1C A S E S T U DY: S L AT E R PAU L L A R C H I T E C T S

Sustainability Design Review: Involving Stakeholders in Energy

Savings at Early Stage DesignSLATERPAULL ARCHITECTS used Sefaira Concept to promote an integrated design approach and explore sustainability strategies

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The CustomerSLATERPAULL ARCHITECTS is a full-service architectural firm located in Denver, Colorado. Their core services range from building condition assessments and master planning to architectural design, conceptual energy modeling, interior design, and construction administration.

SLATERPAULL infuses technology, visual arts, hand illustration, graphic design, 3D digital modeling, and animation to help bring their designs to life. They have extensive experience in the areas of sustainable design, historic preservation, and educational facility planning, allowing the firm to create buildings that integrate seamlessly with the communities and environments they serve.

SLATERPAULL’s design philosophy arises from their mission to “Design for a Sustainable Future.” The firm is committed to creating architecture that makes the world a better place to live in, now and for generations yet to come. They believe that inspirational design, integrated with environmental responsibility, leads to beautiful and healthy places.

The design/construction industry has changed significantly in the past decade. With increased energy costs and unknown inflation pressures, projects have moved toward fast-track and design building delivery processes. SLATERPAULL Architects felt the pressures of the shortened schedules and looked for energy modeling software that provided early energy information allowing them to make well informed conceptual design decisions, began using Sefaira Concept as part of their sustainable design process in 2012.

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The Project

SLATERPAULL and Nunn Construction were hired by the University of Colorado as a design-build team for the new Academic Office Building on the Colorado Springs campus (UCCS). In keeping with the University’s commitment to environmental responsibility, sustainable development is a key factor in the building design. Sustainability targets for the project are a LEED Gold Certification and 40% energy savings below ASHRAE Standard 90.1-2007.

The Challenge

The University requested an integrated design process including early and continued consideration of sustainability. Integrated design emphasizes the importance of collaboration amongst stakeholders, and allows for all parties to be involved in selecting sustainability strategies. Furthermore, a LEED certification strategy was identified which verified energy goals throughout all phases of building and construction. Additionally, the University of Colorado required the project’s environmental impacts be addressed at conceptual design. SLATERPAULL used Sefaira to meet the conceptual design deliverables of • Btu/SF goal• Water conservation target with consideration for indoor and outdoor

water consumption• Building orientation in relation to optimum daylighting and managing

solar gain

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The SolutionFirst, SLATERPAULL modeled variations of the building design and used the Sefaira SketchUp Plugin to verify correct interpretation of their geometry by Concept.

Next, the firm used Sefaira Concept to apply sustainability “Rules of Thumb” to their massings and calculated variations in annual energy usage. Concept highlighted the areas where results went against those rules of thumb due to the building’s specific design and location. Rather than relying on best practices to strategize energy savings, SLATERPAULL used Concept to verify or refute those practices in the context of this particular project.

EXAMPLE #1

Cooling vs. heating load dominance in Colorado

In previous projects, SLATERPAULL found that offices in Colorado were primarily cooling-dominated due to high internal loads within the building. However, for this particular building design, space uses, and climate, the Academic Office Building was actually heating-dominated. As a result, the designers explored energy-savings strategies such as an increased window SHGC (allowing more solar heat into the building) and brise soleils (sunshades) with a large separation distance (permitting solar gains in winter but shading the windows in summer). Although energy usage for the UCCS building contradicted prior experience and rules of thumb, SLATERPAULL used Sefaira Concept to establish an understanding of the actual heating and cooling needs and consider appropriate sustainability strategies.

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EXAMPLE #2

Understanding optimized orientations for energy vs. GHG emissions

SLATERPAULL also used Response Curves, Concept’s optimization tool, to compare energy usage and carbon footprint for different possible building rotations. Though they expected energy consumption and carbon emissions to follow the same pattern, the designers found that the two outputs were not perfectly aligned. This counterintuitive output resulted from the relative carbon emissions from 1) energy generated on-site for heating and 2) electricity generated off-site for cooling and other needs. As a result, SLATERPAULL considered the tradeoff between energy usage and carbon emissions when positioning the Academic Office Building on the project site.

By modeling these changes parametrically, SLATERPAULL ARCHITECTS used Sefaira Concept to calculate the resulting energy savings without any need to edit the underlying geometric models. With Collections (Concept’s façade editing user interface), glazing ratios for each facade could be altered separately.

Concept allowed the designers to quickly apply sustainability strategies to different building models using the Add Massing and Clone Concept features. The Univeristy of Colorado Design Review Board was able to understand individual sustainable strategy benefits for each massing option, and this allowed them to assess tradeoffs between energy savings and other aspects of the building’s construction.

Concept was also used to optimize material parameters such as window U-factor and wall R-value, enabling them to make informed selections for their baseline energy model, which was ASHRAE 90.1-2007 compliant. As they applied various sustainability strategies, Sefaira Concept calculated energy savings from the baseline model and allowed the participants to work towards the building’s goal of 40% energy savings. To reach this target, the participants investigated the following strategy bundles:

• Improved HVAC system• Improved HVAC system, decreased

glazing, and roof-mounted solar panels

• Improved HVAC system, decreased glazing, roof-mounted solar panels, and facade-mounted solar panels

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The Result

By using Sefaira Concept to investigate and prioritize sustainability strategies for various potential massings, participants at UCCS developed an initial energy savings strategy that was on target for the building’s 40% energy savings goal. During the Sustainability Charette, Sefaira Concept fostered Integrated Project Delivery by allowing various stakeholders to assess and communicate about sustainability strategies at the very onset of the project. While exploring these options alongside UCSS, SLATERPAULL validated their client’s acceptance of certain sustainability strategies and the overall building design.

“Concept’s early sustainability analysis allowed us to prove we were meeting the 40% energy optimizations at conceptual design, well before we had the full blown energy model to verify the building’s performance”

- Ara MasseySustainable Design Manager at Slaterpaull

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About SefairaSefaira was founded in 2009 with a mission to promote more sustainable buildings by helping the building industry design, build, operate, maintain and transform all facets of the built environment.

Sefaira’s proprietary cloud-based technology, built upon deep building physics expertise, offers an integrated approach to sustainable design analysis, knowledge management, and decision support. Sefaira helps designers analyze and compare sustainable building strategies for new build or retrofit projects in a fraction of the time and cost previously required. By providing sophisticated analysis via an intuitive web interface, Sefaira helps users define, quantify and optimize the energy, water, carbon and financial benefits of relevant design strategies.

Sefaira’s offices in London and New York have supported projects across the US, Europe, the Middle East and Asia.

CONTACT SEFAIRA+1 855 SEFAIRA (US)+44 (0)203 427 6565 (UK)info@sefaira.comwww.sefaira.com

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