Su+re : Sustainable + Resilient Design Systems 9781119379652, 9781119379515

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Guest-edited by JOHN NASTASI, ED MAY AND CLARKE SNELL

01 | Vol 88 | 2018

SU+RE: Sustainable + Resilient Design Systems

SU+RE: Sustainable + Resilient Design Systems

Guest-edited by JOHN NASTASI, ED MAY AND CLARKE SNELL

ARCHITECTURAL DESIGN January/February 2018 Profile No 251

SU+RE: Sustainable + Resilient Design Systems

01/2018

Introduction About the Guest-Editors

Climate Change is the New Gravity

John Nastasi, Ed May and Clarke Snell

Clarke Snell 06 05

Unsustainability and the Architecture of Efficiency Graham S Wright 16

Resilient Design ‘Systems Thinking’ as a Response to Climate Change

Global Responses to Local Conditions

Claire Weisz

Sustainability and Resilience are Nowhere the Same

24

Alexandros Washburn

ZGF Architects, Innovation Center, Rocky Mountain Institute, Basalt, Colorado, 2015

32

‘Global Warming is Real’ Superstorm Sandy, Stevens and the SU+RE House John Nastasi

40

High-Performance Enclosures

Practical Resilience

Designing for Comfort, Durability and Sustainability

Low-Tech Plug-andPlay Innovation in the SU+RE House Clarke Snell

Ken Levenson

56

48

SU+RE Power Energy Independence and the Sustainable Resilient Sun

Barry Price Architecture, Cabin 3000, New York State, 2016

Modelling to Drive Design

Clarke Snell and Alex Carpenter 64

Honing the SU+RE House through Performance Simulations Ed May 72

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ISSN 0003-8504 ISBN 978 1119 379515

Guest-edited by John Nastasi, Ed May and Clarke Snell

Defining Environments Understanding Architectural Performance through Modelling, Simulation and Visualisation

BIG, Villa GUG, Aalborg, Denmark, due for completion 2018

Brady Peters 82

Data Buildings Sensor Feedback in Sustainable Design Workflows Terri Peters

Building Physics, Design, and the Collaborative Build

92

Climate Change and the Bottom Line

Sustainability and Resilience in Architectural Education Karin Stieldorf 102

Delivering Sustainable Buildings at Market Rate Adam Cohen and Clarke Snell 110

Energy and Design Criticism

Studio Gang, Solar Carve Tower, New York, due for completion 2019

Is It Time for a New Measure of Beauty? Bronwyn Barry 116

Counterpoint Aim High Pressing for a Radical and Global Approach to Sustainable Design

The Design of Public Policy

Craig Robertson 128

Sustainability and Resilience at the City Scale

Contributors

Ann Holtzman

134 122

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ARCHITECTURAL DESIGN Front and back cover: Stevens Institute of Technology, SU+RE House, Solar Decathlon, Irvine, California, 2015. Photography by Juan Paolo Alicante Inside front cover: DRAW Brooklyn (Alexandros Washburn and Jason Beury), Red Hook Island, Brooklyn, New York, 2016. © Alexandros Washburn

01/2018

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January/February

Profile No.

2018

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ABOUT THE

GUEST–EDITORS JOHN NASTASI, ED MAY AND CLARKE SNELL

Guest-Editors John Nastasi, Ed May and Clarke Snell collaborated as faculty leaders on the Hoboken, New Jersey-based Stevens Institute of Technology’s winning entry for the 2015 Solar Decathlon: the SU+RE House. John Nastasi has led three entries (2011, 2013 and 2015) into the US Department of Energy’s Solar Decathlon as part of his work at Stevens Institute, with Ed May joining the 2011 and 2015 teams. Clarke Snell was part of the 2013 University of North Carolina Solar Decathlon team and joined the Stevens leadership group for the 2015 cycle. This 2 focuses on some of the issues and ideas at the heart of this research work, and in particular the intersection of sustainability and resiliency within a context of climate change. Student design-build research projects such as the Solar Decathlon are unique opportunities for students to engage with complex design problems while also learning valuable collaborative and communications skills. It is becoming crucial to cultivate these skills in students as the design community begins to wrestle with the realities of building in an ever-more extreme environment. The articles in the issue take an in-depth focus not only on the SU+RE House, but also on the larger questions of how designers must adapt to the demands of practice within this new context. John Nastasi is both an architect and a design educator. As principal of his own design practice in Hoboken, New Jersey, he has built a diverse body of work that is distinguished by a consistency of process, a rigorous detailed investigation of real and theoretical issues, and a high level of craftsmanship that accompanies the art of making. His work has received the prestigious Young Architects Award from the Architectural League of New York. He is an alumnus of Harvard’s Graduate School of Design (GSD), and a recipient of the university’s Rice Prize in Architecture and Engineering. He has also held the position of Director of the Materials and Fabrication Lab at Harvard GSD. In 2004 he founded the Graduate Program in Product-Architecture at Stevens Institute of Technology. Ed May is a partner with the design and consulting firm BLDGtyp based in Brooklyn. He is a licensed architect and an expert in the use of energy modelling to drive design. He received a Bachelor’s of Fine Arts from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst in 2001, and a Master’s of Architecture from Parsons The New School in New York City in 2009, where he was previously an Adjunct Professor. He was also an Industry Professor at Stevens Institute where he was the Faculty Project Manager for the SU+RE House Solar Decathlon entry. He currently teaches with the Passive House Academy (PHA) and the North American Passive House Network (NAPHN), and has earned the Certified Passive House Consultant designation from both the Passive House Institute (PHI) in Germany and the Passive House Institute of the US (PHIUS). Clarke Snell’s professional focus is the development and application of sustainable and resilient building systems towards a zero-resource architecture. Specifically, he applies research into low-tech, high-performance materials, assemblies and systems to the design and construction of small buildings and their microclimates with the goal of repeatable and quantifiable reductions in project carbon footprint. He holds a Master’s of Architecture from the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, and has experience in construction as a builder, and in design as the principal of his own residential design and consulting firm. He has written two books and numerous articles on alternatives to currently standard construction methodologies. He is currently an Industry Associate Professor on the Design Faculty at Stevens Institute where he was the Faculty Construction Manager on the SU+RE House project. 1

Text © 2018 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Images: (t) © John Nastasi; (c) © BLDGtyp, LLC; (b) © Clarke Snell

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Climate Change is the New Gravity 6

Sustainability and Resilience as Architectural Design Constraints

Beijing’s skyline in smog, 2017 An increase in carbon emissions is initially causing a global increase in temperature that in turn will trigger other climatic changes. Many of these predicted outcomes, including increased polar ice melts and more frequent and intense storms such as Hurricane Sandy, are already being observed.

INTRODUCTION CLARKE SNELL

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In October 2012, Superstorm Sandy, the largest Atlantic hurricane on record, pummelled the East Coast of the United States. In New Jersey alone, Sandy caused US$30 billion in damages, killed 39 people and left 2.7 million homes and businesses without power, 350,000 of those needing repair or reconstruction.1 The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) responded with regulations that mandated construction above the floodplain. This was a sensible technical solution, but disastrous from an architectural and social standpoint in that it would lift many buildings well above street level, disrupting longstanding existing neighbourhoods with entrenched and vibrant living patterns. A small group of architecture and engineering students led by faculty from Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, New Jersey, countered with the SU+RE House, a new paradigm for coastal housing and the winning entry in the US Department of Energy’s 2015 Solar Decathlon competition. Hoboken sits on the Hudson River across from Manhattan, and in 2012 Sandy had flooded the city. Just months later Ecohabit, Stevens’ entry in the 2013 Solar Decathlon, was being built by students in a parking lot adjacent to the Hudson as a storm threatened to flood the river again. As an emergency measure, the building had to be craned out of the danger zone. When Stevens decided to enter the 2015 Decathlon and utilise the same parking lot for construction of the SU+RE House, it seemed clear that the design challenge had to be an intelligent, replicable response to Sandy. The result was the development of a building system that allows for construction in the floodplain, thereby reclaiming a densely populated site condition currently being lost worldwide to more frequent and severe flooding. Through conscious envelope design, the house also requires only a fraction of the energy to run compared to its conventional counterparts, its roof-mounted photovoltaic system producing considerably more power than the building requires. During a storm-induced grid failure, the system ‘islands’ itself to continue producing power, becoming an oasis of energy to supply standby electricity to the neighbourhood. The SU+RE House is a good touchstone for this issue of 2 because it is a very straightforward example of a specific act of design that in order to succeed needed to be generally applicable to a problem of ecological scale. This is the essence of sustainable and resilient design. A Complex Problem with a Simple Solution Superstorm Sandy is part of a clear trend, as over the past 50 years extreme weather events are definitely on the rise. According to the Emergency Events Database, in 1960 there were fewer than 50 natural disasters worldwide, while in 2014 there were 400.2 In the Atlantic, massive storms seem to be becoming more commonplace, with Katrina in 2005 and Sandy in 2012. In 2017, for the first time three hurricanes in a season (Irma, Jose and Maria) had an accumulated cyclone energy (ACE) over 40, while Harvey set flooding records in Texas. We do not have enough data to determine a generalised cause for these specific weather events, but we can say confidently that from a design standpoint the particular ‘problem of ecological scale’ for extreme weather is climate change. Human-induced climate change is very real, ravenous, and happening faster than anyone initially predicted. Though projecting the intricacies of its course is a complex modelling exercise, the causes are mechanistic and well understood. We are introducing materials into the air (collectively called greenhouse gases) that are intensifying the mechanism through which solar heat is trapped by our atmosphere, thereby altering the process responsible for creating the delicate temperature range that has engendered and supported life on earth for the last 3.5 billion years. The main culprit is carbon dioxide produced from the combustion of fossil fuels. The initial result is a general warming trend, the infamous ‘global warming’, which has already begun to trigger a domino effect of changes to other environmental variables such as global ocean and air currents, carbon sinks and precipitation patterns, to name a few. As a result we are moving into uncharted climatic waters. Stevens Institute of Technology, SU+RE House, Hoboken, New Jersey, 2015 As a counter argument to the FEMA regulations, the SU+RE House maintains the existing neighbourhood texture while providing energy independence and a community resource in the wake of future storms. As a result, a catastrophic event is taken as an opportunity to simply design a better building system.

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Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) mandated renovation, Bayhead, New Jersey, 2014 FEMA regulations made in response to Superstorm Sandy required that all rebuilding and new construction be set above the base flood elevation. However, this straightforward technical solution does not take into consideration livability and the existing social fabric.

Predicted results that will drastically affect human society are already being observed. Global ice-melts leading to sea-level rise will threaten the coastal communities where a majority of the most populated human cities are situated. Extreme weather, including more frequent and furious storms, droughts and floods as well as general warming, will cause species migrations and degrade agriculture in ways that will deeply impact human development all over the world. Though no one knows the exact trajectory, generally accepted projections conclude that there will come a point when a feedback loop will be triggered, after which our actions will not be able to affect the outcome.3 Remember, this is not the plot of a dystopian Hollywood blockbuster. These conclusions are derived from observation, study and modelling, all tested and refined through the scientific method to the point where there is almost unanimous agreement on the veracity of the core conclusions from climate scientists worldwide.4 Facts are slippery, but the reality of human-induced climate change is about as factual as facts get. The summary is that it is happening, it is serious, and we have to deal with it collectively and rapidly. The good news is that climate change is a complex problem with a very simple solution: stop burning fossil fuels. We are after all the big-brained mammals that learned to fly, tamed the atom and invented chocolate. This should be an easy one. Of course our industrial society is built on fossil fuels so we cannot just turn off the gas and keep on trucking. We need some time to rethink and retool, but we must not hesitate. Projections based on the same science that uncovered the problem give us good benchmarks to work with in terms of how much carbon we can still afford to emit and over what period of time.5 Such theorising is admittedly inexact. Outputs vary and are constantly under revision. Still, even a conservative analysis points to the need for swift and profound reductions in carbon emissions, so much so that the synopsis ‘as much as possible as quickly as possible’ is almost exactly accurate. The Mandate for Quantitative Sustainable and Resilient Design Systems This is where architects and building engineers enter the picture. Buildings are a big part of the equation with their operation alone making up 30 to 40 per cent of industrial society’s worldwide carbon footprint (see Graham S Wright’s article on pp 16–23 of this issue). And this brings us into familiar territory: the discussion of the complex intersection between the built and natural environments. What should we call it in this case? Definitely our subject falls under the broader mantle of sustainable design, but if you have been to a conference on that topic, chances are you did not come away with a clear definition of what it is or how to do it. Sustainability is often a vague concept deployed as everything from a moral argument to an emotional plea to a marketing strategy. In fact sustainability is easily defined. It is the process of maintaining something at a given level. If we can agree that in this case the thing is life on earth and the level is industrial human society, then at least for now sustainability becomes quantifiable and the metric is carbon. Design on the other hand is simply to devise for a purpose. It does not seem controversial that we need to design such that advanced industrial society can continue. Clarified with these simple definitions, sustainable design becomes a mandate, and a project’s success or failure can be quantified through carbon emissions. 9

Gehry Partners, Marques de Riscal Hotel, Elciego, Spain, 2006 Humans have become so adept at dealing with gravity as a design constraint that we are now often just riffing with structural parlour tricks and formal gags. It is time for a new challenge.

And this is where many architects start to chafe because they interpret this discussion as constraining to freedom of expression. But in fact as designers we know that it is the constraints that generate the beauty. If we were not small animals glued to the ground, what would be the interest in building up and out and over? Would there be Gothic sanctuaries built of stone but made of light? Or the frantic, graceful race to scrape the sky of the 20th-century skyscraper? Or the contemporary penchant for massive cantilevers, voids and structurally counterintuitive forms riffing again and again on the groove: ‘I’ll bet you didn’t think this could stand up’? The challenge of gravity has not mandated limits but created opportunities. It has generated beauty. Climate change must become the new gravity. We simply have to accept that climate change is the new normative baseline design constraint for the built environment. As with the last 5,000-plus years of gravity-focused architectural design, our grappling with climate change will create beauty, but there is a difference. Gravity as a design constraint guides compliance through immediate feedback. Climate change will not baby us. We have to define its parameters for design and create our own short-term feedback inputs. Carbon as the metric of that feedback will not limit our expression any more than gravity. The only thing that has really changed are the stakes. But sustainability is not enough. As the climate changes, so does the site. Solar intensity, temperature, wind speed, drought, flood and sea level are just some of the site-specific variables that are changing. As we work to stem the cause, we therefore have to react to the effects. To respond, a design process is required that seeks to integrate resiliency by building-in the capacity to absorb the impacts of these disruptive events and adapt over time to further changes while simultaneously being part of the solution to the problem itself. To build sustainably in a world with a changing climate, we must now integrate resiliency.

Laboratory for Innovative Housing, Passichanical wall system, University of North Carolina at Charlotte, North Carolina, 2013 Carbon reduction as a design constraint has informed new architectural creativity focused less on the facade and more on the volume of the building envelope. Here, by utilising four distinct concrete mixes optimised for specific thermal characteristics, a conventional precast concrete assembly is re-envisioned as a low-energy heat storage and dissipation machine.

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Architype, The Enterprise Centre, University of East Anglia, Norwich, UK, 2015 Using a variety of simulation tools, the Enterprise Centre was designed as a low-energy building for both current and projected future climatic conditions on site. The technology to create a very low-carbon built environment that adapts to a changing climate is already here and being implemented. The challenge is scale. To get the needed results, we all have to do it.

Sustainability is not enough. As the climate changes, so does the site. Solar intensity, temperature, wind speed, drought, flood and sea level are just some of the site-specific variables that are changing. 11

HD Architekten, RHW 2 Raiffeisen Bank Tower, Vienna, 2013 The form and materiality of ubiquitous neomodern office buildings typically come with a high carbon price tag due to building envelopes that require profligate operational energy use to maintain interior comfort. This does not have to be the case: the RHW 2 tower meets the German Passivhaus standard, one of the most rigorous building energy standards in the world.

This issue of 3 is less about the ‘what’ and more about the ‘how’ of this new synergy of sustainable and resilient design forged by climate change. Peter Ruge Architekten, Passive House Bruck, Changxing, China, 2014 Quantifiable sustainability in architecture is a collective, worldwide endeavour. This apartment block in China was also built to meet the German Passivhaus standard.

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Hemsworth, BC Passive House Factory, Pemberton, British Colombia, 2014 This low-energy factory was built using the components it produces for use in the construction of low-energy buildings, creating a feedback loop of carbon reduction.

The Nuts and Bolts: Energy Demand, Production and the Changing Site This issue of 2 is less about the ‘what’ and more about the ‘how’ of this new synergy of sustainable and resilient design forged by climate change. Its direct genesis is the SU+RE House, a project the Guest-Editors undertook together as architecture faculty at Stevens Institute of Technology. Stevens has been immersed for three centuries in the science and engineering of its local climate, pioneering steam-ferry technology and transportation in the 1700s, developing competitive yacht design and racing (the New York Yacht Club and America’s Cup) in the 1800s, spearheading military warship prototyping and design during the First and Second World Wars, inventing mechanical wave dynamics modelling in the post-war 20th century, and currently researching real-time monitoring and predictive computational modelling of the physics of the coastal ocean in the 21st century. When Superstorm Sandy hit Hoboken in 2012, it was in the context of this long history of local climate-driven research/engineering/design/build iterative loops that Stevens decided to respond with the SU+RE House. The project serves as an appropriate poster-child for this issue because it delivers sustainability through measurable carbon reduction, and resilience through a replicable design system. The issue outlines a practical strategy for this systems approach to sustainable and resilient design. In his article (pp 16–23), Graham S Wright sets the sustainability stage with a more detailed examination of fossil fuels as a context for climate change, and introduces the argument that the sensible response for building designers is to switch focus to operational load reduction. Ken Levenson (pp 48–55) lays out the nuts and bolts of this load-reduction strategy through a primer on passive building design basics, while Bronwyn Barry (pp 116–21) grapples with mainstream architecture’s reluctance to embrace the low-energy envelope as a metric of beauty. Adam Cohen (pp 110–15) outlines a practical approach to delivering low-energy buildings at market rates through increasing the efficiency of the architectural delivery process. Terri Peters (pp 92–101) investigates how post-occupancy feedback provided through integrated building sensoring can improve performance and drive an iterative design process that leads to more sustainable and resilient buildings, using case studies from the international practices Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM), FXFOWLE and 3XN. To offer a more in-depth case study, the Guest-Editors focus on the SU+RE House by first setting it in an environmental, social and educational context (pp 40–7), then discussing its practical approach to sustainability and resilience as a combination of hybridising existing technologies and a plug-and-play approach to innovation (pp 56–63 and 64–71). At the core is a quantitative feedback loop of multiplatform modelling generating real-time design iteration (pp 72–81). In related articles, Karin Stieldorf (pp 102–9) expands on the educational context while Brady Peters (pp 82–91) considers the architectural representation of building performance simulation with examples from the work of Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG) and BuroHappold. 13

Seoul Metropolitan Government, Cheonggyecheon River Restoration Project, Seoul, South Korea, 2005 This river in downtown Seoul had been completely covered by an elevated freeway before being restored to a 6-kilometre (3.7-mile) long greenway that provides water retention for flood protection, a biodiverse microclimate, and a wonderful park for 64,000 daily visitors. The project has led to documented reductions in the local heat island effect and small particulate air pollution while increasing resident fish, mammal, insect and plant species and nearby property values.

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In the context of life on earth, humans are a tiny blip, almost an afterthought. Yet in our short collective life we have skyrocketed to the top of the food chain by developing an impressive skill set for amassing and applying knowledge.

The fact that climate change demands a broader concept of project scope is also examined. Alexandros Washburn (pp 32–9) introduces city-scale resilient design as an equation-defining risk, and makes the argument through case studies that increased risks brought on by climate change can actually generate great rewards through thoughtful action. Illustrating the work of her practice WXY architecture + urban design, Claire Weisz (pp 24–31) describes the challenge of large-scale resilient design – something she calls ‘the practice of designing environments for climate change’ – as a potential for growth in that it requires an evolution from design thinking to systems thinking and a consequent focus on interconnection. Using the example of a partnership between OMA and the City of Hoboken, Ann Holtzman (pp 122–7) discusses how sustainable and resilient design must be supported through policy if change at the scale of the city is to be possible. Architects as the Executive Directors of Creative World-Saving In the context of life on earth, humans are a tiny blip, almost an afterthought. Yet in our short collective life we have skyrocketed to the top of the food chain by developing an impressive skill set for amassing and applying knowledge. Unfortunately our wizardry at innovation far outstrips our ability to extrapolate the effects of long-term application. As a result, we have studied, calculated, invented, designed, driven, flown, fought and built our way into a corner. Imagine human industrial society riding in a brakeless bus careering down a gravel road towards an enormous, growing gorge. Clearly the only option is to jump all the way across. All partial efforts, no matter how profitable or graceful, will result in the same fiery wreckage on the canyon floor. We can measure the gorge and study its rate and profile of change to plan the technology of our jump. This is the easy part. The difficulty lies in the fact that really for the first time we all have to agree and act together. For architects and engineers, that agreement entails accepting climate change as the normative design constraint for the contemporary built environment. Sustainable and resilient design is not a moral mandate. It is simply a practical imperative if the goal is to continue designing at all. Aesthetic whining and formal gnashing of teeth aside, the fact is that good architecture has never worried about choosing design constraints, but instead focused on responding to them. Seen through this lens, climate change is an exciting context within which to design. It turns out that the new job description for our chosen creative career is to save the world as we know it. All that is required is to see existential design constraints as opportunities. Luckily we have a proven history of doing just that. 1

Stevens Institute of Technology, SU+RE House, Solar Decathlon, Irvine, California, 2015 The Guest-Editors working to install the SU+RE House on the Solar Decathlon exhibition site. The house was initially constructed and tested on the Stevens campus in Hoboken, then shipped cross-country and reassembled for the competition in Irvine. Its permanent home is in the grounds of the Liberty Science Center in Jersey City, New Jersey.

Notes 1. Jarrett Renshaw and MaryAnn Spoto, ‘Christie Administration: Cost of Hurricane Sandy's Damage to N.J. Nearly $30B’, The Star-Ledger, 23 November 2012: www.nj.com/politics/ index.ssf/2012/11/ christie_administration_ cost_o.html. 2. Centre for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters (CRED), ‘Emergency Events Database’: www.emdat. be/emdat_db/. 3. The body of scientific knowledge quoted here is huge. A very good singlesource summary of the salient points is Rajendra K Pachauri and Leo A Meyer (eds), Climate Change 2014 Synthesis Report, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (Geneva), 2014. 4. John Cook et al, ‘Quantifying the Consensus on Anthropogenic Global Warming in the Scientific Literature’, Environmental Research Letters, 8 (2), 2013, pp 1–7. 5. Pachauri and Meyer, op cit, pp 58–63. Text © 2018 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Images: pp 6–7 © Kevin Frayer/ Stringer/Getty Images; p 8 © Stevens Institute of Technology, SU+RE House Team; p 9 © Danbro Distributors; p 10(t) © Denis Doyle/Getty Images; p 10(b) © Clarke Snell; p 11(t) © BDP/Nick Caville; p 11(b) © Dennis Gilbert; p 12(t) © Lionel Derimais/Alamy Stock Photo; p 12(b) © Jan Siefke; p 13 © Ema Peter; p 14 © Michael Sotnikov (http://flickr.com/stari4ek); p 15 © Photography by Juan Paolo Alicante

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Graham S Wright

ZGF Architects, Innovation Center, Rocky Mountain Institute, Basalt, Colorado, 2015 View of the south side. The building is a net-energy producer and will ‘pay back’ its embodied CO2 emissions over time. Due to the cold yet sunny winter climate, the design is more solar-oriented than the Oregon and Maine examples also illustrated here.

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Unsustainability and the Architecture of Efficiency

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It is common knowledge that if we continue our current dependence on fossil fuels, we are headed for global economic, environmental and societal disaster. With around a third of the world’s primary energy consumed in the operation of commercial and residential buildings, architecture has a major role to play in averting this. After setting out the dangers of the status quo, Graham S Wright – a building scientist and Chair of the US Passive House Institute’s Technical Committee – explains how passive building techniques can help us to turn away from fossil fuels without compromising comfort or functionality.

European Environment Agency, Correlation of energy consumption and GDP per person, July 2016 Producing more goods and services generally requires using more energy. Data source: World Bank world development indicators.

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Sustainability as a concept is simple and non-political. Everyone has something they think is worth sustaining. Children’s lives, hot showers, cold beer, bands representing a million musical styles, food safety regulations, literacy, wildlife, swimmable beaches. Regardless of whether one is more concerned about human achievements or the natural world, climate change is putting whatever you want to sustain in crisis. Really, then, the topic of interest is not sustainability, but unsustainability. What is the current situation, how did we get here, and what can architects do about it? Our Addiction to Energy We know that the heart of what is not sustainable are the carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions resulting from our fossil fuel dependence. If the equation is so simple and the consequences so great, then what is the big problem with finding a solution? The fact is that fossil fuels are a central source of our riches. Though the ‘technology’ or ‘machine power’ of the Industrial Revolution tend to get the credit, this mechanisation would not have amounted to much economically without the unlocking of the vast stores of fossil fuel to run those machines. The bootstrap effect of using fuel-powered machines to drill and dig for more fuel brought about a revolution that created vast wealth and economic opportunity. From the beginning of the Industrial Age early in the 19th century through to today, economic activity has been closely related to energy use.1 Over 80 per cent of that energy comes from fossil fuels (coal, oil and natural gas),2 so quitting fossil fuels ‘cold turkey’ would essentially be synonymous with the end of prosperity. That is the big problem. Be that as it may, it appears we have no choice. The overwhelming and oft-repeated evidence indicates that the planet is warming, and that the recent warming is clearly a result of our CO2 gas emissions. Indeed, the warming up to this point might have been even worse had we not been kicking up so much dust (technically, sulphate aerosols) at the same time. The combination of CO2 and aerosols explains the observed warming well, while natural variability (such as sun brightness, earth orbital changes or volcanic activity) does not.3

Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Climate Change Synthesis Report, 2014 Panel (a) shows five reasons for concern. Panel (b) links temperature changes to cumulative CO2 emissions, in gigatonnes CO2 (GtCO2) since 1870. Panel (c) shows the relationship between the cumulative CO2 emissions (in GtCO2) of the scenario categories and their associated change in annual greenhouse gas emissions by 2050, expressed in percentage change (in per cent GtCO2-equivalent per year) relative to 2010.

Level of additional risk due to climate change Very high High Moderate Undetectable

The long-term results of this warming are complex to predict, but clear effects are already being observed and measured. To simplify a lot of data and analysis, science has set a cap on how much greenhouse gas we can emit before creating a feedback loop that would spiral out of any hope of our control. According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), we are nearing that cap, and therefore must reduce our rate of emissions rapidly or face ‘high to very high risk of severe, widespread and irreversible impacts globally’.4 If drastic reductions in our CO2 emissions are not achieved, these risks include ‘substantial species extinction, global and regional food insecurity, consequential constraints on common human activities and limited potential for adaptation in some cases’.5 The cap is most often expressed as a conversion from emissions to degrees in global temperature rise, with a 2°C (3.6°F) increase in comparison to the period between 1861 and 1880 seen as the maximum allowable. Based on this calculus, from 1870 onwards, humans have a 2,900 billion tonne (Gt) emissions ‘budget’ moving forward (it is the total amount emitted that matters, not the rate over a particular time frame). We had already produced 1,900 Gt of CO2, or 65 per cent of that total, by 2011.6 At the current world population of 7.5 billion, the per-capita remaining emissions budget is in the range of 87 to 167 tonnes per person. The current per-capita ‘burn rate’ is about 5 metric tonnes, with Europe at 6.8 and North America at 16 metric tonnes.7 Because emissions anywhere affect the climate everywhere, it seems reasonable to regard the atmosphere as a commons and therefore to posit a human right to a fair share of its capacity to absorb these emissions. At least this makes the maths simple and we can calculate that the world would burn through the remaining emissions budget in about 17 to 33 years at current rates and population, with the average North American using up ‘their share’ in just 6 to 10 years.

Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Contributions to observed surface temperature change, 1951–2010 The figure makes the point that the ‘combined anthropogenic forcings’ of our human activity account for the observed post-1950 warming. These consist of greenhouse gases (sulphate aerosols produced as industrial byproducts), and human-induced changes in land surface properties. The uncertainty (the error bars) of these two contributions are large, but in combination the error bar is tight. The contribution from the combined anthropogenic forcings can thus be estimated with less uncertainty than the contributions from greenhouse gases and other anthropogenic forcings separately, because these two contributions partially compensate.

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The Future of Efficiency Though the exact numbers can be debated, the point is that climate science is positing a future without fossil fuels. Either we will retool our industrial society to be fuelled by another energy source or we will change the climate into something that will not support the survival of industrial society. If that is not enough of an argument, we are simply running out of gas. There are two depletion problems with fossil fuels. The total resource is ultimately finite, but it is not like a tank running dry. There is a ‘resource pyramid’ with progressively larger quantities of lower-grade and more deeply buried material. This means that from here on out, every unit of net energy obtained by extracting these raw materials requires progressively more capital investment and yields less energy profit (‘below-ground’ problems) while producing more local pollution and affecting ever larger areas of the environment, galvanising local opposition (‘above-ground’ problems). At some point it must be acknowledged that fossil fuels cannot work the economic magic they used to. To recap, our world income and production of goods and services is closely tied to energy, and that energy is 80 per cent fossil fuel. Presently, we face either the playing out of those resources in economic terms or the need to leave them in the ground to avoid worldwide climate devastation. Logically it would follow that the result will be the crushing of our global economy, both in terms of the continued growth we have become accustomed to, and continuing at anything like the current level of activity. This throws into question the popular myth of inexorable progress towards some ‘starfaring’ future. It is perhaps not surprising that people do not want to face such an ominous prospect. One popular response is to deny climate science by asserting that there must be some kind of mistake or conspiracy. Another is to search for escape hatches. One of these is known as ‘decoupling’. There is some evidence that economies have become less energy intensive over time, giving rise to the hope that this could continue and allow sustained economic growth in the face of declining energy input. However, closer scrutiny has found that this too is not a bottomless well.8 What is more, indications are that even replacing fossil fuels with renewables is not a viable option for maintaining current levels of consumption.9 It seems we must instead find solutions that involve reductions in our collective energy use. In short, we need to become more efficient. Sustainable Architecture: The Passive Mandate So what does this have to do with architecture? The answer is that buildings use a lot of energy. Over 30 per cent of our global primary energy (39 per cent in the US) is used in the operation of commercial and residential buildings.10 Buildings use energy throughout their life cycle. The energy expended to construct (production of materials, installation, and so on) and ultimately demolish a building is called ‘embodied energy’, while that used to run the building during its useful life (space heating/cooling, hot water, plug loads) is ‘operational energy’. A lot of study has gone into the question of how these two relate for our collective building stock. The results are conclusive that operational energy use is much higher, some studies estimating by as much as a factor of 10.11 Therefore, we need to focus much more on the energy used to run rather than make buildings.

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US Environmental Protection Agency, Energy–use intensity data, 2012 For offices, hotels and retail stores, the annual source energy used is about 150 to 200 thousand British thermal units per square foot of floor area (kBtu/ft2). The embodied energy of construction is about 1000 kBtu/ft2, thus the operating energy exceeds the embodied within just a few years.

Cumulative (lifecycle) building energy use – embodied versus operating, 1996 Building energy can be separated into three parts: initial embodied, recurring embodied, and operating. The graph shows these components of energy use during the 50-year life cycle of a typical office building with underground parking, averaged over wood, steel and concrete structures in Vancouver and Toronto. (Adapted from Table 6 in Raymond J Cole and Paul C Kernan, ‘Life-Cycle Energy Use in Office Buildings’, Building and Environment, 31 (4), July 1996, p 316.)

The good news is that our buildings were never really designed to be energy efficient, so there is massive room for improvement. Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Estimated US energy consumption flow diagram, 2016 The diagram illustrates the current dominance of fossil fuels as primary energy sources, and corroborates the International Energy Agency’s Key World Energy Statistics regarding the large fraction of energy use attributable to residential and commercial buildings.

The good news is that our buildings were never really designed to be energy efficient, so there is massive room for improvement. A case in point is that in the thousands of years of collective architectural history, the concept of insulation really only began to take hold in the last 100 years. Among the various operational energy end-uses in buildings, space conditioning is still the biggest savings opportunity in most climates, and the one most under control of the building designer because it is dependent primarily on the building envelope. In fact, drastically reducing space conditioning loads is a fairly straightforward process involving mundane topics such as unbroken insulation layers and air barriers, considering fenestration and heating, ventilation and air conditioning (HVAC) as part of the same system, and coupling building shape and siting to local site and climate conditions. Lowering space-conditioning loads requires a focus on building elements that do their jobs without energy inputs; in other words, passively as opposed to mechanically, hence the term ‘passive building’.

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The climate-driven mandate to focus on passive building features should be a boon to architects because the building envelope, that volume between the ‘outside’ and the ‘inside’, is their realm. However, architects often object that this approach represents too big a design constraint. This response perhaps reflects a confusion between ‘passive solar’ and ‘passive building’ design. Passive solar was indeed a pointedly formal architectural response to saving energy, taking back responsibility for heating from mechanical engineers and emphasising a lot of solar gain with thermal mass to manage it. Passive building is a related but quite different development. First called ‘micro-load passive’, then ‘superinsulation’, and now ‘passive house’, this approach shifted emphasis from managing heat gains to preventing heat losses, thus decoupling the building from a rigid requirement for solar exposure. Passive building offers very high energy performance with more architectural freedom. More to the point, by applying passive techniques we can design buildings that have almost no space-conditioning loads, as proven through the production of millions of square feet of passive buildings of all types in a variety of climate zones throughout the world. This level of load reduction allows us to reconceive how we generate energy for a building’s needs. In fact a new concept has arisen that perhaps buildings should take responsibility for themselves by producing their own operational energy and enough surplus to make up for all the carbon emissions associated with their life cycles, in other words their embodied energy. One way this can work is by capitalising on the fact that low energy-load buildings make on-site renewable production more physically and financially feasible. These on-site systems can now be designed to generate more power than the building requires.

Ankrom Moisan Architects and REACH Community Development, The Orchards at Orenco, Hillsboro, Oregon, 2015 This 57-unit affordable housing project is PHIUS+ certified (US Passive House Institute) and was the largest multifamily passive house in the States at the time. Monitoring confirms high performance, matching the energy design with a site energy-use intensity of 22 kBtu/ft2 yr. Not stereotypical of 1970s ‘wedge of cheese’ passive solar building with a lot of south-facing glass and mass walls, the building is L-shaped in plan, and reduces heat loss through the envelope rather than maximising solar gain.

ZGF Architects, Innovation Center, Rocky Mountain Institute, Basalt, Colorado, 2015 View of the north side. This office building is PHIUS+ Source Zero, LEED-Platinum and International Living Future Institute (ILFI) Petal certified, among others, with a site energy-use intensity of 16 kBtu/ft2 yr.

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This surplus is necessary in order to make up for inefficiencies in the energy distribution system (the grid) and for carbon emissions associated with the embodied energy of construction and demolition. Putting clean (non-combustion derived) energy onto the grid offsets a quantifiable amount of fossil fuel use, allowing a building project to essentially pay the atmosphere back for carbon it borrowed in the process of its creation. Through load reduction, a building can essentially take responsibility for itself, allowing a transition away from fossil fuels without a change in the comfort and use patterns of its occupants. Such a reduction in energy use without a reduction in amenity contributes to a sustainable future for industrial society. As a technology, passive building is a success, but as a movement it has yet to have an appreciable effect. Only through a broader architectural dedication to the goal of energy-use reduction can the passive experiment be tested. And such a movement in our present climate context is what sustainable architecture must become. What is more, our current climate crisis has upgraded sustainability to a form and programme generator, to a mandate if you will. Perhaps the best argument for this claim is that regardless of our differences of opinion, we are all seeking to sustain something. 1

Briburn, Viridescent House, Falmouth, Maine, 2016 This single-family residence/ office is PHIUS+ certified and designed for significant net energy production. The appearance is not at all outlandish glazing-wise, but because of the high levels of insulation and air-tightness, the energy use is so low that the 9-kilowatt rooftop solar array is expected to produce twice the energy needed by the building on an annual basis.

Notes 1. European Environment Agency, ‘Correlation of Energy Consumption and GDP Per Person’, 7 July 2016: www. eea.europa.eu/data-and-maps/figures/correlation-of-percapita-energy. 2. Duncan Millard (ed), ‘Supply’, Key World Energy Statistics, International Energy Agency (Paris), 2016, pp 6–7: www.iea.org/publications/freepublications/ publication/KeyWorld2016.pdf. 3. Rajendra K Pachauri and Leo A Meyer (eds), ‘Summary for Policymakers’, Climate Change 2014 Synthesis Report, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (Geneva), 2014, p 6: www.ipcc.ch/pdf/assessment-report/ ar5/syr/AR5_SYR_FINAL_SPM.pdf. 4. Ibid, p 17. 5. Ibid, p 19. 6. Ibid, p 10. 7. The World Bank, ‘CO2 emissions (metric tons per capita)’: data.worldbank.org/indicator/EN.ATM.CO2E. PC?end=2013&start=1960. 8. James D Ward et al, ‘Is Decoupling GDP Growth from Environmental Impact Possible?’, PLoS ONE, 11 (10), 2016: http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/ journal.pone.0164733. 9. Richard Heinberg, 19 September 2016: www. postcarbon.org/exploring-the-gap-between-business-asusual-and-utter-doom/. 10. See figures 8 and 24 of ‘Key World Energy Trends’, World Energy Balances, International Energy Agency (Paris), 2016, pp 6, 10: www.iea.org/publications/ freepublications/publication/world-energy-balances--2016-edition---excerpt---key-world-energy-trends.html. See also: US Energy Information Administration, ‘Annual Energy Outlook 2017’: www.eia.gov/outlooks/aeo/data/ browser/#/?id=2-AEO2017&cases=ref2017&sourcek ey=0. 11. For example, Raymond J Cole and Paul C Kernan, ‘Life-Cycle Energy Use in Office Buildings’, Building and Environment, 31 (4 ), July 1996, pp 307–17, and Mike Jackson, ‘Embodied Energy and Historic Preservation: A Needed Reassessment’, APT Bulletin, 36 (4), 2005, pp 47–52. Text © 2018 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Images: pp 16–17, 22(b) © Photos Tim Griffith; p 18 European Environment Agency, ‘Correlation of Energy Consumption and GDP Per Person’, July 2016; p 19 Courtesy of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change; p 20(t) Courtesy of the Environmental Protection Agency; p 20(b) Adapted from Raymond J Cole and Paul C Kernan, ‘Life-Cycle Energy Use in Office Buildings’, Building and Environment, 31 (4), July 1996; p 21 © Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory; p 22(t) Courtesy of REACH Community Development; p 23 © Briburn, photos Corey Templeton

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Resilient Design ‘Systems Thinking’ as a Response to Climate Change

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WXY architecture + urban design, Rockaway Boardwalk reconstruction, Queens, New York, 2017

Claire Weisz

The project is intended to create a more protected and active peninsula. The new reinforced-concrete boardwalk is elevated above the 100-year floodplain, and is supplemented with over 7 kilometres (4.5 miles) of retaining walls and planted sand dunes.

Design thinking is not enough. For resilient architecture and urbanism to meet the challenges of global warming head on, what is needed is systems thinking: an in-depth, interdisciplinary approach which recognises that change is constant. Claire Weisz – founding partner of New York urban design, planning and architecture practice WXY – highlights a number of small, innovative US firms that are leading the way, and describes some of their ventures to date. 25

The North American expertise in resiliency – the practice of designing environments for climate change – is fundamentally rooted in science, and therefore the most innovative approaches to planning and design focus on locality. In the absence of large-scale, top-down federal mandates and funding – and very different regional ecological and political conditions – the evolution of resiliency in North America is also highly fractal. The macro- and microcosmic scales of these strategies are as varied as the disciplines and financial resources needed to execute them. Out of this fractal environment emerge complex, innovative projects – often led by small, multidisciplinary firms – that are pushing practitioners beyond ‘design thinking’ to ‘systems thinking’. While not mutually exclusive, there are some key differences. Design thinking tends to be event-focused, while systems thinking looks at the relationships between interdependent components. Using an iceberg analogy, a design thinking approach is focused on the tip – the part that is visible and immediately actionable. In a constantly changing, increasingly complex world, however, a systems thinking approach becomes critical to understanding the interdependent variables that exist below the surface. Design thinking is a linear approach to developing a product or outcome, while systems thinking is a nonlinear approach to living systems. One is born out of a business philosophy that a designer can solve any problem, while the other identifies leverage points within complex relationships. One is rooted in an end-user analysis (observation), while the other demands rigorous modelling (science). Perhaps more importantly, a conventional or status-quo design thinking approach can be accomplished by a single expert, while a systems thinking process by definition cannot be top-down or driven by narrow expertise. Of course, applying a systems thinking approach to resiliency, be it adaptation or mitigation, is not an entirely new concept. But until very recently it has largely been discussed by theorists, not by practitioners who are employing this approach under difficult circumstances. The political, financial and environmental conditions tend to work against the arduous process of applying a rigorous scientific methodology across multiple disciplines to posit, test, design and build resilient environments. And yet a handful of small, nimble interdisciplinary firms are leading innovative resiliency projects by using both design thinking and systems thinking to set a new standard. Change is Constant The unifying theory underpinning this emerging systems thinking approach is that change is constant. The origin of this seemingly contradictory idea comes from Heraclitus, considered the first Ancient Greek philosopher of nature. He posited that ‘you cannot step in the same river twice’, a concept that is instructive for designers to understand how resiliency requires a systems thinking approach that design thinking is simply too narrow to tackle. New York-based WXY has grappled with this realisation through local crises such as 9/11 (2001) and Superstorm Sandy (2012). As an architecture, urban design and planning practice with an emphasis on integrating infrastructure into the urban landscape, the firm had a natural bridge into

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the uncharted territory of resiliency. By the time Hurricane Sandy hit New York, WXY had already spent a dozen years revitalising waterfronts through sustainable, designdriven projects, particularly for Battery Park City in Lower Manhattan. This work spanned multiple disciplines and required the firm to develop close relationships with numerous city agencies, which prepared it well for working on postSandy resiliency projects. In December 2012, New York City initiated the Special Initiative for Rebuilding and Resiliency, which prioritised planning the areas hardest hit by Sandy and those most vulnerable to future storms. WXY acted as the community planner and designer on the multidisciplinary team covering the industrial waterfront. Each of the area planners was charged with developing and presenting solutions for five different parts of the city that were directly affected. In some cases, discrete green infrastructure strategies emerged, while in other locations grey infrastructure was proposed, such as new surge gates or levees. In the process of testing resiliency measures, however, it soon became apparent that even conventional engineering solutions would require significant changes to existing infrastructure and urban design. For example, the complications of creating barrier systems in areas with low elevations and dense populations were too difficult to resolve on land. In other areas, studies of berms and floodwalls showed that solutions both large and small were going to be more costly than the value of the property. These realisations moved WXY more deeply into a systems thinking approach, laying the foundation for WXY with West 8 to lead one of the teams responding to the federal government’s call for ideas, the ‘Rebuild By Design’ competition, launched in 2013. The team’s submission, Blue Dunes: Climate Change by Design, resulted from a systems thinking process unlike anything the firm had attempted to organise until this opportunity came about.1 Analysts, architects, ecologists, engineers, physicists and planners came together to contemplate and model a system of artificial barrier islands to protect the Mid-Atlantic coast. A positive test indeed showed that artificial barrier islands would have a significant mitigating effect in the case of a storm surge, as well as rehabilitate lost habitat due to population and development along the East Coast. While the Blue Dunes proposal was one of the finalists, the ‘Rebuild by Design’ jury did not commit to funding the linchpin of the Blue Dunes plan – the foundational research and data collection necessary to inform an interdisciplinary design and scientific collaboration. The jury concluded that Blue Dunes was not ‘design’ – an unfortunate failure to recognise that developing a ‘systems thinking’ approach is in fact a design process. Resilient Design and Economic Development As the Blue Dunes investigation was underway, the City of New York commissioned WXY in 2013 to lead a multidisciplinary team to reconstruct the Rockaway Boardwalk along the 11-mile (18-kilometre) peninsula in Queens. The project also required a new urban design for entry points from the beach to the neighbourhoods that were devastated by the storm surge. The objective was not

WXY architecture + urban design, Blue Dunes, Coastline of the New York–New Jersey area, 2014 Blue Dunes is a research proposal for a string of barrier islands in response to the challenges of regional coastal resiliency in the northeastern US. The proposal brought together designers, climate scientists, financial advisers, risk managers and various community boards and members in an effort to address and mitigate the damage of future storms in a changing climate.

WXY architecture + urban design, Rockaway Boardwalk reconstruction, Queens, New York, 2017 The new boardwalk design responds to the immediate context of the Rockaways neighbourhoods, as well as the Rockaways’ larger role as a recreational destination for all New York City residents.

to rebuild the boardwalk back the way it was, but to create a new model for coastal resiliency. This goal, however, held the potential for conflict: the redesigned boardwalk had to provide both access to the beach and protection for the communities that dot the peninsula. The larger economic development imperative meant that the beach and boardwalk needed a distinct and locally desirable appearance, to attract people from around the city as well as provide protection and economic activity for the neighbourhoods. Achieving one goal but not the other would undermine the whole project. This conflict was resolved by situating a new reinforcedconcrete boardwalk, with the structure designed as large S-curved planks between two planted dunes at an elevation 1 metre (3 feet) above the 100-year floodplain. The soft infrastructure mediates the transition between the low-lying park space and the newly elevated boardwalk by tucking sand baffle walls under the newly created dunes. This solution arose from a close collaboration between WXY and engineers at the global firm CH2M, which centred on extensive modelling to determine the effectiveness of beach nourishment and flood protection. Finished in 2017, as the longest and largest resiliency project completed to date by the city of New York, the Rockaway Boardwalk has become the blueprint for coastal infrastructure around the New York archipelago.

In the wake of 2012’s Hurricane Sandy, WXY was commissioned by the City of New York to rebuild the Rockaway Boardwalk and to develop a conceptual plan to improve existing parks across the peninsula. Both projects uniquely integrate resiliency and recreation in the area’s rich history as a leisure destination and vital New York neighbourhood.

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Resilient Design at All Scales Local Office Landscape Architecture (LOLA), based in Brooklyn, has been pioneering a local ecology approach to resilient design since the inception of the firm 10 years ago, founded by Walter Meyer and Jennifer Bolstad, an urban designer and landscape architect respectively. They are so focused on local conditions that they put it right in their name, and like to say that the third partner on all projects is the locality where they are working.2 Two projects, one a park, the other a streetscape, illustrate how an inquiry-based approach can work at all scales. The firm designed Mayagüez Parque del Litoral, completed in 2010, the largest urban waterfront park built in Puerto Rico. It has since withstood hurricane seasons while dramatically improving water quality with soft (or green) infrastructure – all on a limited budget. Conversely, Miracle Mile, which will be completed in 2017, is a complex streetscape designed to withstand extreme rain events in an upscale shopping district in Coral Gables, Florida. What unites all of LOLA’s projects is an intensive investigation into local systems to provide guidance for how to design resilient projects in tandem with the forces that are already shaping the landscape. As an example, the partners point to a cloudburst mitigation plan developed by a Danish firm after several extreme rain events damaged Copenhagen. The idea, a classic design-thinking approach, is to prevent overflowing of the sewer system by controlling water on the street surface and gradually guiding it away from infrastructure. But an extreme rain event in Copenhagen is about 75 millimetres (3 inches) of rain an hour. That happens almost every summer day in South Florida, where an extreme rain event might produce 125 to 150 millimetres (5 to 6 inches) of rain in an hour. LOLA’s systems-thinking approach is to ask, how has the local ecology adapted to cloudbursts under the most extreme conditions, and what can be learned and applied to the built environment where rain events are likely to get much worse?

What unites all of LOLA’s projects is an intensive investigation into local systems to provide guidance for how to design resilient projects in tandem with the forces that are already shaping the landscape. 28

Local Office Landscape Architecture, Mayagüez Parque del Litoral, Mayagüez, Puerto Rico, 2010 below: Landscape as coastal infrastructure protecting the city from the sea, and the sea from the city, with urban wetlands, dunes and forest. opposite: Phytoremediating wetlands cleanse urban runoff from street end pipes, and help reduce flooding.

Local Office Landscape Architecture, Miracle Mile streetscape, Coral Gables, Florida, 2017 Blue streets: green infrastructure supplementing existing hard infrastructure.

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Lateral Office, Banking on the Border, Regional study of US–Mexico border, 2012 below: Section through various water border conditions. Banking on the Border imagines water banks, water markets and soft water treatment, forming a new, discontinuous ‘wet’ border between the US and Mexico. bottom: A survey of water, urbanism, and agriculture along the US–Mexico border. In some instances, water banks are paired with current border crossings, shifting from border control to border exchange and cooperation.

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Resilient Design in Extreme Conditions The founders of Lateral Office, based in Toronto, take a deliberately experimental approach. Mason White and Lola Sheppard are both trained architects but position their practice as a ‘lateral’ endeavour by working along a scale-less continuum from public art to urban design. The partners operate in that creatively liberating space just outside the confines of expertise, which allows them the latitude to look at wildly divergent systems and conditions. From the Canadian Arctic to the US–Mexico border, their explorations attempt to uncover opportunities hidden in complex problems. In 2011 Lateral Office created the Arctic Food Network to address the indigenous population’s increasing vulnerability to climate change and its impact on food scarcity. Lateral conducted a similar exploration looking at water scarcity along the US–Mexico border for a design competition in 2012 by the Drylands Institute, which they titled Banking on the Border. Both projects are premised on the idea that applying a scientific methodology to experimental ideas through modelling and simulation is critical to uncovering leverage points within interdependent systems. For example, while some Americans are clamouring for a massive border wall between the US and Mexico, Banking on the Border seeks to create a water harvesting and storage system along the border to promote conservation as well as ease political tensions while producing new landscapes, public realms, and sites of economic exchange.

Waggonner & Ball Architects, Proposed condition of London Canal, Greater New Orleans Urban Water Plan, New Orleans, Louisiana, 2013

The Greater New Orleans Urban Water Plan provides a new science-, engineering- and design-based framework to make the region resilient and sustainable at all scales. It works in tandem with the existing levee system and Louisiana’s 2012 Coastal Master Plan, but offers a paradigm shift from conventional water management towards a system that values water as an asset.

Resilient Design and Financing On the more traditional end of the spectrum is Waggonner & Ball, a seasoned firm with a core practice of historical restoration and modern institutional work. But as a New Orleans-based company with urban design experience, when Hurricane Katrina hit in 2005, the firm’s founding partners became deeply involved in resilient design. In 2011, the State of Louisiana’s Disaster Recovery Unit provided funding to develop a water management plan. The firm led a team that developed a multifaceted resiliency approach, the Greater New Orleans Urban Water Plan, released in November 2013, which imagined water as a resource for the city as opposed to a problem to be kept out. The team took a decidedly science-based, place-based and adaptable approach that shifts the paradigm from ‘piping and pumping’ to slowing, storing and reusing. Building on this work, the practice has since won several resiliency competitions from Louisiana to Virginia and Connecticut. David Waggonner voices frustration that the need for these solutions is so great while the financial resources are so scarce. Translating this systems-based expertise to other communities requires intensive research into local conditions, which can wipe out a budget. He is adamant that, in the absence of national resources, if cities and states are going to be the driving engines of resilient design, they had better learn how to contract for it.

approach. Large-scale projects tend to arise from design competitions with little promise of funding behind them, while the built projects are smaller yet hold the potential for regional applicability. Of course, the representation of these firms in the practice of resilient design is not a complete picture. There are big practices executing large-scale, mostly engineering-related resiliency developments. But the practices employing a systems thinking approach are at the vanguard of both built and experimental projects. These firms are nimble enough to lead interdisciplinary teams and problem solve at the interface of complex systems; in other words, able to design in the context of constant change. Related to the idea that change is constant is another concept also introduced by Heraclitus: that everything is connected. He had a word for this: Logos. Heraclitus believed the Logos – the oneness of humans, nature and the cosmos – to be an absolute truth, but most people fail to recognise it. ‘Although intimately connected with the Logos, men keep setting themselves against it.’3 1

Notes 1. Jesse M Keenan and Claire Weisz (eds), Blue Dunes: Climate Change By Design, Columbia Books on Architecture and the City (New York), 2017. 2. This and other personal opinions of individuals featured were recorded in interviews with the author. 3. Heraclitus, Fragment 72.

Everything is Connected Taking stock of some of the most innovative resiliency projects and ideas in North America, a few patterns emerge. Many of these projects, as already noted, are led by small, interdisciplinary firms that embody this systems thinking

Text © 2018 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Images: pp 24–5, 27(t) © WXY architecture + urban design; p 27(c&b) © Albert Vecerka/ESTO; pp 28-9 © Local Office Landscape and Urban Design; p 30 Courtesy of Lateral Office; p 31 © Waggonner & Ball

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BIG, The Big U, New York, 2014– When finished, the Big U will act as a sea wall during a storm and a park the rest of the time. It will protect Lower Manhattan from storm surges.

Global Responses to Local Conditions Sustainability and Resilience are Nowhere the Same 32

Alexandros Washburn

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To manage the impact of climate change, a mixture of global mitigation (reducing the probability of catastrophes) and local adaptation (lessening their consequences) is needed. Alexandros Washburn – an urban resilience expert and former New York City Chief Architect who witnessed 2012’s Hurricane Sandy first hand – presents three contrasting examples of how cities around the world have approached the latter, with varying degrees of success. From ensuring a potable water supply in São Paulo and Singapore to flood prevention in New York, it is a mixed story that embraces everything from an exemplary large-scale public construction project, to an ingenious community-led proposal, to sheer luck.

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Too hot, too low, too wet, too dry. How does your city stack up in an era of climate change? If your city is São Paulo, you almost ran out of drinking water. If your city is New York, you almost drowned under a storm surge from the Atlantic. If your city is Singapore, you have managed to navigate the treacherous strand where water meets the land. In dealing with extreme drought, increased flooding, warmer temperatures or rising sea levels, cities and regions are being forced to develop and innovate with their urban design, resources generation, governance and regulation in order to reduce their risk. Risk is a product of probability and consequences. As an example, we could ask which has a higher flood risk: New York or New Orleans? Most people guess New Orleans, which has a higher probability of a hurricane strike since it is located on the warmer Gulf Coast. Yet because New York is a far larger and wealthier city, the consequences, in both human and financial terms, are greater. The lower probability of the hurricane strike multiplied by the far higher consequences give New York the higher overall risk. This is the risk equation. The relationship of sustainability and resilience can be viewed through the lens of this equation. Mitigation can be understood to affect probability. It can lower the index of greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere and thereby eventually help reduce the energy in the weather system and decrease the likelihood of future extreme weather events. Adaptation can be understood to affect consequences. If New York had been adapted with a 4-metre (14-foot) tall sea wall when Hurricane Sandy hit in 2012, it would have felt few consequences from its storm surge. The equation might read: Risk = (Probability – Mitigation) x (Consequences – Adaptation).1 So, if we want to manage climate risk at the scale of cities, everything we should do needs to be designed either to lower probability or lower consequences. However, the variety of risks – and the limitations of resources – leads to great variation in the response from cities around the world. São Paulo: What Might Have Been Brazil has been called the Saudi Arabia of water – a country as rich with water resources as the Arab sovereign state is with oil. The Amazon Basin is so vast that the amount of rain that falls and is collected in Brazil represents 12 per cent of the world’s fresh water. So it is hard to imagine that the country’s largest city, São Paulo, would ever seriously face the risk of running out of water. Yet in 2014, an exceptionally dry autumn and winter strained the supply of São Paulo’s fragile water delivery system to the brink of catastrophe. When São Paulo began its rapid growth in the 19th century, the municipal government, through private concessions, made provisions to ensure there would be both capacity and redundancy in the water supply. In addition, given the city’s location in a high plain just one ridge away from the coast, it seemed a good idea to build a hydroelectric generating plant that could siphon water off and create electricity from the gravity drop through the mountain ridge. While no one expected the city to reach its present population, the system of reservoirs, refreshed by the watershed’s annual wet cycles, proved sufficient for the task during the stages of highest growth throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries. In the 1970s, however, the municipal government made critical decisions that endangered the future security of the

Favela, São Paulo, Brazil, 2014 Sewage and run-off drain untreated into the city’s watershed.

city’s water supply. First, it decided to divert water from the polluted Tietê River into one of the city’s main reservoirs, feeding the hydroelectric plant in order to boost electrical production and fuel growth. Second, it turned a blind eye to the rapid growth of informal settlements in the city’s watershed, allowing sewage and run-off from the favelas to drain untreated into its water reserves. Both decisions constricted the supply of potable water. Still, until 2014 it was hard to imagine São Paulo as having a drought – even in a dry year flash floods and thunderstorms wrought havoc on the city and seemed to replenish its potable water. But that year, brief torrents of rain failed to mask the city’s longer-term water problem. By early 2015, the water supply level could no longer be ignored. Both citizens and politicians realised there was no simple solution. No contingency plan was volumetrically sufficient. The only practical short-term solution was to stop using water to generate electricity from hydropower. But after water, electricity is a city’s most critical infrastructure. A team from the University of São Paulo reworked a decades-old plan, the Hidroanel, a water resource and transportation project that would link the city’s rivers and reservoirs into a ring (‘anel’ in Brazilian Portuguese).2 It would solve water supply, drainage and transport problems all at once, but it would cost $100 billion to build. There is a saying that ‘a crisis is a terrible thing to waste’. Exhausted by expenditures on the FIFA World Cup and the Olympics, buffeted by political scandal, and blindsided by revenue drops, Brazil and its cities were not in good shape to take on this new challenge. Following one of the driest years on record, in October 2015 the city came within 5 per cent of draining its potable water supply.3 But before any agreement could be reached, it started to rain again. Singapore: Turning Risk into Reward Singapore is at the forefront of adaptation and mitigation efforts at the city scale. With no hinterland from which to draw resources, every square foot in the city matters, and multiple goals have to be achieved within the same project. The scarcest resource is land itself, so every major project in the city is calibrated to achieve three goals: (1) to support a larger, more prosperous population; (2) to reduce the city’s carbon emissions; and (3) to adapt the city to survive extreme weather.

Consider water supply. Singapore does not have a catchment area to ensure a perfect supply. It is the same size as New York City, but unlike New York it does not own vast tracts of land outside its boundaries containing chains of reservoirs like the Croton and the Catskill. Singapore realised soon after its independence in the mid-1960s that it would have to create a new reservoir. Moreover, that reservoir could not take up land needed for development. The Marina Barrage, completed in 2008, is a good example of how Singapore meets these challenges in a single project. The Barrage turned the Singapore River (and the Marina Bay into which it feeds) into a giant freshwater reservoir – an epic engineering challenge, with two overall components to success. The first was isolating the fresh water in the bay from the salt water of the sea. The second was making the fresh water clean enough to drink. Singapore approached this as a social problem. The water was polluted by shantytowns crowded around the river’s edge, much like the Brazilian favelas at the lake’s edge. To make the water potable, the sewage had to stop. For the sewage to stop, the people had to move. And so, beginning in the 1950s and continuing to this day, Singapore built a programme of public housing, with a twist. They made the housing so attractive that residents from shantytowns and formal housing alike wanted to move. Today, with projects such as The Pinnacle@ Duxton, an award-winning 50-storey residential development in the city centre completed in 2009, public housing is almost indistinguishable from private housing. As the water became cleaner in the latter decades of the 20th century, the problem shifted to forming a barrier with the sea. Here the Marina Barrage would serve as a demarcation line, with pumps working to separate fresh water from salt water. Sea-level rise had become an issue, and with it the need to protect from chronic rise as well as sudden storm. The result could have been a wall with pumps behind razorwire fencing to protect such a critical piece of infrastructure. However, Singapore again took a more social approach. The urban design team of the Urban Redevelopment Agency convinced the engineering department to make the wall a foundation for a promenade, and to make the pump house a base for a green roof open to the public. The roof spirals to the ground, like an open-air Guggenheim, around a fountained plaza. The promenade is a favourite for lovers, and kids fly kites on the roof.

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Marina Barrage, Singapore, 2008 The Marina Barrage is so successful as a piece of critical infrastructure and as public space that it manages to turn the colossal risk of flooding into a rewarding space for visitors and residents alike.

The Marina Barrage gets just about everything right. It starts out as an adaptation to reduce Singapore’s risk, but is so successful as a piece of critical infrastructure as well as public space that it somehow manages the alchemy of pushing risk into reward. New York: Resilience from the Bottom Up My home, my neighbourhood, my city was flooded by Hurricane Sandy. I defied the evacuation order to stay home on Van Brunt Street in Red Hook, Brooklyn, and see for myself. Nothing prepares you for the scale of storm surge. Even the greatest city in the world seems small in comparison to the force of the water. Much of the recovery effort since the flood has been focused on just getting back to where we were. And where we were was unprotected. If in rebuilding our neighbourhood we have neither decreased the probability nor the consequences of disaster, then the risk to our livelihood remains. In the long run, either we move forward as a community and manage our risk, or we fall back into decay and disinvestment if people feel the government – city, state or federal – has abandoned us to our fate. Staten Island is getting money for its Living Breakwaters project to protect itself with man-made islands that grow larger over time with natural sand accumulation and mollusc growth. Designed by Kate Orff and SCAPE Landscape Architecture, Living Breakwaters is at the forefront of the ‘building with nature’ movement in the US. Initially developed for the US Department of Housing and Urban Developmentadministered ‘Rebuild by Design’ competition, the project demonstrated cutting-edge ideas for coastal resilience in the wake of Hurricane Sandy. Lower Manhattan is getting the Big U, a massive project designed by the Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG) to raise a ring of parks along its shore that will act as floodwalls during storms and recreation areas the rest of the time. Bottom line: when completed, the Big U will protect Wall Street, and no expense will be spared by government here. Both Living Breakwaters and the Big U are products of the ‘Rebuild by Design’ process, where Dutch techniques were hybridised into the American infrastructure process by the charismatic Dutchman Henk Ovink. Red Hook did not get a ‘Rebuild by Design’ project. Instead, after Sandy, the government promised us $200 million for an ‘Integrated Flood Protection System’ as they called it. That figure was then restated as $100 million. Only $50 million made it into the budget. And now we are told that it is entirely unlikely to happen. So we took matters into our own hands. I reopened the ground floor of my home, which had been under a metre

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SCAPE Landscape Architecture, Living Breakwaters, Staten Island, New York, 2014– Natural resilience: Living Breakwaters, a New York-based coastal resilience project for Staten Island, is at the forefront of the US ‘building with nature’ movement. The project, currently under development, would protect one of New York’s most vulnerable boroughs.

Initially developed for the US Department of Housing and Urban Developmentadministered ‘Rebuild by Design’ competition, the project demonstrated cutting-edge ideas for coastal resilience in the wake of Hurricane Sandy.

(3 feet) of water during Hurricane Sandy, to the neighbourhood as a community meeting place, inviting in the opinions and expertise of Red Hook’s residents to envision our future. My firm, DRAW Brooklyn, has developed this community vision into a bold plan to protect Brooklyn while creating more space for housing, commerce and public life. Red Hook Island, as we are calling it, combines the best of Living Breakwaters and the Big U into an offshore island. With a waterfront park on one side and working maritime docks on the other, our project would enhance Brooklyn’s civic and economic future. With thousands of new housing units, it would achieve what no other plan can while paying for itself: creating more Brooklyn. But how do you build a new island in New York Harbor? Who owns the land? Who approves it? Answering these questions and more is the aim of our collaborative design process. As we have researched our idea, we have discovered something incredible – an island in the harbour had already been approved by the Governor of New York in 1923, and built to a level just below the surface of the water. The intention of the original Red Hook Island was to improve Brooklyn’s harbour, but the project was abandoned when a joint Port Authority was created with New Jersey and the future port moved there. The legal and physical foundations for this ambitious project are already in place.

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At New York’s market rate for undeveloped land of US$100 per square foot, our project could generate US$3.5 billion in revenue. It would pay for itself in land alone.

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DRAW Brooklyn (Alexandros Washburn and Jason Beury), Red Hook Island, Brooklyn, New York, 2016 right: The foundations of the old Red Hook Island, developed under a 1923 New York State law, are invisible from a photographic satellite view. below left: A bathymetry map shows the extent of Red Hook Island’s century-old foundations just below the surface of the water. below right: Design Research Alexandros Washburn (DRAW Brooklyn) proposes building productive land atop the underwater foundations, elevating a new Red Hook Island above high storm surges and creating more of the urban character that already works in Brooklyn—with room for 20,000 new families and 60,000 new jobs.

What if we completed this island and developed it? On the harbour side we could build a waterfront park rising 6 metres (20 feet) above the water. On the shore side we could build docks and factories to support new industries. And in the middle, we could build more and more blocks of the mix we love as Brooklyn. Yes, this would be expensive, with about $3.5 billion in infrastructure costs, but it would also create 35 million square feet (3.25 million square metres) of new building rights. At New York’s market rate for undeveloped land of US$100 per square foot, our project could generate US$3.5 billion in revenue. It would pay for itself in land alone. But what would all these square feet mean in terms of people, in terms of community? It would mean room for 20,000 new families, and 60,000 new jobs to support those families and the schools, those shops and libraries and parks on which we build the daily life of our community. We would not just get back to where we were pre-Sandy; we would exceed the high water mark. Red Hook Island would form a breakwater for all of Southwest Brooklyn with an ecologically diverse public park on its harbour’s edge.

The Measure of Limits So how do we know when we are doing enough? Mitigation is global; adaptation is local. In each case there are limits to what a city – or a citizen – can do. The interaction between probability and consequences in the risk equation is a race between factors that we can only partially control. Every city reaches its limits of what it can do locally to affect a climate system that is changing globally. As we ponder the future, we can only hope that mitigation (lowering probability) can stay ahead of adaptation (lowering consequences). I would say that is a slim hope. 1

The proposed island would also facilitate thousands of new maritime jobs and double the size of Brooklyn’s existing working harbour.

Notes 1. Alexandros Washburn, The Nature of Urban Design: A New York Perspective on Resilience, Island Press (Washington DC), 2013, p 165. 2. Faculty of Architecture and Urbanism of the University of São Paulo, ‘Study for Technical, Economical and Environmental Pre-viability for the Metropolitan Waterway Ring’, 2011: www.metropolefluvial.fau.usp.br/hidroanel.php#. 3. Brad Plumer, ‘The Largest City in Brazil is Running Dangerously Low on Water’, Vox, 23 October 2014: www.vox.com/2014/10/23/7047533/sao-paulo-droughtwater-crisis-brazil-election.

Text © 2018 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Images: pp 32–3 Image by BIG-Bjarke Ingels Group; pp 35(t), 36, 38–9 © Alexandros Washburn; pp 36–7 © SCAPE Landscape Architecture

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Stevens Institute of Technology, SU+RE House, Solar Decathlon, Irvine, California, 2015 The SU+RE House at dusk. The interior thermal envelope produces a warm glow.

‘Global Warming is Real’ 40

John Nastasi

Superstorm Sandy, Stevens and the SU+RE House ,

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With every new extreme-weather event, climate change becomes harder to deny. When a notorious 2012 hurricane hit Hoboken, New Jersey, academic staff at the city’s Stevens Institute of Technology quickly responded with impact studies and by instigating multi-party dialogue to tackle the issues. The architectural faculty’s efforts soon became focused around the SU+RE House, which was to be the winning entry for 2015 in the Solar Decathlon – a student competition to design, build and operate a solar-powered house, run by the US Department of Energy every two years. Guest-Editor and Stevens faculty member John Nastasi sets out the project’s background and explains how it serves as a new model for architectural teaching.

Sailboat washed aground in the aftermath of Superstorm Sandy, Hoboken, New Jersey, 2012 While the vessel’s new configuration is unsettling, the juxtaposition of the fibre and resin composite hull on dry ground provided the impetus for the design of a new residential prototype.

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On 29 October 2012, with winds of over 120 kilometres (80 miles) per hour and hurricane-force destruction, Superstorm Sandy shifted west and made landfall in the New Jersey shore town of Brigantine, just northeast of Atlantic City, after wreaking havoc days earlier in the Caribbean communities of Bermuda, Greater Antilles, Jamaica, Haiti, the Dominican Republic and the Bahamas, causing over 230 deaths and over $75 billion in damages. In the US alone, Sandy’s impact was felt by 24 states from Florida to Maine, and westward to Michigan and Wisconsin. Superstorm Sandy sparked extraordinary political commentary as scientists publicly attributed the coastal effects of the storm to warming oceans and greater atmospheric moisture. In his news conference on 14 November 2012, President Obama stated: ‘We do know that there have been an extraordinarily large number of severe weather events here in North America and around the globe and I am a firm believer that climate change is real, that it is impacted by human behavior.’ Therefore, he said, ‘I think we’ve got an obligation to future generations to do something about it.’1 Situated at sea level along the Hudson River waterfront, more than half of the New Jersey city of Hoboken was flooded during Superstorm Sandy. As a result, Hoboken’s Mayor Dawn Zimmer had to request the assistance of the National Guard. By late night on 30 October, an estimated 20,000 people – roughly 40 per cent of Hoboken’s population – were stranded, completely surrounded by water. Eighty per cent of the city’s population was without power. On 31 October, the National Guard was deployed and began assisting in rescues. It took several days for the floodwaters to recede, and power eventually came back to the city of Hoboken after a seven-day outage.

NASA, GEOS-5 simulation of Hurricane Sandy’s surface wind speeds, October 2012 Scientists at NASA used the Goddard Earth Observing System Model, Version 5 (GEOS-5) to simulate surface wind speeds across the Atlantic during Sandy’s life cycle.

OMA Design Team, Hudson River Project: Resist, Delay, Store, Discharge, ‘Rebuild by Design’ competition, 2014 This flood map by the New York branch of Dutch architectural firm OMA – illustrating the sequence and devastation caused by Superstorm Sandy on the city of Hoboken – was produced for a post-Sandy design competition launched by the US Department of Housing and Urban Development. The competition led to the establishment of the ongoing international collaborative cross-sector design and research initiative Rebuild by Design, which aims to help communities and cities build resilience.

Stevens Institute of Technology During the lead-in to this historic storm event and in its immediate aftermath, the faculty at the Stevens Institute of Technology, in Hoboken, began to study the impacts of Superstorm Sandy on the New York Harbor. Professors Michael Bruno, the Dean of Engineering, and Alan Blumberg, the Director for Maritime Systems at Stevens’ Davidson Laboratory, gathered key stakeholders including the Army Corps of Engineers, the Port Authority of New York and the New Jersey Governor’s office for a coming together of the scientific, public policy and urban maritime communities. Their panel discussion featured notable speakers from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the US Coast Guard and the US Army Corps of Engineers, and focused on bolstering urban coastal infrastructure resilience to flooding from storm surge, and the implications on social and policy issues. It was evident from these discussions that in the lead-in to Superstorm Sandy, local communities up and down the east coast were not able to psychologically grasp or visualise the potential impact of sea-level rise expected from this event. It was evident that improved predictive forecasting models and methods for determining rising water levels during a storm event (i.e. how much and from where) needed to be developed. While this group of experts in science, public policy and oceanography mapped out a plan for this effort, the architectural faculty at Stevens concurrently pursued a more accessible, public-minded avenue of response: the upcoming 2015 US Department of Energy’s Solar Decathlon in Irvine, California – an international student competition that challenges 20 universities to design, build, operate and test sustainable solar-powered homes. Since its inaugural event in 2002, the Solar Decathlon had expanded internationally to include four additional worldwide competitions in Europe, China, Latin America and the Caribbean, and the Middle East. The Stevens team was poised to introduce the timely and burgeoning topic of storm resilience to the decade-old solar home competition, inextricably linking sustainability (SU) with the emerging study of storm resilience (RE). The SU+RE House Architecture is an art form dependent on and intertwined with numerous outside forces including the natural environment, the physical properties of materials, engineering principles, building systems, the ebb and flow of capital markets, the whims of clients, and the passage of time. During the design process for the SU+RE House, the full integration of each of these disparate forces would have to become fully integrated for this research to meaningfully address the post-Sandy era. It was necessary to rethink and expand existing models of design education, practice and industry. In design education, the ‘studio’ – long understood as an individualistic investigation culminating the academic term, with a singular solution, or ‘final design’ – is repositioned as the first chapter of an extended and deeper design investigation. Subsequent semesters focusing on fabrication, assembly, commissioning, monitoring and testing allow a student to understand whether predetermined design performance assumptions can be achieved. While the success of traditional ‘design-build’ studios in design education

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has been recognised, industry exposure to post-occupancy monitoring and performance has been lacking. Four continuous semesters of design exploration through to design resolution allowed for fabrication, commissioning and testing of a system to meaningfully occur over an extended period. While the SU+RE House set out as an intellectual response to the Superstorm Sandy event, it evolved into an innovative design process positing a new model of interdisciplinary design education, expanded roles for architects’ practice and potential opportunities for intra-industry collaboration. Jettisoning the longstanding models of design education, where students work on design projects with an independent insularity, the SURE House faculty assembled a team of 30 undergraduate engineering students from the disciplines of environmental, structural, mechanical, electrical, computer and systems engineering. Eight graduate-level architecture students formed the nucleus of the project and design glue for the SU+RE House team. Multidisciplinary project teams were established based on targeted performance criteria rather than academic discipline, while an in-depth planning study of neighbouring shore communities was executed to define the architectural programme and target market. Faculty shepherded the discursive and creative efforts to align towards a singular design solution. The architectural faculty (and team of Guest-Editors for this journal) have extensive backgrounds in design-build practice. With a collective fluency in the physical – materials, fabrication and assembly – the student team quickly adapted to a design practice culture. The expanded emphasis towards postoccupancy monitoring and assessment became the primary objective of the team. To accomplish this, the timeframe for the completion of the construction of the house on campus at Stevens incorporated one month of performance testing and data acquisition prior to the disassembly of the home for transport to Irvine, California. During this crucial month, the home was run through a series of activities: air-conditioning was set at desired temperatures, hot water generation was cycled, electric vehicles were charged daily, meal preparation was conducted in conjunction with public outreach events, and laundry was completed – all while students observed and collected data in the hope of validating earlier projected levels of energy consumption. The impact of this phase on the students was evident: the responsibility of garnering performance from the house significantly increased their sense of ownership on the work.

Isometric view showing the interdisciplinary design layers of the home: external shading, technological roof, photovoltaic integrated composite storm shutters and internal thermal envelope.

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Stevens Institute of Technology, SU+RE House, Hoboken, New Jersey, 2015 above: The SU+RE House in the setting of the proposed oceanfront site in the town of Seaside Park, New Jersey – a location identified due to the local authority’s 30-year encouragement of natural dune formations to protect the town from rising sea levels. opposite top: Section showing interior thermal envelope, storm shutters and secondary enclosure. opposite bottom: South elevation with descending composite storm shutters. Each shutter is equipped with integrated thin film photovoltaic panels on its surface.

A critical component of the SU+RE House was the extensive use of fibre and resin composites as construction materials

Inspired by the resilience of the many crafts that survived the storm undamaged, a critical component of the SU+RE House was the extensive use of fibre and resin composites as construction materials. A boating industry standard, research into composite assemblies proved to be a highlight in the team’s creative exploration while also contributing to some of the more frustrating moments of the project during execution. Working within the epicentre of the maritime industry in Bristol, Rhode Island – a collection of materials scientists, engineers, fabricators and educators – students appropriated tried and true methodologies in yacht design for the home’s building sheathing and storm shutters. Early ideas for the development of a fibre and composite structurally insulated panel (SIP) for the entire home were abandoned due to the lack of recognition of the boating industry’s standards in today’s building codes. While this presented one of the low-morale points of the two-year project, it highlighted the importance of building codes and public policy within each industry. A thin composite sheathing was ultimately developed based on its water and impact resistance, while integrated photovoltaic composite storm shutters were developed as standalone componentry. Live demonstration of the shutter deployment – the audible ratcheting of the winches as the students lowered the composite shutters into place – proved to be a daily crowd pleaser in Irvine.

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Stevens Institute of Technology, SU+RE House, Hoboken, New Jersey, 2015 Plan showing the SU+RE House’s 90 square metres (1,000 square feet) of interior conditioned space with an additional 90 square metres (1,000 square feet) of partially enclosed terracing.

Stevens Institute of Technology, SU+RE House, Solar Decathlon, Irvine, California, 2015 opposite: Southern terrace with surfboard storage. The intentional juxtaposition of the composite storm shutters alongside the two composite surfboards showcases the intra-industry design influences of the home. below: The SU+RE House is open-plan: the living, dining and kitchen area opens onto an expansive southern terrace.

The SU+RE House is at first glance a residential prototype in the post-Sandy era, but with a closer look it is revealed as a paradigm-changing pedagogical model for the architectural academy

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Recognising adaptability as a core component of resilience, the SU+RE House was developed with the capability to be reconfigured in three modes of operation, each responding to seasonal needs. The home is initially conceived as a compact 90-squaremetre (1,000-square-foot) interior. A substantial and continuous thermal envelope is complemented by expansive southern glazing. Designed for the New Jersey shore seasonal culture and climate, winter hibernation is acknowledged. The low winter sun fully heats the home, while also producing 100 per cent of its hot water needs. During the summer, shore communities experience seasonal population swell with the arrival of seasonal homeowners, their fair-weather guests, and beach-goers. Supporting this phenomenon, the home opens and expands outwards to north, south and east terraces, providing an additional 90 square metres (1,000 square feet) of partially enclosed entertainment spaces. Outdoor dining, seating and gardening is incorporated into the architecture of the terraces, while the expansive overhangs of the composite storm shutters inhibit the summer sun’s entry into the home. During a storm event, or an extended period of seasonal inactivity, the SU+RE House can be deployed into a closed and dormant configuration. Large folding shutters lower over the expansive southern exposure, protecting the large areas of glass from both rising floodwaters and storm projectiles. In a period of extended power outage, the home’s thermal envelope, roof-mounted photovoltaics and solar hot water systems (integrated into the composite storm shutter) are capable of islanding, allowing the home to maintain both temperature and systems for an extended period of time – without the assistance of public utility infrastructure. DC-powered receptacles allow for community access for the charging of electronic devices. Upon return after an area evacuation, the home is watertight, conditioned and readily occupy-able.

A New Pedagogical Paradigm Global warming is real, not theoretical. Superstorm Sandy reinforced this to the world. The ‘theoretical’ in design education will no longer be sufficient to empower future architects to address the new reality of climate change. The culture at Stevens Institute, an engineering school long invested in the urban ocean and coastal communities, assembled and empowered the SURE House Design Team to produce a paradigm-changing resilient home. Innovative models in interdisciplinary design education, expanded roles for architectural practice, and critical intra-industry collaboration all point to a buoyant path for young design professionals. In the end, the SU+RE House is at first glance a residential prototype in the post-Sandy era, but with a closer look it is revealed as a paradigm-changing pedagogical model for the architectural academy. 1 Note 1. ‘Transcript of President Obama’s News Conference’, New York Times website, 14 November 2012: www.nytimes.com/2012/11/14/us/ politics/running-transcript-of-president-obamas-press-conference. html.

Text © 2018 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Images: pp 40-1, 46(b), 47 Photography by Juan Paolo Alicante; p 42 New Jersey Environmental Protection Agency (NJEPA)/Ramin Talaie, Hoboken, NJ 2012; p 43(t) Courtesy of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, Scientific Visualization Studio; p 43(b) Image Courtesy of NJDEP/Rebuild By Design/OMA Design Team; pp 44-5, 46(t) © Stevens Institute of Technology, SU+RE House Team

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High-Performance Enclosures

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Ken Levenson

Designing for Comfort, Durability and Sustainability Key to any building’s energy consumption levels is the quality of its envelope, comprised of all its enclosing elements. Passive buildings, which do not require costly mechanical systems to keep their users comfortable, are increasing in popularity. But to design them, architects need to engage closely with building science. Citing several recent US examples, including the SU+RE House, Ken Levenson – active in the Passive House movement and a founding partner at Brooklyn, New York company 475 High Performance Building Supply – explains how.

Barry Price Architecture, Cabin 3000, New York State, 2016 Thanks to the high-performance Ecocor envelope on this building, the interior spaces such as the living area are incredibly comfortable and quiet. The triple-glazed windows maintain high interior surface temperatures thanks to their low heat-loss rate (U-factor). This means radiators are no longer needed below the glazing, which frees up the architectural design of the space greatly.

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Over the past 60 years, consumer electronics such as phones and computers have all provided greater and greater performance while using less and less energy.1 At the same time our buildings have been stubbornly resistant to such a dramatic decoupling of energy and performance.2 Today, confronted with climate change, this is finally beginning to change through a renewed focus on the building ‘envelope’. This envelope is made up of all of the enclosing elements of the building such as walls and windows which control and manage the flows of light, heat, air and moisture. A result of pioneering research, we know we can provide very high indoor air quality, high levels of thermal comfort and indoor daylighting, all while reducing energy consumption for heating and cooling by up to 90 per cent – a reduction commensurate with the demands of climate change mitigation.3 Buildings are effectively increasing service to occupants while slashing energy usage. Incremental efficiency improvements of equipment like boilers and air-conditioning units play a part in this dramatic shift, but the decoupling of building performance and energy use was fundamentally made possible by focusing first on the enclosure’s performance, and delivering it with a clear and coordinated strategy. Consequently, the focus on high-performance envelopes has demanded a renewed engagement with building science, construction techniques and methodologies to provide consistent and predictable results. When we deliver reliable comfort through the envelope design, our buildings no longer require complex and expensive mechanical systems. This building revolution is possible with a commitment by designers to achieving an understanding of building science – that is, the science of how materials, building components and the enclosure assemblies they form, interact with natural phenomena such as sun, wind, rain, humidity and temperature. Beyond a basic understanding of the forces at play, though, designers will also have to employ a methodology that puts building science knowledge to use strategically in order to create cost-effective solutions. This new focus must be combined with a commitment to less environmentally toxic materials and a real desire to create healthier spaces. This will mean moving away from using standard details to a new design process which includes developing material assemblies and methods of construction to provide replicable, predictable and durable results. This innovation in design and detailing will have to be coupled to a rigorous regime of on-site testing and verification of airtightness and overall building quality. The commissioning of buildings and continued monitoring must become a piece of every designer’s scope in order to advance our understanding of these new structures. The resulting architecture is one which is truly engaged with performance and occupant comfort for the first time. Building Science Principles As we re-engage building science, this knowledge can inform dramatic improvements in the comfort and durability of our buildings through sensitive design decisions rather than ever more energy consumption. The primary flows we seek to manage through the design of the building enclosure include air, heat, moisture and light. In addition to these

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environmental factors, the critical parameter of human health and material toxicity must also be present in any evaluation of the building envelope. Limiting uncontrolled airflow through the enclosure can greatly improve a building’s performance, as it prevents enclosure damage from moisture carried by air leaks. Building airtight can also reduce the energy usage required to heat and cool constructions of similarly well insulated yet leaky enclosures by up to five times.4 An airtight enclosure provides a controlled interior environment that can be efficiently and reliably ventilated, preventing stuffy and unhealthy interiors and empowering occupants to open windows, for ventilation, only when desired. This airtight layer is especially important for building durability in cold climates, but in humid climates this layer also serves to help manage the amount of moisture able to enter the building, reducing dehumidification need and improving occupant comfort.

Stevens Institute of Technology, SU+RE House, Hoboken, New Jersey, 2015 above top: Students from the US Department of Energy Solar Decathlon 2015 SU+RE House entry installed a continuous interior airtight layer before any interior finishes. Here team members are installing the plastic membrane along the underside of the ceiling joists after the mineral wool insulation. above: Thick mineral wool insulation was installed on every enclosing surface, even floors. Here student team members can be seen adding several layers of the insulation in between the timber joists which make up the structure of the floor.

BLDGtyp, Larchmont Passive House, Larchmont, New York, 2015 A thick layer of continuous mineral wool insulation is applied outboard of the wall sheathing and weather-resistive barrier on this home. By adding insulation to the exterior, the surface temperature of the sheathing is increased, which reduces the likelihood of condensation and moisture damage.

By calibrating the window performance to the building climate, interior surface temperatures can be ensured which will deliver both high levels of occupant comfort but also condensation resistance, as well as increasing useful lifespans for the frame and surrounding materials.

When we insulate at sufficient levels – often at significantly higher levels than typically specified – thermal stability at the interior is achieved, like a thermos. Such continuous insulation produces relatively even surface temperatures that prevent mould growth and eliminate convective current drafts found in typical buildings where there are greater temperature differences between surfaces. Controlling heat flow through continuous insulation is also one of the most cost-effective ways to reduce a building’s energy consumption, especially in colder climates. While we want to increase insulation levels for comfort and energy reasons, higher insulation levels can produce colder exterior surfaces in winter which can increase the risk of moisture damage such as mould, rot and rust to the enclosure components. We mitigate the risk and avoid potential moisture damages if we increase the drying capacity of the enclosure. We should increase the safety buffer – just as we should allow an increased amount of space between ourselves and the car in front of us as we drive faster. Through careful assessment of how moisture vapour moves through our assemblies, we can successfully create low-energy buildings while ensuring that they will remain in good condition for the life of the structure. Windows are essential for daylighting and views, yet typically the glass and frames are poorly insulated and produce radiant discomfort that must be overcome with mechanical systems. However, if windows are understood as an integrated part of the enclosure’s uninterrupted airtightness and thermal insulation control, they become high-performance components – often triple-pane in cold climates, triple-gasketed, with insulated frames – and result in more even surface temperatures that promote comfort and health. By calibrating the window performance to the building climate, interior surface temperatures can be ensured which will deliver both high levels of occupant comfort but also condensation resistance, as well as increasing useful lifespans for the frame and surrounding materials. Certain building materials and processes can pose serious health risks to construction workers, building occupants and our natural environment for generations to come if they are not carefully controlled. The environmental impact of materials and components should be considered across all aspects of the building: materials that exhibit a lower embodied energy, and that reduce reliance on dangerous chemicals and materials that may even act as a carbon sink, should be utilised wherever possible. Programmes like the Pharos Project have been leading many of these efforts and provide ongoing useful references.5

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BLDGtyp, Wisconsin Cabin, Wisconsin, 2012 The materials used in this super-insulated double-stud wall are carefully chosen to ensure excellent moisture tolerance. The ‘smart vapour-retarder’ on the inboard face is vapour impermeable in winter but in summer allows for inward moisture movement, to permit drying. The exterior weather-resistive barrier is vapour open to maximise drying of any interstitial condensation while protecting the structure from liquid water like rain or snow.

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A Clear and Coordinated Approach Much of the building science described above has been known for millennia, but there have also been significant advancements in understanding over the last 50 years by researchers, builders and designers in North America and Europe. Many of the tools to make high-performance enclosures have been known too, yet they were typically used in isolation, undermining the perceived and actual benefit. What has been missing is a methodology that utilises all the instruments, like a symphony, and makes improved results, with reliable predictability. The Passive House approach has sought to weave together these discrete strands of research into a unified, coordinated, science-based methodology to building design and construction.6 With this new design methodology, quantifiable metrics of occupant comfort form the basic criteria for enclosure performance.7 Thermal comfort should be largely provided by the quality of the enclosure. Once the envelope is optimised, comfort can be maintained with a tiny amount of heating or cooling energy: sometimes the heat gains of occupants themselves, and incidental equipment, provide enough. Prioritising the enclosure performance prior to deploying mechanical systems is also called ‘fabric first’ – and ensures that the sequence of effort is best suited to deliver low-energy results. This methodology includes careful placement and detailing of materials and components, with their arrangement calculated in a highly calibrated energy model using software packages custom built for low-energy buildings.8 Also, included in the methodology are aspects of massing, orientation, shading, internal loads, local climate data and occupant uses. The energy model becomes a critical design tool for these buildings. The model empowers architects to manipulate all aspects of building design towards lower energy consumption and understand the effects to energy usage. By engaging with the energy model, form, function and technology can be manipulated and optimised to achieve lowenergy, high-performance results. Because some building components are more critical to achieving high performance than others, specific testing and certifications for them have also been developed for these components. There are three categories of components: opaque (structural connections and assembly systems), transparent (windows and doors) and mechanical (ventilation and heat pumps).9 In addition to pre-certified components, once the exterior shell’s insulation and airtight control layers are connected on site, the enclosure must be physically tested to confirm that the airtightness performance goals have been met. In the test, a fan is used to pressurise and depressurise the building’s interior, measuring tightness. Without airtight confirmation, predictable performance is not possible. The result of this intensive modelling and on-site testing is a building which increases occupant comfort, is more durable, healthier and uses far less energy than a standard codeminimum structure.

BLDGtyp, Passive House Core Concepts, New York City, 2016 The Passive House approach utilises a ‘fabric first’ methodology and requires designers to focus on (1) continuous insulation, (2) durable airtightness, (3) the mitigation of ‘thermal bridges’, (4) the careful use of high-quality windows with climate-appropriate shading, and (5) the use of balanced ventilation with heat recovery.

The result of this intensive modelling and on-site testing is a building which increases occupant comfort, is more durable, healthier and uses far less energy

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A Timber-Frame Example Timber-frame construction has been employed for thousands of years, but in the post-war period of the 1940s and 1950s the timber-framed home was re-engineered to be as cheap as possible, with little thought to thermal comfort and durability. Architects, builders and owners struggled with low expectations of performance, as the heating and cooling systems would compensate for poorly built enclosures and deliver a minimum level of comfort. Working in the cold climate of Maine, Ecocor has been seeking new ways to build high-quality enclosures and set out to make an affordable timber-frame assembly that delivers predictable high performance. The result is a replicable assembly that can support a wide variety of architectural designs. Ecocor not only evaluated their proposed components and details with rigorous energy and comfort analysis using various computer models and techniques, but had the complete system certified by the Passive House Institute, in Darmstadt, Germany.10 The production of these advanced wall and roof elements utilises off-site fabrication techniques, and was moved from the job site to a new factory in order to ensure quality and streamline the construction. This system solves the key issues of airtightness, thermal insulation continuity, integrated daylighting, lower toxicity and moisture damage protection. When this robust wall assembly is combined with triple-glazed windows – for example in the Cabin 3000 project in Lake Hill, New York, by Barry Price Architects (completed in 2016) – the building can deliver dramatic energy savings while maintaining exceptional levels of occupant comfort. The approach to the assembly’s success is a focus on several questions: What is the arrangement of control layers, and how do they manage the various flows of energy, moisture, air and light? Where is the continuous insulation, and what is an appropriate level for this climate? Where is the continuous air barrier? What is the vapour profile, and what is the relative drying capacity? How will these critical control layers be protected for long-term durability? Looking closely at the build-up of the Ecocor wall assembly reveals how these control layers are organised and combined. First the exterior cladding uses a back-vented rainscreen technique where the boards are fastened to vertical furring strips. This technique protects the assembly from external damage from ultraviolet sunlight and force. The rear air-gap of the rainscreen increases the wall’s drying capacity, which improves the overall resilience and durability of the wall. Behind the furring, a high-performance weather-resistive membrane is installed. This membrane layer is a watertight, airtight and vapour-open building wrap, reinforced to withstand the stress of the assembly’s dense-packed cellulose insulation, and provides outboard weatherproofing of the assembly. The high vapour permeability of this layer increases the outward drying capacity but maintains the ability to resist liquid water. Beneath this cladding and weather barrier is the primary thermal control layer. A layer of continuous insulation is formed with blown-in dense-packed cellulose, installed between vertically placed wood I-Beams which form a ribbed ‘parka’. The cellulose is a recycled paper and a carbon sink that has the ability to move moisture from damp areas to dry areas

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Barry Price Architecture, Cabin 3000, New York State, 2016 opposite top: This cabin in New York State utilises the prefabricated Ecocor envelope systems with super insulation, airtight construction and triple-glazed windows. These strategies allowed the design team to create a building which uses much less energy than a conventionally built structure, while maintaining occupant comfort, health and durability. opposite middle: The superinsulated Ecocor wall system under construction here shows the outboard waterproofing membrane which is vapour-open and airtight. The membrane covers the dense-packed cellulose insulation and is covered by furring strips that form the air gap behind the rainscreen finish to ensure good outward drying potential. bottom: The wall assembly detail of the Ecocor high-performance enclosure shows a large amount of continuous insulation, airtightness and vapour control – protected by outboard rainscreen siding and an inboard service cavity with decorative interior finish.

and buffer moisture flows, which also increases the moisture resistance of the overall assembly. To achieve sufficient levels of resistance in the cold climates of the northeast US, the insulation can be 25 centimetres (10 inches) thick or more. The next layer is where the assembly gains its lateral stability and is made of wood structural sheathing, which also forms the primary airtight layer inboard of the insulation and may provide variable moisture vapour protection. In the dry winter season, the wood is more vapour-retarding and helps prevent wetting of the enclosure due to outward vapour drive; and in the summer season it is more vapour-open and allows more drying towards the interior of the assembly. Structural timber framing is of the sort recognisable on any US home, and uses small timbers spaced at regular intervals. Not only does this timber framing support the roof and floors above, but it also provides a ‘service cavity’ inboard of the airtight sheathing layer for the installation of all the building’s electrical, mechanical and plumbing services. Since services are run in this cavity, it limits the number of penetrations through the airtight layer, thereby greatly enhancing durability and overall airtightness. Additional insulation may be added at this framing service cavity if desired. The final interior finish is only decorative in function and may be damaged without damaging the performance of the assembly. Here it is made of simple gypsum wall board, but any finish desired could be installed here as all the key control functions have already been satisfied by other layers in the assembly. This example illustrates how buildings can provide improved occupant comfort and services while dramatically reducing energy use – a key component of our struggle with climate change. It only takes a commitment by architects to understand building science and apply that knowledge in a strategic and comprehensive methodology. By embracing this renewed focus on the enclosure – on the architecture itself – designers can create high-performance assemblies and affect great improvements in how our buildings are made and operated. 1 Notes 1. Jonathan G Koomey, ‘Implications of Historical Trends in the Electrical Efficiency of Computing’, IEEE Annals of the History of Computing, 33 (3), March 2011, pp 46–54. 2. ‘2012 Commercial Buildings Energy Consumption Survey: Energy Usage Summary’, 18 March 2016: www.eia.gov/consumption/commercial/ reports/2012/energyusage/index.php. 3. City of New York, ‘One City: Built to Last (Transforming New York City’s Buildings for a Low-Carbon Future)’, undated (2014), available for download at: www.nyc.gov/html/builttolast/pages/plan/plan.shtml. 4. Helmut Wagner, ‘Luftdichtigkeit und Feuchteschutz beim Steildach mit Dämmung zwischen den Sparren’, Deutsche Bauzeitung, December 1989, p 1,639. 5. See ‘Welcome to Pharos!’: https://www.pharosproject.net/. 6. See ‘‘About Us’, Passive House Institute website: http://passivehouse. com/01_passivehouseinstitute/01_passivehouseinstitute.htm. 7. ‘Thermal Comfort’, Passipedia (the Passive House Resource): www. passipedia.org/basics/building_physics_-_basics/thermal_comfort. 8. ‘Passive House Planning Package (PHPP)’, Passive House Institute website: http://passivehouse.com/04_phpp/04_phpp.htm. 9. ‘Component Database’, Passive House Institute website: https://database. passivehouse.com/en/components/. 10. ‘Certificate’: www.passiv.de/alte_komponentendatenbank/files/pdf/ zertifikate/zd_ecocor_passiv_en.pdf.

Text © 2018 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Images: pp 48-9, 54(t&c) © Barry Price Architecture; pp 50-3 © BLDGtyp, LLC; pp 54-5(b) © 475 High Performance Building Supply

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Clarke Snell

Practical Resilience Low-Tech Plug-and-Play Innovation in the SU+RE House

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Stevens Institute of Technology, SU+RE House, Hoboken, New Jersey, 2015 Before being shipped to the Solar Decathlon competition site in Irvine, California, the SU+RE House was constructed on the Hoboken waterfront across from Manhattan. It is hard to imagine abandoning these densely populated economic engines along the east Atlantic coastline, so how can we continue to build where flooding will reach higher levels and be more frequent due to climate change?

Advances in sustainable, resilient building can have little impact unless they are both affordable and easily repeatable. The SU+RE House was conceived with both of these imperatives firmly in mind. Guest-Editor Clarke Snell, who was in the project’s leadership group, highlights its emphasis on familiar rather than ultrahigh-tech materials, both minimising costs and facilitating the construction process. Describing its mechanisms in detail, he reports on how its floodproofing system was inspired by existing marineindustry technology, with elements designed as standalone products that could be used in other settings.

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Mitigating climate change is technologically a simple task. Proven materials and methods are readily available to deliver carbon-neutral buildings. Resilience to climate change, fundamentally durability in response to site, is already a basic part of an architect’s commission. The difficulty, therefore, is not technology or training. Really design professionals just need to do their jobs. The problem is that by definition climate change is communal, and a whimsical celebrity house here and an innovative upscale skyscraper there will not get that job done. To have the needed effect, we all have to do it, all of the time. Since meaningful response to climate change requires quick systemic change, design solutions need to effectively deliver sustainability and resilience to a broad range of projects immediately at present market rates. Essentially, architects and engineers are being asked to save the world for free. But how? Stevens Institute of Technology’s SU+RE House, the winning entry of the US Department of Energy’s 2015 Solar Decathlon completion, is a case in point in this context. Though built in Hoboken, New Jersey, shipped to Irvine, California for the competition, and now a permanent exhibit at the Liberty Science Center in Jersey City, the house was designed as a prototype of a holistic sustainable and resilient building system for coastal construction. It is a good case study first because it is a house, and the residential design/construction industry in the US is resistant to change for a number of reasons, including an informally trained workforce, typically inexperienced clients, and smaller project budgets, all of which leave very little room for experimentation. Second, as an entry from an engineering university in a design competition focused on sustainability, the project was able to consider both design process and practical innovation. In other words, it was an opportunity to investigate delivering sustainability and resilience in a market that has large barriers to entry. This article focuses on one aspect of the design: how to deliver a low-energy, floodproof building envelope at market rates.

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Design Constraints: Quantifying Sustainability and Resilience The genesis of the SU-RE House concept was Hurricane Sandy, the famous superstorm of the 2012 Atlantic hurricane season. The office, studio and workshop at Stevens Institute of Technology that were used for the project are located in a building that had been flooded by Sandy, so the need to deal with mitigating climate change while simultaneously adapting to it was lost on no one. At the same time, the response from the US Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to the storm had resulted in regulations requiring elevation of new construction out of the floodplain.1 Many student team members were from the Jersey Shore and knew that such a move, though practically sensible, would destroy the longstanding cohesion of shore neighbourhoods that rely on indoor and outdoor rooms that transition to the street. The decision was made to create a new sustainable and resilient residential paradigm for coastal communities. Early in the process, a set of design constraints were clearly defined to allow considerable creative latitude within a very tightly controlled programme. First and foremost, ‘sustainability’ and ‘resilience’ were rescued from abstraction and viewed not as moral positions but quantitative variables. Due to the belief that climate change mitigation is presently paramount, sustainability was defined in terms of project-associated carbon footprint. To offset carbon emissions, the Stevens team chose to design a building that could produce quite a bit more energy than it was projected to use, requiring a building envelope that considerably reduces heating and cooling loads. Designing to the Passive House standard was chosen as the most straightforward method of delivery, and was therefore locked in as a requirement from almost the first design meeting.2 In similar fashion, rather than conceived as an ominous, finger-wagging bullet point, resilience was concretised as durability over time. A baseline building lifespan was chosen, then present and projected future site conditions studied before any design development commenced. The prototype was designed for a New Jersey coastal condition exposed to high winds and back-bay (non-wave) flooding along with the typical high UV and saline environment of a seaside

The lure of an expressive but impractical design was avoided by consciously considering construction variables as design constraints.

FEMA’s concept of resilience in the face of more frequent flooding has been to dictate that new construction be elevated out of the flood zone. The SU+RE House project proposes a solution that would preserve the architectural fabric at street level.

location. Wind speeds and flooding frequency were projected to increase in coming years. Local building codes and typical practice already dealt with winds, UV and the caustic effects of salt air. In the SU+RE House, an enhanced structure to resist defined buoyancy forces, armouring against wind- and water-borne debris, and a building envelope floodproofed to at least 2 metres (6.5 feet) above grade were added as upfront programme requirements to round out the resiliency picture. Second, the lure of an expressive but impractical design was avoided by consciously considering construction variables as design constraints. Existing materials and methods were to be considered first due to a belief that there is plenty of efficiency to be gained by new focus on available technologies. The team limited its floodproofing palette to applying established marine industry materials and methods to existing low-energy building envelope construction practices, eliminating barriers to entry for motivated contractors and tradespeople. It was decided that where needed, innovation would be plug-and-play to encourage improvement and adoption by others while keeping new technology out of the established construction workflow. The commitment was also made to design for repetition, because – in the context of climate change – solutions need to be easily repeatable and scalable for quick market adoption. The team resisted formal complexity and the trap of ‘sustainability as image’. An efficient shape was chosen early on without sacrificing architectural intent, and buildability was always a central consideration in design discussions. Finally, project cost was creatively engaged as a design element. Cost parity to related projects in the target market was a fundamental mandate. However, in comparison to a standard house design, the programme called for considerable performance enhancements, some of which would clearly require additional physical components, which meant that the project would need to give more without costing more. All of the previously defined constraints were conceived to help meet this goal. In addition, the team committed to developing a marketing strategy as part of, and not after, a careful design process, therefore engaging rather than simply accepting the narrative of cost.

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Low-Tech Floodproofing: Passive House and the Marine Industry Project design constraints defined the envelope as a hybrid combination of existing low-energy building and marine industry materials and methods. It was noticed that a boat hull is a structural insulated panel (SIP), a well-established assembly for creating low-energy building enclosures. Building SIP skins are most often wood-based sheet goods, while in boats they are glass-fibre laminates. When used in buildings, the foam cores of SIPs are excellent insulators, while in boats they are part of an efficient buoyant waterproof shell. In both instances, the foam sandwiched between and bonded to continuous skins uses similar structural principles to create very strong panels.3 Therefore, to deliver floodproofing, why not simply build a boat configured to perform as a very low-energy house? This design thread provided many potential advantages including unbroken insulation, integral rather than applied floodproofing, standard methods for perfect joint-sealing against air and water leakage, and simple adjustment of insulation thickness for different climate zones. The biggest problem encountered was finding structural and fire code equivalence between glass-fibre composite panels and wood-panel-based SIPs designed for buildings. Used ubiquitously in craft designed for water, air and space travel, the technology was clearly there for the composites, but the regulatory infrastructure was not. A case in point and a cautionary tale for design processes that prioritise innovation. The eventual solution arrived at was simply to modify a conventional stick-frame envelope to deliver required thermal resistance, airtightness, and resistance to buoyancy forces with floodproofing applied as a layer in the floor and wall assemblies. Joint-sealing detailing was borrowed directly from proven marine practice. Performance enhancements were therefore accomplished through rearranging ubiquitous materials in existing construction details. The sage design advice of not fixing what isn’t broken was followed and proven durable, and easily repairable vernacular beach exterior and interior skins were employed. The result was an effective low-energy, floodproofed envelope that motivated contractors and tradespeople could build with a limited learning curve.

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Stevens Institute of Technology, SU+RE House, Hoboken, New Jersey, 2015 A model of the first envelope design direction in which the same composite panels would be used to form the floor, walls, roof, applied shutters and window plugs for the building. This solution solved a number of problems, but eventually fell prey to code restrictions.

The final building envelope is essentially a reorganisation and amplification of a well-established low-energy system.

To complete the floodproofing, barriers protecting fenestration from water, wind and flying debris needed to be devised that can quickly be deployed as a storm approaches, locking the house down while the occupants find safety off-site. This task required higher levels of innovation, so the team developed standalone products that could be applied to the existing envelope, thus enabling continued development towards a commercial product beyond the scope of this single project. A large expanse of southern glazing created a transition between indoor and outdoor rooms. As part of a Modernist tweak on classic passive solar design, the glass needed a large overhang to maximise winter and minimise summer solar gains. Movable bi-fold shutters were designed that when open provide this overhang. In the event of a storm, the shutters can be quickly closed and locked, compressing their gaskets against a structural frame. Marine hardware, gas springs, and a 6:1 mechanical advantage pulley system allow two people with limited strength to close the large foam-core glass-fibre composite panels. Fibre-laminate schedules were customised in each panel to balance weight and strength: the lower panel heavy and stronger to withstand the lateral and uplift forces of flood waters; the top panel lighter to allow for easier movement of the assembly. Using the same composite-panel technology, plugs were designed to cover the remaining fenestration, a straightforward application of existing marine hardware, gaskets and structural forms. Again, this technology is advanced and so panel thicknesses could be dialled in, allowing a thinner and lighter design since they cover smaller openings. Plugs were designed for easy storage and to be quickly fastened with integrated hardware by one or two people.

To complete the floodproofing, barriers protecting fenestration from water, wind and flying debris needed to be devised that can quickly be deployed as a storm approaches, locking the house down

above: Though construction of the envelope system requires attention to detail and a basic understanding of the building science behind its configuration, all of the materials used and installation procedures adopted would be familiar to any conscientious residential contractor. left: Envelope floodproofing was concentrated in a layer wrapping the underside of the floor system and continuing up the lower portion of the wall exterior extending above the base flood elevation. A proven sealant and flashing tape construction detail was borrowed directly from the marine industry and inserted easily as an extra step in the typical workflow.

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Stevens Institute of Technology, SU+RE House, Solar Decathlon, Irvine, California, 2015 above: The panel system was created as an open-source standalone product to encourage the transition of this technical solution from a custom research project to the niche residential market for which it was designed.

above: Large composite-panel bi-fold shutters act as solar shades when open, and floodproofing when closed. Integrated solar panels are part of a direct DC water-heating system that supplies hot water even during a grid power outage.

right: The shutters had an ambitious technical goal, but the materials used are essentially off-the-shelf marine parts: pulleys, ropes, cleats, compression latches and gas springs.

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Pricing for the Market The directive of the biannual Solar Decathlon competition is to design, build, deliver and operate a state-of-the-art solar-powered home. It is made up of 10 contests conceived to measure project performance, livability, innovation, affordability, marketability and educational message. In the Affordability contest, professional estimators reviewed plans and inspected the completed, fully functional SU+RE House at the competition site to determine a market cost using unionshop labour rates. These estimators determined a turnkey project price of US$275,000. For the Marketability competition, a jury of professionals assessed prepared marketing plans and toured the finished projects. Using the professionally estimated cost, the team’s narrative was that the local realestate market for the project had evolved quickly over recent decades, creating very high-priced plots holding older, sub-code buildings that are due for expensive renovation to bring them in line with current codes. Leveraging this fact and including energy savings and higher durability as part of the square-foot costs (monthly costs = mortgage + utilities + maintenance),4 it was posited that the project could be constructed at costs competitive with renovated market comparables. This would essentially deliver project energy savings and resilience features for free – an argument that convinced the professional jury and resulted in the SU+RE House team winning the Marketability contest.

Stevens Institute of Technology, SU+RE House, Hoboken, New Jersey, 2015 The same composite-panel technology used for the shutters was re-engineered to create strong, lightweight window plugs. A thin profile allows for easy storage, and simple hardware enables quick installation in response to a coming storm.

Research Versus Reality The SU+RE House illustrates at least conceptually how careful application of existing technology combined with judicious innovation and proactive involvement in defining costs can deliver great strides in sustainability and resilience at market prices. However, it is important not to paint too rosy a picture. The building envelope strategy employed in the project is an untested experiment applying partial floodproofing to a vapour open assembly with the assumption that vapour migration will not be significantly hampered. It would be irresponsible to deploy this detail to the general market without more study. In addition, the fenestration floodproofing solutions developed are not commercially available and therefore most likely outside the reach of the existing residential market. The fact that a student team got as far as it did in the development of these products is heartening, but the question remains: who will develop products for a market that does not yet accept the mandate to design for climate change? These issues of performance testing and product development underscore a general observation: that conscientious design alone cannot bridge the gap between conventional and climate-change-ready practice. Funding is required to support both basic research and product development in response to new climate-driven building conditions. The point has already been made that this is not a difficult technical issue. One need only view recent pictures of the earth taken by space probe Cassini from Saturn to be reminded of that fact. Clearly, if we have the will, we can easily find the way. 1 Notes 1. US Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), ‘Biggert-Waters Flood Insurance Reform Act of 2012’, 8 October 2013: www.fema.gov/media-library/ resources-documents/collections/341. 2. See Passivhaus Trust, ‘Passivhaus and Zero Carbon: Technical Briefing Document’, 5 July 2011: www.passivhaustrust.org.uk/UserFiles/File/Technical%20Papers/110705%20 Final%20PH%20ZC%20Brief.pdf. Also Passive House Institute US (PHIUS), ‘Project Certification Overview’: www.phius.org/phius-certification-for-buildings-products/ phius-2015-project-certification/phius-certification-overview. 3. Howard G Allen, Analysis and Design of Structural Sandwich Panels, Pergamon Press (Oxford), 1969, p 1–2. 4. Agnieszka Zalejska-Jonsson, Hans Lind and Staffan Hintze, ‘Low-Energy Versus Conventional Residential Buildings: Cost and Profit’, Journal of European Real Estate Research, 5 (3), 2012, pp 211–28.

Text © 2018 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Images: pp 56–9 © Stevens Institute of Technology, SU+RE House Team; pp 60, 61(b), 62(c&b) © Clarke Snell; p 61(t) © AJ Elliot; pp 62(t), 63 © Photography by Juan Paolo Alicante

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Clarke Snell and Alex Carpenter

SU+RE Power Energy Independence and the Sustainable Resilient Sun 64

Stevens Institute of Technology, SU+RE House, Hoboken, New Jersey, 2015 Through lowering operational energy demand, the SU+RE House produces a surplus of clean solar energy on site. By designing the renewable energy system to withstand violent storms, to keep producing in their wake, and even share some power with neighbours, the project approaches true energy independence.

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The use of solar power is the central requirement of the Solar Decathlon house design competition. GuestEditor Clarke Snell and SU+RE House student team member Alex Carpenter here describe why this is so crucial, and how the Stevens Institute entry fulfilled and exceeded this part of the brief. Its arrays of photovoltaic panels – conceived to resist the elements, and subdivided to ensure a constant supply even in the event of partial damage – provide more energy than the house requires. The surplus can be fed back into the grid, or diverted to an outdoor energy hub for use by neighbours if the grid fails.

Part of the power grid, Hoboken, New Jersey, 2017 Centralised electrical power grids are inherently inefficient, for example wasting about two-thirds of the primary energy embodied in coal through the production and distribution process. As a complex matrix of wires fanning out from power plant to user, it is also vulnerable to service outage. In short, it is neither sustainable nor resilient.

‘Fossil fuels are sustainable’ is a claim that no one makes. Most of the bad press that oil, coal and natural gas receive concerns their impact on climate change and how they are part of an approach to industry that is not sustainable on a macro scale. Even more fundamentally, though, fossil fuels are a one-off. As buried plant and animal tissue that has been naturally compressed and heated over hundreds of millions of years, they are a rarefied and finite resource. Fossil fuels are getting harder to find and more expensive to extract.1 We cannot make more, and we are running out. They are the definition of an unsustainable resource. Fossil fuels are also not resilient; they are sourced remotely and delivered over long, vulnerable supply routes. Gasoline starts as oil that is commonly moved by ship or pipeline many thousands of miles to be refined before trucks burn fuel to deliver more fuel to your local service station. After the herculean effort of digging it from deep inside the earth, coal is often shipped long distances by train or barge to a power-generating plant. In the process of producing and delivering electricity, about two-thirds of coal’s embodied energy is wasted at the plant and through being shipped out over a thick and snaking mat of wires, ominously dubbed ‘the grid’, to power our machines and operate our buildings. The inefficiency and vulnerability of this system is almost comical even before one considers the projected effect of the increasing frequency and force of storms that are a part of living in our current era of climate change. As we move forward into uncharted territory, we clearly need a sustainable and resilient energy source and delivery system on which to base our industry. The most obvious is the source of energy responsible for life on earth: the sun. Wind, hydro and biomass (sunlight turned to plant tissue through photosynthesis) are all engines driven by the sun. Solar photovoltaics (the direct production of electricity from sunlight) is the most versatile solar energy source for architecture since it offers easy building integration for on-site production, and plug-and-play installation. Buildings have a ready-made convenient installation location – the roof – that can simultaneously be optimised for performance and allows for architectural flexibility. Thanks to steady efficiency improvements along with growing industry and government support through the advent of net metering, renewable energy credits and other incentives, solar photovoltaic electricity (PV) is steadily dropping in price. Though calculations are complicated and variable-rich, PV is today in the ballpark of cost parity with coal-sourced electricity.2 PV also has the potential to be a very resilient energy source. Building integration allows for energy independence either through standalone or grid-tied with battery backup hybrid installations. Storage and the local distribution of energy via battery backups and microgrids make it possible to reduce the vulnerability and inefficiency of the centralised electricity grid. This makes storm resilience and adaptation to a changing climate much easier to accomplish while also increasing overall system efficiency, and therefore lowering demand.3 SU+RE Energy: Production Linked to Demand With all the promise of PV, its market share in the US is still small.4 One reason for this is that it is generally seen

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Stevens Institute of Technology, SU+RE House, Hoboken, New Jersey, 2015 The solar module is the basic building block of photovoltaic (PV) systems. When sunlight hits the panel, electricity is produced. Since sunlight blankets the planet, PV systems are born decentralised.

Stevens Institute of Technology, SU+RE House, Solar Decathlon, Irvine, California, 2015 Visitors to the SU+RE House at the Solar Decathlon competition site could not see the powerful renewable energy systems installed on the roof and storm shutters that produced much more power than the all-electric house required. On the right is the public bench with integrated AC and USB outlets for neighbourhood use during a power outage.

as an add-on, a way to get LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) points or display a conceptual dedication to sustainability as a vague ideal. This is missing the point. Renewable energy only delivers its full potential when part of a fully integrated system linking specific demand to associated production within a calculus encompassing full project lifecycle. On-site renewable production linked to project demand is a presently available and practical avenue to deliver projects with quantifiable rather than abstract sustainability and resiliency performance. A case in point is the SU+RE House in Hoboken, New Jersey, which was Stevens Institute of Technology’s entry in the 2015 US Department of Energy Solar Decathlon competition, and intended as a response to Hurricane Sandy, which had rocked America’s East Coast in 2012 causing extensive flooding and power outages, including in Hoboken. Conceived as a new sustainable and resilient paradigm for

coastal housing requiring energy independence and advanced floodproofing, the project programme mandated the design of a renewable energy system capable of providing 100 per cent of building operational needs while also maintaining production capacity in severe coastal weather within a flood zone. Sustainability was conceived primarily as a decoupling from carbon emissions, so the system needed to produce enough renewable energy to provide all of the house’s demand, with surplus production to offset some of the nonoperational energy carbon footprint. PV energy production is a function of available surface area exposed to solar radiation, which limits the amount of energy a site-installed system can produce. In order for the available physical space to accommodate a system large enough to completely power a project, the first step is therefore to reduce the energy demand of the building itself. To minimise this variable, the decision was made from the outset to design the SU+RE House to a Passive House standard.5 Careful micro- and macroclimate-based performance modelling informed design variables including high levels of insulation, airtight and vapour-controlled construction, attention to low thermal bridge detailing, high-performance glazing and integrated shading, all packaged in an efficient form. The result was an integrated system that guaranteed very low space heating and cooling loads. Daylighting strategies combined with highly efficient all-electric appliances and lighting along with computercontrolled monitoring and user feedback data produced a design with a predicted modelled energy demand 91 per cent lower than the norm in the project’s regional market (see Ed May’s article on ‘Modelling to Drive Design’ on pp 72–81 of this issue). Such low building-energy loads created the groundwork for an on-site renewable energy system to produce a surplus of electricity over operational demand. This energy is placed on the centralised electricity grid and used by others, essentially making the project a small clean-power utility responsible for a quantifiable amount of carbon emission reduction. The project then takes credit for this reduction as an offset to carbon embodied in the building’s construction, for example in materials manufacturing and transport. Such a strategy requires access to the grid as a place to distribute this surplus. The SU+RE House therefore required a grid-tied system. Using local historical climate data, system sizing took into consideration potential lower annual solar insolation as the result of possible increased storm activity linked to climate change. The result was a roof-mounted PV array projected to currently produce about 12,000 kilowatt hours (kWh) of electricity per year. Modelled annual building consumption based on the high-performance envelope was about 3,500 kWh per year. Producing this much energy would be called ‘site net zero’. ‘Source net zero’ is the on-site energy production of the building’s primary energy demand, meaning the demand adjusted for the inefficiencies in the centralised electricity grid discussed earlier. Primary energy demand for the project was calculated to be about 9,000 kWh to achieve source net zero production. This leaves a surplus of about 3,000 kWh per year produced by the array that can be made available to the grid, offsetting that amount of fossil-fuel energy production.

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As stated above, this surplus is how the SU+RE House project makes up for non-grid-related carbon emissions associated with its life cycle. The calculation to determine the true embodied carbon for any building project is complicated6 and was not undertaken. However, the actual number is not important. The point is that by linking demand and production in the design of an on-site energy system, the project is producing a surplus of renewable energy that is lowering its carbon footprint year after year through its service life.

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By linking demand and production in the design of an on-site energy system, the project is producing a surplus of renewable energy that is lowering its carbon footprint year after year

Stevens Institute of Technology, SU+RE House, Hoboken, New Jersey, 2015 above: PV systems were employed in space travel long before they graced the first building, so have long-proven durability. Off-the-shelf products, like these partially ballasted polyethylene trays ideal for the coastal environment of the SU+RE House, allow for durability customisation for the given project. below: The shutter-mounted PV array utilises thin film modules that added little weight to the panels. They are out of the flood plain when the shutters are closed, and produce electricity in either orientation. opposite middle: The SU+RE House is designed to produce 400 per cent more energy than it uses. However, to estimate real-world effects, two corrections were made to projected production: (1) climate data was adjusted to simulate lower solar insolation from increased storm frequency due to climate change; and (2) the inefficiency of the coalpowered grid was taken into effect. Even with these adjustments, the project still places about 3,000 kilowatt hours of truly surplus energy onto the grid annually, year by year moving it closer to carbon neutrality through its service life. opposite bottom: The SU+RE House uses two independent PV systems: a roof-mounted array and a shutter-mounted array. In turn, these were divided into discrete sub-arrays, allowing for the breakdown of individual parts without causing total system failure.

SU+RE Energy: Resilience Through Decentralisation Resilience is essentially durability in response to the microand macroclimate of a site. In our era of climate change, this means both the mundane, slogging daily wear-and-tear of climate (sun, wind, rain), and also adaptation to projected changes. The SU+RE House was designed for a coastal flood zone, so these changes included resistance to more frequent and more forceful storms as well as flooding. The roofs of buildings are brutal environments that can experience extreme heat and cold, rapid freeze–thaw cycles, and exposure to high winds. PV as a technology benefits from a long history in extreme location applications such as marine and space travel, so its basic durability is already high. PV systems require a limited number of standalone components; there are no moving parts or liquids under pressure. Conscious product selection based on climate specifics enhances their inherent durability. For example, the SU+RE House array modules were attached using a partially ballasted polyethylene roof-mounting system that is particularly suited to the corrosive salt air of a coastal environment, simple to install, and requires limited roof penetrations. A low mounting angle of 10 per cent was chosen to optimise the energy generated per square foot of roof area while ensuring minimal wind uplift as protection against severe storms. As the centralised power grid is not easily storm-proofed, a strategy had to be devised to protect the SU+RE House’s renewable energy production from the grid’s vulnerability to disruption. Part of the solution was to use transformerless inverters that allow system ‘islanding’ during a grid failure. Though the electrical engineering is more complicated, in summary the system switches from placing power on the grid to directing it to dedicated outlets in the building, allowing for non-grid power production and usage without storage requirements. Additionally, a separate system mounted on the building’s flood shutters is designed to heat water with direct DC solar electric input, and is completely decoupled from the grid. In daily use, this system provides domestic hot water, but in the event of grid disruption it is better understood as a liquid battery storing solar energy that could be used for cooking, washing and limited-space heating through a simple hydronic delivery system. The direct DC array supplies about 75 per cent of the house’s annual domestic hot-water needs, further lowering operational energy loads and demand from the roof-mounted array.

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Another resiliency strategy for the project was energy packaging. As outlined already, the production capacity was divided into two discrete array clusters: grid-tied roof mounted, and grid-decoupled shutter mounted. In turn, these systems were divided into sub-arrays. The roof array consisted of three independent strings serving two inverters. The DC electric hot-water array was divided into three discrete inputs running to three independent resistance coils. This approach allows damage to a part or parts of the system (panels, inverters, coils) to result in only partial loss of production, and not overall system failure. The individual resilience of this system was also conceived in a larger context. Initially, as perhaps the only renewable energy system in the area, system energy production in the wake of a storm-induced grid failure can be made available to the community by directing some of the islanded production to an outdoor power hub, allowing neighbours to charge portable electronics, flashlights and other critical equipment. As these PV systems proliferate in the neighbourhood, clusters can lead to small community microgrids where shared interest and support provide greater security and lower risk while simultaneously decreasing local energy demand through reducing distribution losses.7 To generate further capacity, community battery energy storage tied to microgrids can better support individual customers than home-integrated batteries, through the creation of an energy pool, similar to a health-insurance pool, spreading risk and maintenance across the group as well as levelling energy-use variance among individual homes. Decentralisation also adds another level of resilience by decreasing the area affected by a single point of failure. As they gain acceptance, battery energy storage microgrids should also help to increase the PV market share, thus establishing a feedback loop of reduced prices fuelling further demand.

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Stevens Institute of Technology, SU+RE House, Solar Decathlon, Irvine, California, 2015 opposite: The mechanical room features the home's solar inverters (left wall); electrical panel board, energy-monitoring equipment and emergency power-hub relays (back centre); PV DC electric hot-water heating unit (the white enclosure at the base of the hot-water tank); and the heating, cooling and ventilation systems. The placement of these systems optimises the space requirements and electrical wiring. below: The SU+RE House’s roof-mounted PV system is grid-tied, while the shutter array is decoupled from the grid, producing DC electricity to directly heat water.

As these systems proliferate in the neighbourhood, clusters can lead to small community microgrids where shared interest and support provide greater security and lower risk

The Future is SU+RE There is currently a dissonance between the theory and practice of architectural sustainability and resilience in the age of climate change. When discussing climate change specifically, the focus quickly and completely centres on the carbon emissions our buildings produce. The conclusion is straightforward and unequivocally energy focused: we need to wean ourselves off fossil fuels. However, when the topic turns to the architecture itself, the discourse becomes a nebulous ramble of LEED certifications, recycling programmes, bamboo furniture and social responsibility punctuated by the everpopular conceptual parti expressed as a formal gesture. Energy struggles to make the top-10 list, and this simply has to change. A basic piece of the puzzle is that solar integration and optimisation need to become defining design criteria, not afterthoughts. Projects like the SU+RE House illustrate how linking project demand to on-site production can create results that at least move the carbon meter in the right direction. At the same time, these integrated renewable energy systems have the potential for powerful resilience, customisable for the climate specifics of any project. A design approach that mitigates and adapts to climate change through fostering energy independence. What are we waiting for? 1 Notes 1. James Murray and David King, ‘Climate Policy: Oil’s Tipping Point has Passed’, Nature, 481 (7382), January 2012, pp 433–5. 2. Kadra Branker, Michael Pathak and Joshua M Pearce, ‘A Review of Solar Photovoltaic Levelized Cost of Electricity’, Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews, 15 (9), December 2011, pp 4470–82. 3. Paolo Tenti et al, ‘Distribution Loss Minimization by Token Ring Control of Power Electronic Interfaces in Residential Microgrids’, IEEE Transactions on Industrial Electronics, 59 (10), October 2012, pp 3817–26. 4. US Energy Information Administration (EIA), ‘Electric Power Monthly’: www.eia. gov/electricity/monthly/epm_table_grapher.cfm?t=epmt_1_01_a. 5. See Passivhaus Trust, ‘Passivhaus and Zero Carbon: Technical Briefing Document’, 5 July 2011: www.passivhaustrust.org.uk/UserFiles/File/Technical%20 Papers/110705%20Final%20PH%20ZC%20Brief.pdf. Also Passive House Institute US (PHIUS), ‘Project Certification Overview’: www.phius.org/phius-certification-for-buildings-products/phius-2015-projectcertification/phius-certification-overview. 6. Stuart McHendry, ‘The Embodied Energy and Carbon of Passive House’, Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, University of Strathclyde, 2013: www.esru.strath.ac.uk/Documents/MSc_2013/McHendry.pdf. 7. Chad Abbey et al, ‘Powering Through the Storm: Microgrids Operation for More Efficient Disaster Recovery’, IEEE Power and Energy Magazine, 12 (3), May/June 2014, pp 67–76.

Projects like the SU+RE House illustrate how linking project demand to on-site production can create results that at least move the carbon meter in the right direction. At the same time, these integrated renewable energy systems have the potential for powerful resilience, customisable for the climate specifics of any project.

Text © 2018 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Images: pp 64–5, 67-8 © Stevens Institute of Technology, SU+RE House Team; pp 66, 69(t) © Clarke Snell; pp 69(b), 70–1 © Photography by Juan Paolo Alicante

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Ed May

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Modelling to Drive Design

Honing the SU+RE House through Performance Simulations

Stevens Institute of Technology, Temperature and relative humidity percentage monitoring results, SU+RE House, Solar Decathlon, Irvine, California, 2015

Looking closely at the monitored performance for Monday 12 October 2015 to Thursday 15 October 2015 illustrates how well the home performed even as exterior temperatures climbed very high during the day. This granular level of performance data allowed the design team to optimise the home’s configuration during the competition.

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Digital simulation technologies are for the first time allowing designers to directly study and impact the flows of energy, water, air, heat and sound which affect a building’s occupants. The SU+RE House is a prime example of this. Guest-Editor Ed May, one of the Stevens Institute of Technology faculty leaders for the project and also a partner in the Brooklyn-based design and consulting firm BLDGtyp, looks closely at how it demonstrated the possibilities of integrating data and environmental analysis techniques into the architectural design process, to produce truly sustainable and resilient buildings. The architectural model has a long history within the profession. With the advent of digital models, their utility has expanded and now regularly includes not only highly photorealistic renderings and 3D models but fully immersive virtual-reality experiences. While digital 3D modelling tools are useful for developing and communicating the visual experience of a building, digital building performance modelling is now allowing for the design team to engage more fully with the non-visual aspects of their buildings. These latent aspects of building performance primarily include flows such as energy, heat, moisture, air, water, sound, movement and light. Using these tools, designers can quickly measure, document and manipulate these flows directly. The integration of performance simulation into the design process carries with it huge potential for increasing the comfort, durability and energy efficiency of our buildings through smarter decision making based on data. A digital simulation, like any form of architectural representation, requires the selective abstraction and inclusion/exclusion of certain elements of the building. This curation and model construction requires a great degree of experience and a clear view of what questions are being asked of the simulation. This ‘question seeking’ can be conceived of in a similar manner to the programming phase in a traditional

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BLDGtyp, 2D heat-flow simulation of window installation, Ozone Park Passive House, New York City, 2015 An example of how LBNL THERM is used to simulate interstitial temperatures on three versions of a window installation. The flow of thermal energy changes as the position of the window moves from interior to middle to exterior, which results in a modified internal surface temperature as well as a change to the ‘PSI value’ (Btu/hr-ft-F) that is used to quantify the thermal bridging at the installation site.

architectural design sequence. Through careful inquiry, the model maker works with the project stakeholders to identify the project goals and uncover areas of required investigation. Understanding what questions to ask is critical to the effective use of these tools and will change how and to what level of detail the model is built. The digital simulation process can be outlined as three basic steps: (1) the decision to pursue a simulation and the ‘question seeking’; (2) the actual construction and operation of the model; and (3) the interpretation and analysis of the model results. While the model construction and operation typically receives the most attention from users and requires the greatest amount of technical training, the effective deployment of a simulation actually depends much more on strategically defining the question and accurate interpretation of the outputs. The interpretation of the model outputs is a particularly consistent stumbling block for users of all experience levels and requires the model builders to have both a grasp of the basic science but also the experience to understand which are the key results to focus on. Relying on specialist practitioners to aid with this analysis and interpretation stage is probably unavoidable for the near term in order to gain effective use of these tools within the design process.

Though seemingly unavoidable at present, this reliance on outside domain experts for the construction and interpretation of these models is unfortunate, as it increases project costs, stretches project timelines and most likely results in less than optimal design solutions. A more effective approach would be for designers to engage more directly and fully with these new tools within the context of their existing design process. This approach is not new and has been attempted in various ways since the advent of digital simulation tools. The primary mechanism for providing these new tools to designers, however, has been through the construction of so-called ‘designer-friendly’ tools. These seek to reduce the model complexity and input variables enough to allow non-experts to deploy them without fear of erroneous results or significant up-front time commitments or training. Unfortunately, the experience to date has demonstrated that these simplified tools do not allow for designers to generate meaningful results. This is due both to the simplified inputs but also to a general lack of context for simulation results. For this reason, it seems clear that if they are to take advantage of the enormous potential of these new tools, design teams will need to educate themselves in the operation and interpretation of these models. While domain experts and specialist consultants will probably always have a role

in certain projects with non-standard construction or spatial configurations, in order to truly deliver better buildings across a broad range of project types it will be the designers themselves who will need to be the ones to do this work and fold it into their individual design process. Multiple Models for Multiple Problems: The SU+RE House Example In 2015, Stevens Institute of Technology successfully competed in the US Department of Energy (DOE) Solar Decathlon in Irvine, California. This international student competition challenges students from interdisciplinary design teams to fully design, build, operate and test sustainable solar-powered homes. While the contest itself only takes place for 10 days, the lead-up to it is an intensive multi-year effort by students and faculty to develop the final built work. The student design process of the Stevens team’s winning entry, SU+RE House, over the 2014–15 academic cycles offers a model of how a truly integrated design team can leverage the power of digital simulation to create innovative sustainable architecture which delivers outstanding occupant comfort, increased building durability and radically reduced energy consumption.

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Stevens Institute of Technology, Overall yearly energy gains and losses from the digital model, SU+RE House, Hoboken, New Jersey, 2015 A whole-building energy model was used to evaluate the home’s projected space-conditioning energy consumption over the winter period. A full accounting of modelling losses (left) and gains (right) is used to calculate the modelled yearly energy demand for heating (shown). A similar accounting is undertaken for the cooling energy over the summer period.

By implementing these models early, the information drawn from the models was able to shape and inform the design.

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Stevens Institute of Technology, Evaluating shading depth impact on energy demand using digital simulation, SU+RE House, Hoboken, New Jersey, 2015 The horizontal overhangs of the shutters on the south facade are designed to block summer sun which is high in the sky, while allowing winter sun which is lower in the sky to warm the building. Spaceconditioning energy consumption (y-axis) is plotted against shutter overhang depth (x-axis). As the depth is increased, the cooling energy is reduced, but heating energy increases. These competing desires intersect at a balance point representing the lowest total space-conditioning energy consumption.

A whole-building energy model was executed by student team members using two primary tools: first a numerical steady-state model called the Passive House Planning Package (PHPP), and then a full dynamic model using transient systems simulation software package TRNSYS. Both of these models rely on detailed geometric inputs, material and climate data as well as occupancy profiles to calculate the yearly energy consumption. By implementing these models early, the information drawn from the models was able to shape and inform the design. Decisions about formfactor, glazing distribution, assembly and construction details, shading and building orientation were all informed by the results from the models. During the project’s development, several tools were used to assess the interior daylighting, both for baseline illuminance levels but also for the assessment of critical comfort glare issues. The primary tool used for this analysis was the ‘Ladybug’ expansion of the popular parametric 3D modelling environment Grasshopper® for McNeel’s Rhino®. This tool requires a detailed 3D model of the interior spaces with critical surface material parameters such as reflectivity being input. Using historical weather data, a series of pointin-time analyses were undertaken to evaluate the interior performance levels. Critical viewpoints were evaluated for both minimum surface illuminance levels but also discomfort glare potential. The results of these analyses drove the selection of interior finishes as well as the deployment and geometry of exterior shading elements such as overhangs and louvres, and fed into decisions about the electric lighting design and specification.

The results of these analyses drove the selection of interior finishes as well as the deployment and geometry of exterior shading elements

Stevens Institute of Technology, Detailed predicted hourly heating and cooling energy use from a dynamic simulation tool, SU+RE House, Hoboken, New Jersey, 2015 The student team used the dynamic energy modelling platform TRNSYS to simulate the building’s energy consumption and environment. Interior and exterior temperatures as well as heating, cooling and dehumidification energy demand are modelled on an hourly basis.

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Stevens Institute of Technology, Shadow study using Rhino Grasshopper Ladybug, SU+RE House, Hoboken, New Jersey, 2015

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In order to design the solar louvres of the home, careful solar analysis of the south facade glazing was undertaken in parallel with the whole building energy model. The targets from the energy model were used to guide the louvre spacing, shape and placement.

While daylighting and energy consumption were both foregrounded during the architectural design and specification phase, a parallel track of in-depth mechanical system simulations were undertaken by the student team as well, particularly in regards to the home’s hot-water system. While most single-family home hot-water systems rely on simple boilers for heat generation, some sustainable projects may include a so-called ‘solar thermal’ system which use solar energy to heat domestic water through exterior (usually rooftop) panels. The Stevens Institute of Technology team decided to pursue a fully electric solar hot-water system, using products which are not readily available and working with a hot-water tank manufacturer to create a custom solution. This system was integrated with the building’s facade and ‘solar shutters’ and was able to use electric power to directly feed the hot-water system. Clearly the creation and integration of a fully custom mechanical system is a large task, and the team relied on a detailed system model, executed in TRNSYS, to evaluate and design both the mechanical components but also the solar photovoltaic facade-integrated elements and controls. Through these simulations, a complete low-energy hot-water system was executed which was able to deliver a significant amount of

Stevens Institute of Technology, Hot-water system monitored results, SU+RE House, Solar Decathlon, Irvine, California, 2015

‘free’ hot water to the building using only solar energy and without any fluid, pumps, heat exchangers or complicated user-controls. During the detailing phase, a fourth distinct simulation tool was deployed in order to evaluate the durability and energy efficiency of the proposed construction details. Students on the architectural detailing team used THERM, a program developed by the US’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL), to iterate through design alternatives, and relied on the feedback from these simulations to drive material, fastening, sequencing and assembly decisions. The team focused on reducing the thermal bridging through all connection details such as building corners in order to reduce the building’s overall heat loss. In addition, the students used the simulations to evaluate interior surface temperatures for minimum critical levels, to avoid condensation and mould risk. This phase was perhaps the clearest example of why digital simulation tools need to be integrated into the individual designer’s toolkit. The designer executing the detailing must be able to simultaneously perform simulations if this tool is to be used effectively; the time lag between generating a detail and sending it off for subconsultant review and simulation is clearly prohibitive to effective use.

The measured results from the final photovoltaic solar–thermal hot-water system clearly show how well the final system functioned, with only minimal heat-pump energy consumption. The bulk of the home’s hot-water energy comes directly from the solar photovoltaic system which dramatically reduces the overall energy consumption.

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Stevens Institute of Technology, 2D heat-flux simulation of the typical roof-to-wall joint, SU+RE House, Hoboken, New Jersey, 2015

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Heat flux (Btu/hr-ft2) is simulated with LBNL THERM and mapped for the typical wall-to-roof junction. The areas of high heat flux (red) are locations of thermal bridging where thermal energy is able to ‘bypass’ the insulation layer. By utilising a triple-layer insulation strategy with continuous exterior mineral wool insulation, these thermal bridges from framing can be significantly reduced.

Stevens Institute of Technology, Predicted energy consumption of the SU+RE House versus a typical New Jersey home, 2015 As a result of a focus on the building envelope and energy performance, the team was able to predict a 91 per cent reduction in energy consumption relative to an average New Jersey home. This dramatic reduction in energy is accomplished while still delivering a comfortable, durable and healthy building, thanks to careful design.

The creation of more comfortable, durable and efficient buildings through these technologies is clearly possible, but it will require designers to be open and engaged with these exciting new methods.

Lessons from the SU+RE House Process Clearly the student team here was able to integrate these tools into their process well. This was accomplished both due to good organisation and planning, but also thanks to the interdisciplinary nature of the team which included both architects and engineers sitting at the table together throughout the entire project development. Even in the context of this successful project, however, certain clear challenges to the adoption of these new tools were immediately apparent. First, the models themselves clearly need to be built in a manner which allows for iteration and testing while maintaining quality levels and speed. By allowing the design team to adjust critical parameters such as glazing areas, shading or assembly build-ups, optimised solutions can be found through iterative analysis. Creating a design process for this type of optimisation is both a tool problem and a process problem, but if designers are to be expected to take up these new programs then certain measures will need to be implemented to ensure that the models are built in a robust and task-appropriate manner. More importantly than concerns about the model construction, though, is the fundamental issue of interpreting the results appropriately. This is related to the very first step of ‘problem seeking’ and making sure that the right questions are being asked. It is clear that both students and professionals alike can have unrealistic expectations of these tools, and it should be understood very clearly that these tools are only helpful if they are used to answer the right questions. They have immense capabilities for reducing building energy consumption, as well as increasing durability, but it is up to the designer to use them wisely and with clear intent. One potential solution to this issue is an increased use of external standards or certifications to establish clear project performance goals. Standards such as EnergyStar, Passive House, LEED, Living Building Challenge, WELL Building and others can provide critical assistance with the establishment of project goals and relevant threshold levels. Particularly for the inexperienced designers engaging with these tools for the first time, having an outside marker or target can prove to help put in place functional and conceptual boundaries which will aid in the evaluation of the simulation results and provide relevant scales for evaluation and decision making. Digital simulation tools are a clear evolution of traditional methods of evaluating the built object. These tools allow designers to now ‘see’ how their design decisions will affect the flows of energy, light, heat, sound and more. But it is also becoming clear that while these tools have tremendous potential, for their power to be fully realised it will require designers to integrate these simulation technologies into their design process. The creation of more comfortable, durable and efficient buildings through these technologies is clearly possible, but it will require designers to be open and engaged with these exciting new methods. 1

Text © 2018 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Images © Stevens Institute of Technology, SU+RE House Team

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Brady Peters

BIG, Villa GUG, Aalborg, Denmark, due for completion 2018 Computational fluid dynamics (CFD) spatial draught rating (DR) analysis of main living space. The analysis shows low DR in the living room. White =