Modern Chemistry is Essential to Sustainable Building Design
Article originally from Modern Materials magazine.
A new set of policies promote energy efficiency in federal buildings, thus raising the ante on sustainable design and building requirements. Now the design and construction communities are working together to determine what compliance measures will be required.
Over time, architects and engineering firms have recognized that buildings in the U.S. consume 40% of our fossil fuels and greater amounts of energy per square foot on average than our counterparts in other regions of the world. Now they are taking initiatives toward designing and producing energy efficient buildings. As a result, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) established regulations that require all new federal buildings to achieve at least 30 percent greater energy efficiency than that of the current building codes.
Months into the adoption of the new buildings standards, it is still unclear what construction techniques will be necessary, what technologies will help ensure that buildings meet the new energy efficiency requirements, and what new materials may come into use.
“It’s a whole new world,” says Tim Christ, who led the design team for Morphosis on the General Services Administration (GSA)-owned U.S Federal Building project in San Francisco, Calif. “It’s a constantly shifting landscape. Congress passed the Energy Independence Act, but nobody really knows what that means right now. How one gets there is still the 64 thousand-dollar question.”
In recent years, GSA has strived to make sustainable design the foundation of building excellence in federal projects. For example, since 2003, GSA has required that all of its buildings receive certification through the U.S. Green Building Council’s Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) Rating System™.
Today, as Morphosis is just beginning to work on a border station federal building project with GSA and DOE, they find themselves struggling to apply the new energy efficiency standards. In the short-term, there are some energy efficiency provisions that focus on specific aspects of construction and how they comply with the Act.
However, these energy efficiency benchmarks are more aggressive and are now required to be used by federal builders in an integrated approach when constructing new buildings. The new policies address energy efficiency through overall building performance, instead of relying on prescriptive requirements that require specific building materials, components, and systems.
Sustainable building design will increasingly depend on the essential products of chemistry. For example, site design and building orientation are central to up-front planning that includes solar analysis, which evaluates how natural light will be delivered to the site. In this way, spaces will likely be engineered with chemistry innovations such as solar walls that produce more energy and provide more shade when needed.
Federal regulators and the design community are engaged in an active dialogue about how best to achieve these new energy standards. With the potential to save more than 40 trillion Btu and reduce carbon dioxide emissions by two million metric tons over the next ten years, the future design of federal buildings is closely tied to the sustainable energy saving products of today.