Home | Site Map | Blog | Contact | Resources | Links

Building Green still way to go for Condo Developers

Building Green still way to go for condo developers

Article By: Jennifer Smith - Kelowna Capital News

Published: December 20, 2008 12:00 PM
Updated: December 22, 2008 6:38 AM

If there’s a message for the moment in the building industry, it’s at the base of Enterprise Way.
“Green building design: A sign of things to come” a white billboard boasts over a graphic of a field of grassy green that should have been development gold.
Cleaner, greener, leaner construction has been selling condominium complexes across B.C. on this sort of message for the better part of a decade as the province converts to smaller, more energy-efficient homes.
Then just last month, the bubble burst, leaving hope of completing larger, multi-family developments in the lurch.
Now all most Okanagan developers can do is finish what they’ve started and let the grass on their empty lots grow as they wait for better days ahead. On one hand, the timing couldn’t be worse.
With the provincial government demanding high-end energy and environmental standards for their buildings, and private industry turning to the green movement for marketing prowess, it seemed the stage was set for a green building revolution—until the stock market crashed.
But a group of local consultants say they still believe greener pastures lie ahead for those willing to try truly eco-friendly design.
They’re hoping the industry’s misfortune can be the average customer’s gain, as the slower pace of construction gives those who design our homes and offices a chance to rethink how green, energy-efficient claims are addressed.
Building outside the box
Kevin Ryan, Dan Tatham and Emmanuel Lavoie are not your average group of building consultants.
This fall, as the world teetered on the brink of financial ruin, the architect, industrial designer and engineer decided to band together, introducing a different way of designing buildings that could save their customers plenty of money.
Their collaborative approach gives them a chance to share information from the ground up rather than passing plans off to one another as the process unfolds—and it’s not exactly new.
Around the world, building professions come together on projects on a routine basis, but there is no one-stop local shop poised to offer this approach.
And in sharing their ideas, the three have developed an environmentally attuned philosophy to building that takes the green focus out of green building.
With a more holistic view of the built environment they say they can offer tailor-made solutions to the problems our environment throws at us, rather than a one-size fits all approach.
The BlueGreen Consulting team believes the cookie-cutter housing we’re used to has deprived North American cities from really using the free energy and water the earth already offers.
Rather than including resources like the sun, the wind and the rain in our building designs, we’re all too quick to plug a predesigned home into an expensive, unsustainable well of city resources—and pay through the nose for the convenience.
Lavoie is the engineer for the group. He says his profession should almost be aiming to build themselves out of a job—at least on the back end.
What the construction industry should be working towards is getting engineers involved at the beginning of the design process to build neighbourhoods that need as little mechanical intervention as possible.
With good design techniques and natural site-specific materials that allow buildings to heat and cool themselves as much as possible, engineers can help their customers save plenty on bills and even more of the earth’s resources.
Balancing the blue with the green
When you look at the earth from a distance, there’s a balance between the blue and the green.
The BlueGreen Consultants believe building healthy, energy-efficient buildings is about striking that balance, not just sealing up windows and doors to save heat.
“The global biosphere is a land and air and water environment,” says Ryan, whose primary role as an architect is with Coast Architectural Group.
“We’re very focused right now on green. Green is the colour of the land and things related to the land and we’re thinking of physical products.
“But we want people to think about the water too, about rain water and water conservation, and about the air.
“It’s about how the building affects the earth, not just the land it sits on.”
Ryan went through architecture school during the 1970s energy crisis, a time when the world was just starting to realize the answer to a draft couldn’t always be: turn up the heat.
He studied rammed-earth buildings developing an appreciation for how natural products, like compressed-earth blocks, emulate how the body heats, cools and ventilates.
Educated in Britain, he was required to study thermal and water vapour dynamics as part of the regular design and permit process of a building.
But after he came to North America, he discovered the building codes simply require builders to use a sheet of high-grade plastic in the walls called the vapour barrier and generic insulation standards to block cold air and moisture out.
What this means for the building is that the moisture of our daily lives also cannot get out, anymore than fresh air, free of harmful environmental toxins can get in.
Unless an engineer puts the proper mechanics in place, mold and mildew will build inside the building.
This is why you turn on the fan when you shower and it’s also part of the reason our houses cost so much to operate.
But it doesn’t have to be this way according to Lavoie, Ryan and Tatham, who say better design up front can save a lot on mechanical intervention.
“We just want to take it back to some of the fundamentals and be able to design buildings to the optimum performance for comfort and health,” said Ryan.
In a traditional design process, the architect designs the building and puts a contract out to tender for an engineer. The engineer adds heat and air conditioning and ensures that haze from the shower and boiling pot of spaghetti water can clear.
The roles are very defined and there’s little interaction between the professions involved.
If an architect decides they like the look of a three-storey wall of glass facing south with no overhang, it’s up to the engineer to ensure the occupants of the building survive that decision.
“They build the fishbowl; we cool it off,” says Lavoie. “It’s that simple.”
Some architects make the process pretty formulaic. They’ve got their building process down to a science whereby the engineer just needs to show up and plug the holes.
But it isn’t necessarily the healthiest or most efficient way to build, as far as they’re concerned, because there may be advice the engineer, or other professionals, could have given along the way to tweak how the product unfolds (and maybe eliminate that three-storey glass wall).
This is where the BlueGreen philosophy comes in.
If all of the players are involved up front, the likelihood of maximizing how natural resources can be used is that much greater, they believe.
And a building that’s truly good for its surroundings and has little to no impact on the earth should be healthier for those who live in it.
Revisiting the plastic wrap vapour barrier
One way to really maximize those resource, is to eliminate the vapour barrier and design the walls for vapour permeability, according to Ryan.
“It’s like going out for a hike in the rain. You could wear a plastic raincoat and that would keep the water out, but it also traps your own moisture in,” he said.
“So instead you wear Gore-Tex and it keeps the rain out but it’s still breathable.”
Most of us understand these concepts when it comes to our clothing choices, but that understanding has yet to be connected to the buildings we live in—though the provincial building regulations are moving in this direction.
Until recently, the vapour barrier was mandatory in B.C., but the BlueGreen team believes there are now ways around the building code’s prescriptive requirements, if the case can be made that the building is still protected from mold and mildew.
The team says the vapour barriers do work in some cases, but that good design leaves plenty of room for other solutions that require less energy to maintain and may prove healthier in the long run.
In Scotland, for example, they’re developing a breathable insulation to filter the air while keeping warmth inside.
And Tatham has some modeling solutions that can help designers start building custom environmental solutions they might not bother to look for if a blanket solution to energy efficiency, the vapour barrier, is in place.
Most building, particularly of individual homes, doesn’t require an industrial designer like Tatham to offer expertise.
But he has started using a new product called building performance analysis software to help the team detect how the buildings the structures they are working on will react to various design choices out in the elements.
The software works by placing the building in its weather zone. In the Central Okanagan, for example, Tatham can call up the variables for a Summerland climate, where the closest weather station is located, and instantly work with average temperatures, wind, rainfall data and find out where the sun will be at any given point in the day, at any time of the year.
“It really gives the architect an understanding of the impact their decisions are having in the early stages. Otherwise it’s all just gut feeling, and there are things you can find out from doing the research that don’t come from intuition,” Tatham says.
He recently discovered, for example, there was more heat on an easterly window in a building he was modeling, than on a westerly one because the building was angled slightly.
Optimizing and minimizing sun exposure can dramatically affect how the temperature is regulated without ever having to employ outside energy—so Tatham’s findings could be instrumental for both architect and engineer.
Build the building right and it should be around for 100 years or more, he says, and that’s really the ultimate environmental solution to reducing waste and energy consumption.
Living building: Returning to our roots
Two years ago, the Cascadia Green Building Council, an industry-based advocacy group, launched the living building challenge, asking the building industry to design a structure so environmentally attuned it performs like a flower: Generating the power it needs, collecting water from its surroundings, even educating those who travel between its walls on sustainable living.
What BlueGreen Consultancy is aiming for looks a lot like that a living building concept, treating the built structure as a third skin—so you have the skin, the clothes and then the building all working harmoniously to heat, cool and ventilate the spaces we live in.
The three say they hope to get people thinking about how the human body reacts to the built environment, but their methods may not work for everyone.
For one thing, no truly green, energy-efficient building will ever be 4,000 square feet in size for one family.
“We’re not building a hybrid hummer here,” says Ryan. “You can’t just buy sustainability.”
The team wants to start using more earth-friendly materials in their designs, products that don’t need to be shipped around the world causing more environmental pollutants.
They’re certain a more thoughtful design process, which takes the time to include the best possible building materials for the elements involved in each project, will give their clients a healthier product in the end. And they’ve already had a few bites.
Today they have three BlueGreen projects on the go and they believe there’s more to come. Whether others will follow remains to be seen, but for now, they’re working, even in an economic slump.
jsmith@kelownacapnews.com

© Copyright Black Press. All rights reserved.

Copyright© KelownaHome.com, 2010 all rights reserved. Terms of Use | Privacy Policy | Disclaimer
Each office is independently owned and operated.