Page 80 - Green Building Through Integrated Design

INTEGRATED DESIGN IN PRACTICE—AN ARCHITECT’S EXPERIENCE 57

Sculpture Building and Gallery at Yale University. Kieran describes how they went
about creating an integrated design process.*

We didn’t have the time to mess around with [a more conventional approach].
These were half-day meetings and everybody sat in the room. What transpired
was pretty remarkable because the team started to comment on each other’s work.
We had some of our best criticism about mechanical systems from our structural
engineer for instance. It became a real broad vetting process. Ideas bubbled up to
the surface and were more thoroughly integrated as a result of having everyone in
the room.

For example, the building has a displacement ventilation system. It’s the first one
Yale has done. It’s completely married to the structure of the building. All of the
ventilation cabinets, the outlets for this very low-velocity ventilation are built
around all of the structural columns. We did that because for the long-term flexi-
bility of the building, the structure is not going anywhere and the displacement
ventilation system needs to become a fixture in the building. We didn’t want to
compromise the flexibility of the building from the owner’s perspective; it’s basi-
cally a loft building.
The same circumstance repeated itself in hundreds of details throughout the building.
It was basically unifying and integrating rather than dividing and segregating. We
didn’t even try to get to Platinum. The owner only authorized Silver. They didn’t
authorize paying for anything that could get us anywhere above Silver. By all of us
working together and integrating our efforts, we got to Platinum without expending a
nickel more than the owner thought they would spend to get to Silver. We think it
was really a by-product of all of those integrated systems in the end. It didn’t cost
anymore; it was just more intelligent design.

What lessons can we learn from this project? First of all, recall from Chap. 1 that
there was incredible time pressure; only 21 months from start to finish. Second, there
was a strong bias toward creating a high-performance design. Third, the team was
really first-rate. Fourth, the architect was determined to create a process for truly inte-
grated design and gave each specialty the opportunity, even the mandate, to partici-
pate fully, even in areas where they didn’t have particular expertise. With sufficient
team building and the support of the team leader, seasoned building team profes-
sionals are able to help each other toward more efficient and sustainable design solu-
tions. No one can work completely independently or with only minor coordination
(aimed mostly at avoiding obvious conflicts) and create a truly integrated design.
Instead, there has to be a strong overriding vision and clear sense that everyone’s con-
tribution may have value.
Looking at the final result, Kieran commented that his experience with an earlier
LEED Platinum project had led him to believe that one always had to add systems

*Interview with Stephen Kieran, March 2008.