ABSTRACT
Buildings currently account for 75% of the carbon emissions on the planet, so if we are serious about reducing greenhouse-effects we need to explore better ways to design and construct buildings to achieve improved energy performance. With buildings consuming circa 50% of the United States’ total energy, we should re-examine past practice; building envelopes can no longer be passive, they must become dynamic and adaptive. The development of adaptive buildings requires early design collaboration to examine trade-offs versus energy costs for heating and cooling. Achieving optimized building envelopes requires design to be integrated across disciplines. Selection of curtain wall, glass substrates, solar shading devices, fixed/operable windows, and window sizes requires critical analysis relative to the building’s global site positioning and solar orientation, as well as weather, wind, and context within its built environment. We can develop building envelopes designed to accept or reject free energy from the external ecosystem, and as a result, reduce the cost of power required to achieve a comfortable, internal environment. Case studies such as “The Bow”, Encana’s headquarters in Calgary; Aura, Toronto’s tallest 78-story condo tower, now under construction; and DFR 57, a residential rental project in New York City, will be featured to demonstrate how with collaboration and technology, the AEC industry can bring intelligence to performance-based design and achieve more energy efficient buildings.
