Demand for heightened building performance is taking shape in an emerging green architectural style that emphasizes harmony with natural systems over signature design elements.
“Buildings should be treated as organic entities,” Peter Busby, managing director at Perkins + Will, an architecture firm specializing in sustainable design, told attendees at the Canada Green Building Council’s (CaGBC) 2014 national conference in Toronto earlier this year.
In a presentation entitled, The Changing Face of High-Performance Design, he explored a still somewhat novel angle for a philosophy that favours function over form — the aesthetics and visual impact of green architecture.
Examples of beauty in combination with pragmatic capability are nevertheless plentiful. Nature — and plants in particular — provided three themes for Busby’s discussion of architecture’s evolving image. Notably, plants: sustain themselves: adapt to their environment; and, in doing so, prosper.
“They live for millennia and humans currently don’t have that reputation,” he quipped.
On-site water treatment and net-zero energy offer examples self-sustaining building systems, while soaring interest in resiliency, triggered by various extreme weather events, dovetails with the concept of adaptation. Potential to prosper might be found in the burgeoning economies of scale for green products and technologies.
For example, Busby forecasts an imminent upsurge in the use of photovoltaic (PV) panels as the price (now at $2.50 to $3-per-watt) continues to fall in step with dramatic improvements in efficiency, which is projected to double in watts-per-lumen output within the next three years.
“Around $1 per watt it becomes cost-effective to put PV on the surface of your building,” he said.
Yet, even if cost-effective, energy-efficient measures are something of a slam-dunk when hidden from sight behind opaque surfaces, they can become a matter of intense and differing opinion when exposed for all to see. Green architecture’s ability to prosper is also linked to acceptance of new, sometimes unprecedented structures in public space — a cultural shift that Busby contends is now in progress.
In almost every era linked to a predominant architectural style, great buildings have been identified primarily for their iconic structural presence. “They were done for show or fashion,” he observed.
That bias is still apparent in the popularity of showpiece public and cultural buildings such a museums and theatres, but extra appraisal measures have been added to the scale. Buildings may also be judged for their environmental footprint and effect on occupants’ health, productivity and well-being.
Busby commends various green building programs and broader environmental efforts that contribute expertise, rationale and momentum for architecture’s evolving face and shape. Although first-generation LEED buildings were often largely indistinguishable from the conventional buildings nearby, the now almost standard pursuit of higher-level Gold and Platinum certification introduces more detectable clues.
“Certified and Silver buildings are not so significant anymore,” he reported. “Our clients are getting more educated. The market is changing.”
LEED’s remarkable strides in market transformation are tied to visible outcomes including how buildings are oriented on their sites, the choice of cladding, size and location of windows, and exterior features such a green roofs, shading devices, solar PV panels or vertical-axis wind turbines. Storm water treatment ponds, bioswales and a new trend toward indigenous plants are likewise transforming grounds and landscaping.
Design solutions to increase resiliency or promote health can alter the traditional configuration and use of space, particularly at the ground floor level. For example, positioning the staircase as a dramatic focal feature of the lobby can subtly urge more people to use it.
“Hide the elevators; make people take the stairs,” Busby advised.
Meanwhile, giving up leasable space to accommodate key infrastructure above grade is a smart move to safeguard the capital asset. “We used to put transformers and equipment rooms in the basement because that’s where the cheapest space was, but no more,” he said.
“Green building design strategy and resiliency design strategy have an awful lot in common,” he added. “Buildings that anticipate climate change are resilient.”
Looking to emerging technologies, Busby predicted CFD (computational fluid dynamics) software will be widely used to support modelling in the design phase, while biomimicry will influence the choice of building materials.
“We can find materials that react to moisture and thermal conditions and provide passive performance in building envelopes,” he said.
Other green building initiatives like the 2030 Challenge, the Passive House standard and the Living Building Challenge are in line with Busby’s three plant-inspired stems of sustainable design. Indeed, architects were the target-setting agents of the 2030 Challenge, which aims to cut fossil fuel consumption by half in both the construction and operation of new and renovated buildings, and attain carbon-neutral status by 2030. He credits the idealized goal for capturing the public imagination.
“It has proved politically extremely popular,” Busby noted. “Seeing this building performance in practice is more of a challenge. There still aren’t many of them.”
The Passive House Institute tallies about 40,000 buildings worldwide that meet its design criteria for a building envelope free from thermal bridging, incorporating triple glazing and achieving at least 75 per cent heat recovery over the total system. This is meant to achieve annual energy intensity of no greater than 120 kilowatt-hours per square metre.
To date, low-rise apartment buildings remain the most ambitious North American applications of the standard, which has been used for larger commercial and institutional buildings in Europe. Yet, even on a small scale, the standard gives form to a distinctive architectural style.
“This is a change in the way buildings look because of the attention to the envelope,” Busby explained.
Buildings that interact passively or benignly with the environment are merely the penultimate aspiration, however. In the next step, green building proponents foresee more projects like the Vale Living with Lakes Centre at Laurentian University in Sudbury, Ontario, which deploys limestone exterior cladding to neutralize acid rain and balance the pH of storm runoff. Such development serves to heal the environment, or return more benefits to nature than it extracts.
“The critical idea is about materials being more than passive,” Busby said. “We are looking to regenerative design standards going forward.”
Barbara Carss is editor-in-chief of Building Strategies & Sustainability and Canadian Property Management.