Past Meetings

In this presentation, Richard will share the design principles being developed for the ASTM Structural Use of Glass standard, how they were implemented on the Seattle Space Needle, and how these new standards will allow architects and engineers to achieve bolder designs with lower risks.

Richard Green is the founder and owner of Green Facades LLC, a specialist facade consultancy, design and engineering service in Seattle WA. With 30 years’ experience. Richard has projects in over 20 different countries covering a wide range of building types, including: high rise, museums, airports, concert halls and opera houses, university facilities, hotels and residences. He has worked with some of the most notable and award-winning architects around the globe, including Renzo Piano Building Workshop, Foster and Partners, Zaha Hadid, Shigeru Ban and OMA. A selection of his favorite projects on which he has worked recently include: the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Cultural Center by Renzo Piano in Athens, Greece; Brookfield Place Calgary with AFK/Dialog 10 Hudson Yards with KPF; designing the world’s largest point-fixed glass wall forming the world’s largest glass enclosed volume for Helmut Jahn’s Bangkok Airport; The Spheres for Amazon with NBBJ and the renovation of the iconic Seattle Space Needle with Olson Kundig.

Richard is also an international expert in glass design. He is currently the technical chair for the ASTM Structural Glass Committee, having also participated in the writing of the Australia Glass Standard (AS-1288), the ASTM Window Glass Standard (E-1300), and is a guest expert with participation in Eurocode 11 for Structural Glass Design. He also currently represents the United States on ISO committees.

The Portland Airport Concourse E extension extends Concourse E more than 800 feet. The project adds several new gates, passenger concessions, and other amenities while creating improved regional flight ground loading facilities and airline operational spaces.

Poised as an impactful gateway to the airport, the extension is designed to be complementary in materials and form to the existing concourse. Taking advantage of its orientation, the project features a sweeping window wall that washes the interior spaces with daylight. Inside, the public areas feature a welcoming and durable palette of regionally inspired materials. Soft lighting balances abundant daylight to give passengers an intuitive sense of place and connection to the outside, while also meeting universal design goals. The project is pursuing a high level of LEED certification and using Energy Trust of Oregon incentives to guide its environmentally responsible design, in alignment with the Port of Portland’s sustainability goals.

Mike Meade from Hennebery Eddy Architects will discuss how the team used innovative techniques to provide a high-performance enclosure for a client that will have changing needs for interior spaces. Highlights include an adaptable curtainwall for interior tenants, daylighting large spaces without skylights, bird safe glass, glare control, and curtainwall mounted exterior lighting.

This program addresses the importance of resilient building design and how it differs from green building design. It covers the resilient qualities of concrete masonry products and wall systems.

Tom Young is Executive Director of the Northwest Concrete Masonry Association and a Fellow of The Masonry Society. He is a graduate of the University of Utah and has over 40 years’ experience working in the masonry industry. Tom is a member of the Structural Engineers Associations of Idaho, Washington and Oregon, and is co-chair of the Structural Design Task Group of the Masonry Alliance for Codes and Standards. He is also a member of the ASTM Committee C-15 on masonry materials.

Tom has presented at numerous conferences and meetings. He serves as a guest lecturer at several northwest universities in the colleges of architecture and engineering. He has co-authored several papers based on structural masonry research and written technical articles for industry publications.

In this presentation, Richard will share the design principles being developed for the ASTM Structural Use of Glass standard, how they were implemented on the Seattle Space Needle, and how these new standards will allow architects and engineers to achieve bolder designs with lower risks.

Richard Green is the founder and owner of Green Facades LLC, a specialist facade consultancy, design and engineering service in Seattle WA. With 30 years’ experience. Richard has projects in over 20 different countries covering a wide range of building types, including: high rise, museums, airports, concert halls and opera houses, university facilities, hotels and residences. He has worked with some of the most notable and award-winning architects around the globe, including Renzo Piano Building Workshop, Foster and Partners, Zaha Hadid, Shigeru Ban and OMA. A selection of his favorite projects on which he has worked recently include: the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Cultural Center by Renzo Piano in Athens, Greece; Brookfield Place Calgary with AFK/Dialog 10 Hudson Yards with KPF; designing the world’s largest point-fixed glass wall forming the world’s largest glass enclosed volume for Helmut Jahn’s Bangkok Airport; The Spheres for Amazon with NBBJ and the renovation of the iconic Seattle Space Needle with Olson Kundig.

Richard is also an international expert in glass design. He is currently the technical chair for the ASTM Structural Glass Committee, having also participated in the writing of the Australia Glass Standard (AS-1288), the ASTM Window Glass Standard (E-1300), and is a guest expert with participation in Eurocode 11 for Structural Glass Design. He also currently represents the United States on ISO committees.

Building envelope standards and practices have evolved over the past few decades in response to increased energy efficiency goals and a better understanding of Building Science. New materials, systems, and methods have been developed that reduce air leakage through building envelopes. Thermal protection requirements have increased and continuous insulation is often detailed better to avoid thermal bridges. A properly designed, detailed, and installed building envelope assembly utilizing these new products, systems, and standards will typically perform as expected, reduce energy usage, and provide a durable and long lasting building envelope assembly.

However, what if the installation is imperfect and air leakage occurs, or excessive moisture is introduced during construction? What if future wall or roof leaks cause water to become trapped within the assemblies? What if the components degrade over time and no longer fulfill their purpose? We have investigated many building envelope failures and found that air barrier, roofing, and waterproofing perfection is challenging to achieve. In some cases, moisture collects within the building envelope assemblies and needs to be removed

The goal of this course is to outline potential strategies to reduce or evacuate moisture from building envelopes without wholesale replacement. To accomplish this, the course will present case studies of a few existing buildings and new construction where we installed moisture monitoring data loggers to evaluate initial conditions and verify moisture reduction over time. The data loggers collected five-minute data for temperature, relative humidity, and moisture content and have been in place for over six years in some buildings. Moisture reduction methods in these studies include added thermal protection to reduce interior condensation, modification of heating and HVAC systems, and air movement strategies including directional fans, dehumidification, and in one case a roof ventilation system utilizing induction and exhaust fans. The success of these strategies was verified with empirical data.

Wade Vorley is an architect and registered roofing consultant at Wiss, Janney, Elstner Associates (WJE). Prior to joining WJE, Mr. Vorley worked as a roof installer, supervisor, project manager, and cost estimator for a roofing contractor in the Pacific Northwest. He has a master’s degree from UC Berkeley, focuses on building envelope investigation and design; and provides condition surveys, field investigations, repair designs, peer reviews, and litigation support. Mr. Vorley is published in trade journals, presents AIA accredited seminars, and conducts research. He has presented technical papers at the 2011 NRCA Symposium in Washington, D.C., the 2013 Waterproof Membranes Conference in Dusseldorf, Germany, the 2018 RCI Convention in Houston TX, and the 2018 ASTM E06/D08 Symposium in Washington D.C.

The building envelope is an integral part of architectural expression and is quickly becoming the innovative system utilized to realize carbon emission reduction goals. More and more the building envelope’s roofing, glazing, and waterproofing assemblies include Mass Timber. These assemblies are critical for ensuring durability but challenged to increase envelope performance without creating environmental barrier deficiencies.

On the path towards Zero Carbon Emissions, the implications of building envelope performance are increasingly harder to ignore, as the traditional trade off of efficiencies from the MEP systems can no longer account for the poor envelope performance. Instead, the full potential of each is needed to leverage increased carbon offsets. Mass Timber is carbon sequestering, rather than carbon intensive, and capable of replacing steel and concrete as a buildings structural frame and enclosure. Mass Timber is also far less conductive than concrete or steel, pivotal for reducing thermal bridging.

New simulation models have derived in part from the increased pressure energy codes place on envelope performance, as well as from the advances in research and increased capability of computer simulations to analyze envelope assemblies. Mass Timber’s inherent level of precision is a compelling reason for furthering digital innovation by combining simulation data with 3D digital fabrication. Structural, manufacturing, and prefabrication designers can employ new digital tools to visualize and explore innovative structural connections while ensuring strategic integration with the building structure and the major MEP building systems.

Mass Timber digital design is becoming the solution for proving constructability, predictability of schedule, and sustainability while delivering an ideal process and data necessary for compiling a comprehensive Life Cycle Assessment (LCA). Ultimately, LCA confirms the potential for achieving zero carbon emissions when building with Mass Timber, while building with wood provides a renewed capacity for architectural aesthetic expression and envelope performance.

Eric Wood joined Morrison Hershfield as a façade specialist in 2019. He has a comprehensive understanding of performance envelope systems and techniques related to mass timber structures. Eric is a technical subject matter expert within the Façade Specialist Engineering Group having spent the past several years overseeing the commercialization of mass timber and unitized building components for commercial, residential, and multi-family construction. Eric’s experience includes a variety of wood and mass timber construction projects with a specific focus on digital fabrication, specialty engineering, and innovative connections.

Eric specializes in the prefabrication of Mass Timber to facilitate the early design and detail development rationale leading to optimized supply and constructability. He has particular experience with design-assist specialty engineering, supply-installation logistics, and infield review of complex prefabricated Mass Timber projects.

Water-Resistive Barriers (WRBs) have evolved to serve compound forms and functions. Despite these advances, performance expectations still reflect over-simplistic assumptions and problematical testing methods. Interfaces with modern wall components also remain ill-defined with respect to the WRB’s primary function of liquid water resistance. Industry trends toward component integration have further strained the WRB’s intended role.

This presentation explores new findings from experimental research and computational modeling to demonstrate performance attributes of recognized WRB systems. Moisture transport and storage are reviewed for three dynamic interfaces: A) the exterior insulation interface; B) the substrate interface; and C) the fastener interface. Directives for industry research, testing standards, and product innovation are discussed.

Dr. Doggett is the Principal Scientist and founder of Built Environments, Inc. an architectural & building science consulting firm specializing in building enclosure design and research. His background includes extensive field experience with complex building enclosure failures, particularly those involving air, heat, and moisture transport. He merges this experience with innovative design practices to assist multi-stakeholders achieve more resilient, higher-performing buildings. Dr. Doggett is actively engaged in enclosure design, assembly and material research, and building simulations involving computational fluid dynamics, 3-D thermal modeling, and hygrothermal modeling. Dr. Doggett is the former chair of the Minnesota Building Enclosure Council.

Sometimes the glass that was part of the building envelope ends up on the street. Nobody is happy. Buildings age and fail when the properties of the materials change. Currently, there is no effective method of determining the design life of materials used in building enclosures. Materials are thus selected based on first cost. This transfers the benefit of lower cost materials to the specifier, but the risk associated with that decision on the building owner. When there is a way to determine the accurate design life, economically efficient materials selection decisions are possible. The glass stays stuck to the building for as long as it is expected. This presentation will discuss development of tools to accurately predict design life of materials to mitigate those risks to project teams.

Dr. White has been at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) for over 20 years developing a fundamental understanding of the degradation of polymers exposed to outdoor exposures. This passion is focused on developing the adoption of new method to establish the prediction of in-service design life, or service life prediction of materials. The innovative research of this NIST team has been published in journals, standards, and the popular press The Research focused on producing validated predictive models has generated new instruments, models, statistical methods, procedures and insight to both indoor and outdoor weathering of these materials. In addition to the many papers, Dr. White has edited four books related to durability and service life prediction. Dr. White is a sought-after speaker who has organized international conferences, symposiums as well as many invited and contributed talks to a wide variety of audiences.

Dr. White has a formal background in Chemistry and Chemical Engineering (Ph.D. University of Wisconsin, -Madison, 94). This deep technical knowledge is augmented by with a business background (MBA, University of Maryland, 2007). Dr. White is the rare combination of a world class scientist/engineer who also understands business. He is a successful entrepreneur with several successful startup companies, the latest being Bee-America.

While the main focus has been on Service Life Prediction model development, Dr. White’s diversity of background and broad understanding has lead to a wide variety of interesting projects including: rheological measurement of the Tg of ultra-thin polymer films for electronic packaging applications, working with the Department of Homeland Security on a project to standardize procedures for explosive force mitigation within the mass transit system, developing new standards and test methods for the adhesion of spray applied fire resistant materials for protecting structural steel, working with the department of Housing and Urban Development on translating the work on service life prediction to a sustainable materials mortgage credit, working on the task force to successfully develop a Enterprise Risk Management framework for NIST.