professionals through the entire process, from early conception to occupancy, is one path some in the industry are pursuing to bring these disciplines together for individual projects.
3. Transparency. Greater transparency with regards to resource consumption, from the individual home owner to the largest corporate or government entity would also help facilitate holistic design that reduces greenhouse emissions. Along these lines, online resource consumption “virtual worlds” have been proposed,^[11] where everyone’s energy and water usage would be visible for the entire world to see. Such visibility would likely result in social pressure to reduce consumption as well as competition among peer groups, particularly if incentives and penalties were structured to take advantage of such an environment. This would in turn create more of a demand for evaluation and verification—necessary for effective resource consumption reduction.

The rules that will direct allocation of funds from the stimulus package are a potential means to encourage and require building evaluation and verification on a large scale. Federal, state, and local projects focused on greening our built environment should include evaluation and verification as a stipulation for receiving stimulus funds. Such evaluations would ideally occur one to two years after the work is complete to verify performance and make the necessary revisions to ensure that the energy savings are being met, and that facilities and residences are maximizing the quality of the human experience within the built environment. Otherwise we’re not obtaining the full potential of our tax dollars, and may even be wasting them. And without such changes, we will not reduce the built environment’s carbon footprint enough to mitigate the effects of climate change.

Marcel J. Harmon, P.E., Ph.D., is a built environment analyst at M.E. Group, Inc., an engineering and sustainable consulting firm based in Lincoln, NE, and heads up M.E. Group’s Human Inquiry services out of their Kansas City, MO office.

Notes

[1] Energy Information Administration, “Annual Energy Outlook 2009 Early Release with Projections to 2030,” 2008, http://www.eia.doe.gov/oiaf/aeo/emission.html; United Nations Environment Program, “Buildings and Climate Change: Status, Challenges and Opportunities,” 2007, http://www.unep.fr/shared/publications/pdf/DTIx0916xPA-BuildingsClimate.pdf.

^[2] Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, “Climate Change 2007: Mitigation, Contributions of Working Group III to the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change,” 2007, http://www.ipcc.ch/ipccreports/ar4-wg3.htm.

^[3] U.S Green Building Council, “Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) Green Building Rating System,” http://www.usgbc.org/DisplayPage.aspx?CategoryID=19; Architecture 2030, “The 2030 Challenge,” http://www.architecture2030.org/2030_challenge/index.html; Architecture 2030, “The 2010 Imperative,” http://www.architecture2030.org/2010_imperative/index.html; Green For All, http://www.greenforall.org/; The United States Conference of Mayors, “Mayors Climate Protection Center,” http://www.usmayors.org/climateprotection/.

^[4] New Buildings Institute, “Energy Performance of LEED® for New Construction Buildings,” 2008 http://www.newbuildings.org/downloads/Energy_Performance_of_LEED-NC_Buildings-Final_3-4-08b.pdf.

^[5] Crain, C. and C. Siepel-Bechman. “Research That Supports Evidenced Based Design and Effects Positive Patient Outcomes and Staff Satisfaction” International Conference and Exhibition on Health Facility Planning Design and Construction, Orlando FA, March 10-13, 2008.

^[6] Kats, G. “Greening America’s Schools: Costs and Benefits,” (Capital E., 2006), http://www.cap-e.com/ewebeditpro/items/O59F12807.pdf; Kats, G., L. Alevantis, A. Berman, E. Mills, and J. Perlman. “The Costs and Financial Benefits of Green Buildings: A Report to California’s Sustainable Building Task Force,” report (California Sustainable Building Task Force, 2003) http://www.usgbc.org/Docs/News/News477.pdf; Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment and the British Council for Offices, “The Impact of Office Design on Business Performance,” 2005, http://www.cabe.org.uk/AssetLibrary/2191.pdf; Miller, N., J. Spivey, and A. Florance. “Does Green Payoff?”, 2008, http://www.sandiego.edu/business/documents/July142008DoesGreenPayOff-Ed.pdf.

^[7] Harmon, M. J. and R. D. Leonard. “A Post Occupancy Evaluation of the Edward Gonzales Elementary School, Phase I (Interim Study)”, report in possession by the New Mexico Public School Facilities Authority (Human Inquiry 2006).

^[8] Kats, G., L. Alevantis, A. Berman, E. Mills, and J. Perlman. “The Costs and Financial Benefits of Green Buildings: A Report to California’s Sustainable Building Task Force,” report (California Sustainable Building Task Force, 2003) http://www.usgbc.org/Docs/News/News477.pdf.

^[9] Heerwagen, J. “Do Green Buildings Enhance the Well Being of Workers?”, Environmental Design and Construction Magazine, July/August 2000, http://www.edcmag.com/CDA/ArticleInformation/coverstory/BNPCoverStoryItem/0,4118,19794,00.html.

^[10] Loftness, V., V. Hartkoph, and L. K. Poh. “Sustainability and Health Are Integral Goals for the Built Environment,” Healthy Buildings, June 4-8, 2006. http://www.dcat.net/workshoptoolkit/Workshop_Toolkit/Benefits_files/sustainability_and_health_loftness.pdf.

^[11] Byron Reeves, “Anticipating the Future: Immersive New Media – Evidence and Ideas from the Science of Fun” Opening Plenary, Behavioral, Energy and Climate Change Conference, Sacramento, CA, November 16-19, 2008.

Tags: engineering, green building

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