Page 219 - Green Building Through Integrated Design

ENERGY-RELATED QUESTIONS 195

Phil Beyl is an architect in Portland, Oregon and was the principal in charge of
design for the world’s largest LEED Platinum building. On the role of engineers at this
stage in the design process, he says:*

We’re in the camp that brings the engineers on board early [in the design process]. We
think that’s a pretty critical thing to do, in fact it’s absolutely imperative. It may be
different on client-by-client basis, because you don’t want to barrage some clients
with engineers who are speaking in some fairly technical language. But we typically
work with a pretty sophisticated group of clients who are able to handle that.
What we expect out of our engineers is to be able to evaluate ideas on a conceptual
basis. To able to use history from other projects and do some quick “back of the nap-
kin” kind of calculations. For example, being able to say, “If you reduce the amount
of glazing on the building 40 to 50 percent, that’s going to result in a downsizing of
your HVAC system by X tons and that’s worth X dollars.” It takes those types of quick
evaluations to measure the quality of an idea. It may be a great idea, but it may only
be worth pennies. It may be a really absurd idea, but it’s worth lots of money [so it
might be worth exploring further].

You always have to bring the idea back to a dollars and cents basis in order to advance
it, because everybody has budgets. That’s where several engineers, a lot that we work
with, are really advancing their capabilities to think in more conceptual terms than in
hard and fast engineering terms. Still, I criticize them often for not having enough peo-
ple [on staff] who, in an engineering capacity, can think and communicate conceptu-
ally, as opposed to needing to know exactly how big every window is before they run
a calculation for you. They’re too accustomed to plugging these values into a fairly
complex computer formula and letting the software run the results for them. They need
to be able to pull back from that level of detail a little bit and give [the architects and
owners] some higher-level guidance [especially at the early stages of design].

Here is a series of questions that you can use at this stage of the project to evaluate
energy issues:

1 Can vegetation be placed on the south, southwest, and west sides of the building
(particularly for low-rise and mid-rise structures) to reduce cooling loads in sum-
mer from the hot afternoon sun? In southern climates, have we also considered
shading the east façade of the building?
2 Are we affecting solar microclimates or our neighbor’s access to light and air,
through the building height or mass, or even through landscape plantings, and
what can we do to mitigate this impact?
3 How should we orient the building, and how will this impact our ability to utilize
daylighting and passive solar design strategies? Are there site features or community
connections that dictate how we orient the building? If we have a less than optimal
orientation, owing to site constraints, how can we accommodate the building on

*Interview with Phil Beyl, GBD Architects, February 2008.