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Using Integrated Design for Achieving Highly Energy Efficient Buildings
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Integrated Design is a process that can be widely applied across many elements important to building development. It is this wide applicability which makes it attractive to designers interested in sustainable or environmentally sound design, where multiple elements are considered interactively, and where sustainability and energy efficiency goals place additional constraints.
Many designers use some elements of Integrated Design. In general the integrated design approach is more holistic and inclusive. More players are involved early and more options considered.
What Makes it Integrated Design
- Early and regular collaboration of entire D&C team with the owner in an iterative process
- Performance goals set during programming
- Interactive analysis of site, climate, facility use and loads yields synthesis: integrated solutions
- Analysis of alternatives based on all costs over measure life
- Commissioning with post-occupancy assessment and feedback
- Front loading the design effort identifies risk issues and mitigations early
- Using a "whole project" iterative process can yield emergent features and synergies which mitigate risks and enhance benefits
- Using a life cycle approach to costs and benefits, with post-occupancy validation, reduces exposure
- Commissioning validates performance
The Core Process
At the heart of the process from programming through Schematic Design is the search for synergies: i.e. strategies with resultant benefits greater than the sum of individual design decisions.
Integrated design synthesizes climate, use,
loads and systems resulting in a more
comfortable and productive environment,
and a building that is more energy-efficient
than current best practices.
The key mechanism of the systems integration process is a highly iterative, open ended analysis of all of the major components and options…in effect, a search engine for synergies. This is the key practice that differentiates integrated design.
Here we see schematically the cross-optimization thinking process, where the interplay of all four elements contributes to a final solution.
Looking for synergistic opportunities:
- The climate can both create and serve loads
- Occupancy schedules may be malleable
- Thermal and visual comfort standards relate to people, not spaces
- Building and site design as opportunities to reduce or eliminate HVAC system loads
By implementing a whole building, integrated design approach, the team may be able to realize significant savings in lighting, heating, ventilating, and air conditioning systems, or in some cases even eliminating systems, allowing funds to be invested in mechanical upgrades and/or enhancements to other parts of the building.
This is a two step process. First, starting not with systems but with loads, we use resources, such as daylight and site orientation, to reduce loads by half.
The result is a need for smaller systems that use less energy. In addition, smaller heating, ventilation and air conditioning systems mean lower construction costs.
Next we apply system efficiency to reduce energy use even further. By combining the two approaches, we achieve even greater operational savings at a lower first cost.
Integrated design provides the potential for creating buildings with lower first costs and large energy savings. In this example, reducing HVAC and lighting loads-created by the interaction of climate, use and design-should precede the sizing of HVAC and electric lighting systems. Installing efficient systems may be cost effective at the scale of "parts," but masks the much larger benefits that might be obtained from an integrated design systems approach.
Written by Jeff Cole, Konstrukt, Inc. for NEEA's BetterBricks
