Page 222 - Green Building Through Integrated Design

198 CONCEPTUAL AND SCHEMATIC DESIGN

6 If mechanical equipment will be placed on the roof, will there still be room for pho-
tovoltaic solar panels? Why can’t the mechanical equipment be put in the basement
instead?
7 Can we design our electrical systems to allow for future solar energy retrofits, by
bringing wiring to the roof and allowing room for an appropriately sized inverter in
the electrical room?

Paul Stoller is principal at Atelier Ten’s New York office. This international firm is
an expert in energy engineering and climate-responsive design. They were brought
onto the Yale Sculpture Building and Gallery project by Kieran Timberlake Associates
(see Chap. 3). Atelier Ten has completed a number of design projects at Yale, so you
can assume they had the university’s confidence in their abilities. Stoller spoke about
his team’s approach to this particular LEED Platinum project.*

This was an odd project in that it was very fast track. Because of its fast-track nature,
decisions had to get made quickly. It succeeded because decisions were made effi-
ciently and quickly and because the design team was very skilled. We had good
hunches about what would make for a high-performance building. We worked
through those hunches in every project meeting, every two weeks when we had our
regular session, and the design evolved very quickly.
The conceptual design phase was the first half of the schematic design process. We
did modeling in this phase, examining a whole series of major building performance
options. We modeled the implications of glazing percentages on wall performance, of
daylight performance, of control strategies, and of displacement ventilation versus
mixed-mode ventilation. We looked at heat recovery ventilation versus no heat recov-
ery. We looked at evaporative cooling versus no evaporative cooling. [In this way], we
could quickly assess a long list of design options both architectural and mechanical.
Then we looked at the interrelationships of those things. We always modeled things
individually and then in combinations so we can see how they would affect each other.
That happened in schematic design, and that’s how we made our design decisions. That
process used a schematic [energy performance] model so it was not a LEED-compliant
whole building energy model [at that stage]. [We modeled] a somewhat abstracted form
of the building [at this stage], but still one that represented how it would perform.

PLATINUM PROJECT PROFILE
Merry Lea ELC/Reith Village, Wolf Lake, Indiana
The Reith Village is an ecological field station for undergraduate environmental
study for the Merry Lea Environmental Learning Center of Goshen College
located south of Wolf Lake, Indiana. The Village includes two buildings for student
housing and a third structure that serves as a learning center and environmental

*Interview with Paul Stoller, Atelier Ten, March 2008.