Past Meetings

A “passive” approach to building design uses architectural and building enclosure elements aligned with local, micro-climate considerations to meet thermal comfort requirements. This can significantly reduce the need for “active” mechanical and electrical equipment that would typically provide heating, cooling, ventilation and lighting. Ideally, a truly passive building would eliminate the need for active equipment all together. This presentation will discuss common passive design features and their potential for reducing annual energy consumption, including case studies from building projects where passive strategies have been employed.

Susan Hayes, P.Eng. is a mechanical engineer with a focus on sustainability and energy efficiency. She is experienced in the design of low-energy mechanical systems and energy modeling in a variety of software tools. Susan’s project accomplishments include: leader of the LEED energy modeling team for the Vancouver 2010 Olympic Athlete’s Village; mechanical consultant for Vancouver’s first LEED Gold office building and presenter at a number of seminars and events. Prior to joining RDH in early 2012, Susan worked as a designer for a mechanical engineering firm and as sustainability project manager at an integrated design firm.

CLSB - Collaborative Life Science Building is an extremely complicated, hyper-fast construction schedule project with several large clients and an amazing set of functions housed within the building. The building enclosure was developed with key lessons that will apply to most other building types. The complexity of the schedule, team, functions, and enclosure performance program all combined to make an interesting project. This course is intended to share the lessons that have been learned and are continuing to evolve through construction.

1 LU HSW/SD

Recognized as one of the leading sustainable envelope experts, Sean Scott has influenced sustainable envelope design through requested consultation, national presentations, instruction and research. Sean Scott has worked in London, and presented at numerous national and regional venues. He is currently practicing at SERA Architects, and concurrently as an adjunct professor at the University of Oregon teaching “High-Performance Envelopes”. Sean is quoted by and has published envelope articles within Environmental Building News, Trim-Tab, and others. In his spare time, he serves on several envelope committees, is authoring a book called “Envelope Tools”, and developing an iPhone application for envelopes.

"Building Envelope Commissioning" will discuss the process of envelope commissioning and how the NIBS structure can be implemented. ASHRAE states, "The Commissioning Process is a quality-focused process for achieving, verifying, and documenting that the performance of facilities, systems, and assemblies meets defined objectives and criteria."

Drawing on project experience from across North America, the presentation will examine the need for commissioning the passive building envelope systems, the process, the challenges and the impact on energy performance.

1 LU HSW/SD

John is a licensed architect with over 15 years of experience as a designer in Portland. He has worked as a project architect and project manager on highrise residential buildngs, medical office buildings, commercial construction, and schools. He is proficient at building envelope design with more than three years of experience as a Façade Consultant, currently working at Morrison Hershfield. John has conducted Building Envelope Commissioning and also acted as the facade consultant on a wide range of projects.

An introduction to Oregon's Reach Code, an advanced energy code for optional use in all jurisdictions in Oregon. Background on the development and why it is one of the most advanced energy codes in the nation. Participants will learn the basic structure of the code and how to apply it in everyday projects.

1 LU/HSW/SD

Mark is a mechanical engineer with nearly 30 years of HVAC design experience, working on a wide range of projects around the globe. A graduate of Georgia Tech, his experience includes project management and the sustainable design on some of the earliest LEED projects in Oregon while at Interface Engineering.

At Building Codes Division, Mark is responsible for technical support, development and interpretations for Oregon’s Mechanical, Energy, and Reach Codes. He directed the energy sub-committee for development of the energy efficiency chapter of the Reach Code.

He is an active participant in sustainable and energy issues. He is vice chair of the ICC Sustainability, Energy and High Performance Code Action Committee, which will submit recommended revisions to the 2015 International Energy Conservation Code and the International Green Construction Code.

This course will focus on the concepts of blast resistant design as they relate to building envelope systems. The differences between ballistic, blast, and impact resistant designs will be discussed along with lessons learned from previous blast event. Opaque and transparent wall and roofing systems will be discussed within the context of blast resistance mitigation.

Eve Hinman pioneered the field of blast engineering. In 1983, she became one of the first structural engineers in the United States to take on this highly specialized design work, when the bombings of the U.S. embassy and Marine Barracks in Beirut brought to the attention of the Federal government the need for anti-terrorism solutions. Since then she has designed nuclear missile silos, NATO military facilities, industrial buildings subject to accidental explosions, and civilian buildings vulnerable to terrorist attack.

Eve received her doctorate in Engineering Mechanics, and her MS and BS in Civil Engineering from Columbia University (with structural emphasis). She is a registered Professional Engineer in California and New York.

Mark will present tools and resources for integrated facade design and analysis from the Building Technology Department at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab (LBNL). Their latest research includes testing and simulation of complex fenestration materials and assemblies. Tools from LBNL, including Window6 and COMFEN4, can provide valuable information to support intelligent decision-making in the design of integrated facades.

COMFEN supports the systematic evaluation of alternative fenestration systems for project-specific commercial building applications. It provides a simplified user interface that focuses attention on key variables in fenestration design. Under the hood is Energy Plus, a sophisticated analysis engine that dynamically simulates the effects of these key fenestration variables on energy consumption, peak energy demand, and thermal and visual comfort. The results from the Energy Plus simulations are presented in graphical and tabular format for comparative fenestration design cases to help users move toward optimal fenestration design choices. The presentation will include case studies which illustrate application of COMFEN to a number of recent projects. http://windows.lbl.gov/software/comfen/comfen.html

Speaker Bio

Mark is the manager of SERA’s Sustainability Resources Group which provides sustainable design expertise, research and development, and sustainability consulting services to all of SERA’s project teams. Mark brings 20 years of experience in architecture, building performance research, and education. He has played a significant role in the creation of quality public buildings including university academic and laboratory buildings in Oregon, California, Colorado, Minnesota, and Ohio. Mark teaches university courses on building enclosure design and performance, and has presented at recent conferences on related topics. Mark’s study of high performance European façades included sessions in Seattle in 2010, and a symposium with leading practitioners and researchers from Europe and North America in San Francisco in 2010 in collaboration with LBNL, CBE, and the Pacific Energy Center.

Electronic leak detection for roofs in almost any form, whether it is manually practiced or computer controlled, is based on the following principles:

1. High inherent electrical resistance of roofing membranes;
2. The ability of water to conduct and at the same time to act as a resistor to electrical current;
3. The ability of other materials to conduct and resist electric currents;
4. The ability of water vapor to distribute and concentrate in areas in the roofing envelope.

The first 3 combined elements can shape an electrical field which allows one to detect leakage in membranes and to determine the location of such leakage and the 4th principle allows systems to measure increase in overall moisture in a building envelope, indicating and roughly locating a leak. We are going to demonstrate how the 2 widely used manual methods of leak detection and how the automatic leak detection systems utilize the 4 principles. We will discuss automatic leak detection including detection of leakage at penetrations and edges of building envelopes, leak detection for multi-layered roofs utilizing more than one discreet membrane or an impermeable vapor barrier acting as one of the membranes, and how vapor tracking in a roofing envelope can help determine leakage.

Thomas Cooper is the Executive Vice President of Progeo Monitoring of North America. He is responsible for business development, AIA Continued learning programs, and corporate client services.

Before coming to Progeo, Thomas was the Managing Director of Green Roof Solutions, Inc. a component manufacturing company in Chicago which produced materials for the burgeoning green roof industry. Green Roof Solutions supplied branded components to major membrane manufacturers for inclusion in their green roof systems product offering. Tom is a member of RCI and the Gulf States Construction Specifier’s Institute Leadership group.

We live in a dynamic environment, but until now our building enclosures have been static in nature – unable to effectively control the flow of the sun’s light and heat into buildings from hour to hour and from season to season. Electronically tintable glass provides the means to develop a dynamic façade with variable visible light transmission and solar heat gain coefficient, which saves cooling and lighting energy, and solves problems of excessive solar heat gain, glare, fading and the need for unsightly blinds. In fact, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) states that their goal of a zero energy building in 2030 cannot be achieved without the use of dynamic glazing. Electronically tintable glass is now commercially available and is being actively specified and installed in building envelopes.

This session will briefly review dynamic electrochromic glass performance characteristics and the benefits to glazing contractors. The presentation will then focus on a number of diverse case studies to demonstrate the application of electrochromic glass in different building types and glazing applications to achieve different objectives such as glare control, heat control, daylighting, occupant comfort and to facilitate sustainable design. A discussion of installation will also be included.

Del Bankston has 35 years experience in the fenestration industry, beginning in 1976 as a glazier for 8 years, an owner and operator of AGA and AGC for 10 years, then taking on sales and management assignments across the nation including strategic cities: Seattle, WA; Portland, OR; San Francisco, CA; Denver, CO; and New York, NY. Bankston is Regional Sales Manager for SAGE Electrochromics and is responsible for the development and management of sales in the western region of the United States.

Prior to SAGE, Bankston worked as strategic partner and business developer for Serious Energy, formerly Serious Materials - a clean tech, energy Efficiency Company. He was responsible for establishing a presence in new markets nationwide and participated in strategic planning and forecasting.