During our our eco-charrette for the Oregon Sustainability Center, we took some time to examine the role that people play in buildings. Apart from the energy and resources that go into constructing a building, with no one inside, a building becomes energy neutral. But once you add the human element and begin to provide for the health, safety and welfare of building occupants, environmental impacts become substantial.
The energy and resource intake and expenditures of a building are mostly around our need to control our environment. We rarely think of occupants as being part of the building, but people are actually the Building’s Metabolism™. Bodies generate heat and absorb it. Ventilation, heating and cooling, the materials that come into the building and the solid waste goes out all contribute to making ourselves comfortable. Our presence and actions place demands on the entire system. As an organism within the building’s metabolism, it’s vitally important to look at our function and responsibility.
Passive Buildings/Active People
We have made our buildings so complex and automated them to such an extent that we have removed ourselves from the process. Occupants expect a building to provide ideal temperatures, optimal light conditions, and all the water they desire without thinking about the resources captured to maintain these benefits. Moreover, the way people do interact with these systems is unpredictable, and individual actions can have large ripple effects.
It’s time to reincorporate the human element into the building function from the earliest phases of design through operations. Rather than overly automating building systems, let’s use our automation technology to give people feedback on their actions and increase accountability. Can we break down information so that what is happening within a building is understandable at the building, organization and personal levels? Facilities personnel should be provided with real-time comprehensible information about how their equipment is performing and what the ramifications are if they alter recommended settings. Occupants could learn to consume fewer resources if they had feedback mechanisms and understand what they do. Imagine a “dashboard” at the restrooms sinks that shows how much water is used if the faucet is left running, or an energy panel in individual office areas that displays the amount of electricity it takes run your personal equipment (computer, cell phone, task light, ipod, etc.) and the impact of turning these things off before you leave your desk.
It becomes important to ask ourselves, how much control over nature do we have to exert to experience comfort? Looking at building programming in new ways could also help bring the people back into the equation of building function. What if there were no specified workstations and we no longer tried to maintain a consistent temperature in all work areas during all seasons? A space conditioning allowance for each floor would let us create areas that are warmer, cooler, brighter, and darker. With a smart monitoring system, an occupant could look up the temperature and illumination (weather) of a specific area and select where they want to be rather than being forced into a general “ideal.”
The Living Building Challenge asks a building to become part of a building, like a system in nature. As the largest component in a building’s metabolism, can we do more? Can we forego our need to control nature and, instead, work within it to become part of the solution?
By Ralph DiNola, GBS Principal, Associate AIA, LEED Faculty