Page 73 - Green Building Through Integrated Design

50 THE PRACTICE OF INTEGRATED DESIGN

The Role of BHAGs

I’m especially fond of the term “BHAG,” or Big, Hairy, Audacious Goal, a “technical”
term from the world of management consulting that describes one essential activity
that must occur to create high-performance buildings: establishing “stretch” goals for
the design team. We all know from watching children over time that the more that’s
demanded, the better the child responds (up to a point, of course). The late-1980s
movie Stand and Deliver depicted a group of kids in Los Angeles who became
national whizzes in calculus because a determined teacher demanded that they “stand
and deliver” the absolute best of which they were capable. Why can’t we do just as
well with highly educated, highly motivated architects and engineers? Is it because we
(or the clients) don’t challenge them enough? Is it because we accept the mediocrity
of the process as the natural order of things?
Portland, Oregon architect Phil Beyl describes how establishing stretch goals with
a sophisticated developer client resulted in a large LEED Platinum building coming
out of what could have been a very ordinary medical “build to suit” project.*

We established a LEED Platinum benchmark for the [Oregon Health & Science
University’s] Center for Health and Healing [Fig. 3.3] before we started doing much
design work on the project. That was done for a couple of reasons. One, the project
was the first in an emerging neighborhood where the city has great aspirations for it
to be a model for the rest of the world for sustainability. So the city had specific inter-
ests in pushing the envelope there, as did the client [OHSU]. It was their first build-
ing for a new market segment. They also wanted to demonstrate to the city, the state,
and the country that sustainability was very high on their agenda for this and all of
their [future] facilities. So this first project at the South Waterfront area provided a
great chance to demonstrate that commitment.
Second, this was a unique building that had never been done before in the world, to
our knowledge. Having those two factors setting the benchmark for performance
very, very high really forced the entire team to work in a highly integrated fashion
from the very early stages of design. The building orientation, for example, had a
huge impact on our capacity to control the cooling loads. If we had to wait and find
out down the road [of the design process] how different mechanical systems needed
to be integrated into the building and where they needed to be placed, we would have
never been able to accommodate them.

I suppose that it’s hard to say that there’s a better project that I could reference that
utilized truly an integrated design process from the very early stages. You always
need to integrate the design of all of those disciplines in executing a project, but
usually you know enough about basic needs that you can go a ways down the road
with the architecture of the building before you need to say, “Exactly how big does
that fan need to be? Where does it go?” Because you’ve made some fundamental

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