This is a Modular Green School Building

A HEALTHY INDOOR ENVIRONMENT is provided by carefully selecting materials, equipment and construction methods. Air quality is maintained with non-toxic construction materials, finish surfaces and paints containing low levels or no volatile organic compounds (VOCs). Factory construction in a weather-protected facility avoided exposure of materials and systems to rain and mildew during the construction process, minimizing the long-term potential for mildew or indoor air-quality degeneration. Natural ventilation is provided with monitored fresh air intake in the mechanical system and with operable windows for fresh air in nice weather, while high insulation values, quality windows and careful weatherization eliminate drafts and minimize mechanical conditioning in hot or cold weather. Generous windows and solar tube skylights provide daylight in all rooms. To optimize day light levels, the windows are shaded from direct sun with exterior aluminum sunshade louvers and solar tubes are fitted with operable shades. Acoustical dampening is essential to interior experience, and children’s ability to learn and distinguish spoken language is especially affected by background sound levels and surface echo. This building has advanced mechanical systems that have been tested as 20 to 35 times quieter than traditional systems. Floor, wall and ceiling systems are designed to limit sound transfer from the exterior and between rooms and to significantly dampen sound reverberation within rooms. Surfaces, materials and colors throughout the space are selected not only for health, sustainability, functionality and hygienic ease of maintenance, but also to provide vibrancy, fun and creative inspiration.

ENERGY EFFICIENCY has been a major focus of design and construction for this building. First of all, factory built modular buildings are not only equal to or superior to traditional buildings in quality, but the controlled manufacturing process greatly minimizes energy and material waste typical to site construction. Modularity of the construction system allows relocation and future re-use of the building without typical demolition and disposal waste of materials and embedded energy. High quality windows, high-performance GreenGuard insulation and high-grade sealants reduce heat loss, which reduces energy waste, pollution and release of greenhouse gasses.  A high-quality white rubber roof and solar-shaded, low-emissivity glazing reflect solar heat gain away from the building to keep it comfortable in hot weather, reduce air conditioning loads inside the building, and reduce heat-island warming of adjacent buildings and outdoor spaces. The high-efficiency Bard heating, ventilating and air-conditioning (HVAC) mechanical systems use sensors and electronic controls to minimize energy use while optimizing temperature and fresh outside air as the number of people and activity increase in a room. These carbon dioxide monitors and other occupancy sensors “learn” patterns of activity and optimize air conditioning settings to conserve energy and maintain comfortable levels appropriate to daily cycles of use. Coordinated sensors and electronic control of the lighting system turn off lights when there is no activity in a room. The electronic control system is designed for future implementation of light dimmers controlled by actual daylight levels in the room, so that when the sun brightens, lights will automatically dim. Planning for increased future affordability of on-site power generation, the building is also designed and structured to accommodate a future rooftop photovoltaic (PV) array capable of fully powering the building with zero energy from the power grid.

SUSTAINABLE MATERIALS AND CONSTRUCTION SYSTEMS are employed throughout the building. Wherever possible, high-recycled content materials are used, including gypsum wallboard, cabinet systems, acoustical ceiling tile, and linoleum floor tile; and carpet tile made from recycled plastics and designed for return to its factory for 100% future recycling. Wood structural and finish components are either engineered composite wood from rapidly renewable sources, or Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) certified products grown in sustainable forests. Microstrand Wheat Board, a material that contains no toxins and is made from agricultural waste products left over from the harvesting of edible grains is used as a special wall-surfacing panel. Finally, factory-built modular, re-locatable construction, with its inherently low waste and reduced embodied energy, is itself a major contribution to sustainable building practice. This green, modular school building was built sustainably and economically to serve its current Harvard users well, and in the future, this will be relocated to another site with minimal transfer waste, to be enjoyed again by future users. Re-Use, Reduce, Recycle.

Self-built by the owner’s family, this concrete house overlooks the Pacific Ocean just south of San Francisco. Located on a small hillside site with stringent community zoning restrictions, the home gently contorts to maximize light and view within the complex zoning envelope and design restrictions. The frequently fogbound and chilly site required a sheltering form to provide pleasant indoor/outdoor living, as well as maximum sheltered glazing to bring in sunlight over the shoulder from the rear of the house. For simplicity of appearance and minimization of cost and resource consumption, the house is constructed of just two primary materials inside and out—hammered, site-cast concrete, and sustainably-harvested Peruvian redwood imported and milled on site by the owners. The 12” thick concrete walls are cast monolithically with rigid foam insulation between two reinforced layers of concrete, affording a massive wall exposed inside and out. Windows, doors, flooring and millwork are hand built and finished by the owners on site. The main ceiling is an arcing plane of Peruvian redwood paneling warped from one end to the other in order to follow the natural street slope at the front of the home while tipping down to minimize sunlight shadowing of the uphill property at the rear of the home. A glass clerestory box pierces this warping roof plane, creating a stairway, light and ventilation shaft through the center of the home, and providing access to a roof deck with provisions for concealed photo-voltaic and solar hot water equipment.

PGA Prairie Hopper

This environmental education pavilion is a pre-fabricated, portable, off-grid, structure showcasing innovative green technology. The pavilion will fold-up, be transported as a shipping container and be re-deployed at a series of sports events, providing shade, two-story views, refreshments and environmental education for diverse public communities not ordinarily exposed to advanced green technology and education. The structure is intended to be fun, functional and educational and is constructed of re-used components, high-recycled content steel, recycled content shade cloth and modular, xeriscaped planting trays.  Protected within a limestone-composite thermal and evaporative-resistant mass, native prairie grasses, cactus and several hundred additional species thrive without regular irrigation. The project was deployed 55 days from napkin-sketch, through detailed design, fabrication, assembly, and delivery. Remote team collaboration was facilitated by a central BIM database and various social networking applications.  All professional services were pro-bono in the interest of advancing environmental education and construction prefabrication technologies. The shade screens variably articulate to provide optimized shading whatever the pavilion orientation, then fold flat for transport. Ganged, evacuated-tube solar thermal collectors provide potable, sanitary hot water. The pavilion is self-powered by building-scale wind turbines and high-efficiency photovoltaics.

Autodesk Gallery at One Market, San Francisco

A media-intensive, 16,000 square foot exhibition space for digital design and fabrication, this project was delivered under a fast track, design-build, Integrated Project Delivery (IPD) contract. The design and construction process took place entirely using collaborative Building Information Modeling (BIM). The project consists of exhibition galleries, artist-in-residence digital design studios, conference and education spaces, with advanced multimedia audio-visual, information technology, and digital fabrication systems integrated into the spatial design of the architecture.

The design process and design concept work together to emphasize four integrated points reinforcing the owner’s intended message: Parametric modeling in support of integrated practice, sustainability and design innovation. With these goals in mind—and the intention to draw upon the unique site and to distinguish a multi-industry software maker’s creative project from more static exhibitions of physical products—the architects introduced the intention to design a space of “creative immersion in an ever-refreshing, media-saturated, special-for-me experience blossom floating within San Francisco clouds.”

To accomplish these goals, the physical space consists of a very simple, rectilinear background structure of translucent fabric boxes suspended above a polished concrete floor. The palette of materials is limited to white drywall and steel, polished concrete, and translucent white fabric hung within the exposed brick and concrete frame of the existing historic building, the large round-topped windows of which open out onto the fog-shrouded downtown waterfront. The primary spatial experience of the project is not the physical structure, but is instead the image content projected onto the system of taut white fabric boxes flowing fog-like throughout the space, defining individual galleries and meeting spaces, yet tying the space together as a single experiential thread of immersion within floating film imagery. Utilizing a complex grid of 84 projectors and hundreds of focused speakers, a coordinated film can wander through the entire space of the project—perhaps tracking a swarm of butterflies floating above a field of time-lapse blossoming flowers, or tracing the flow of blood through an animated digital heart.

The projection screen boxes are themselves the lowest-hanging components of a field of similar fabric boxes suspended from the ceiling. Together this single background field of cloud-like, undulating rectilinear space serves as projection screens, space dividers, acoustical dampeners, and support enclosure for the dense array of projectors, speakers, computer boxes, mechanical equipment and lighting systems that would otherwise form the predominant and overwhelming image of the space. Within this undulating white cloud, the spatial experience focuses on the software exhibition of human creativity and technological results, rather than on the hardware experience of technological support. Local reclaimed Redwood millwork, Sierra granite, and black recycled steel complete the physical exhibition and furnishing support closest to the body.

As part of a larger, integrated office, conference and gallery complex of 35,000 square feet, the overall project was managed under an equal IPD partnership of two architecture firms (Anderson Anderson Architecture and HOK, designer of the adjacent office spaces); builder (DPR Construction); and owner (Autodesk). This new IPD contract method aligns the interests of all parties and equally incentivizes cost-savings, project speed, quality and design innovation. Together, the project team has delivered a LEED Platinum sustainable project, the highest rating for green construction. The project was delivered in an extremely tight design and construction timeframe, meeting target budget and time schedules, with substantial additional program added into the project during the course of construction, thanks to under-budget savings and the nimble and collaborative contract structure. With its design partner, McCall Design Group, Anderson Anderson Architecture subcontracted and managed a diverse team of engineers, consultants, and technology design collaborators. The project achieved a top, 100% quality and innovation rating in the IPD contract incentive evaluation provided by an independent peer review.

Project Team:

Anderson Anderson Architecture/McCall Design Group
Design Principals: Mark Anderson, Peter Anderson
Project Manager: Ken Moy
Design Team: Kioni Cho, Christopher Campbell, Dan Holbrook, Marc Holbrook, Ben Johnson, Michael McCall, Yevgeniy Ossipov, Julien Schimmel, Jeff Shiozaki, Matthias Steppuhn, Brent Sumida, Johnson Tang, Karl Vavrek

IPD Contract Partners: Autodesk, HOK, DPR
Audiovisual Design: Joey d’Angelo, Charles Salter Associates
Exhibition Design: Downstream Media
Lighting Design: Auerbach French
Structural Engineer: Tipping Mar
General Contractor: DPR Construction
Principal Fabricator: Monster Route

B-House in Shimasaki, Kyushu Island, Japan

This two bedroom, one bath home built for two public school teachers on a hillside overlooking Kumamoto, Japan is planned to become fully energy self-sufficient once all designed systems are phased in. The construction budget of US$154,000 an extremely modest budget by local Kumamoto standards—required a close collaboration of the architects and builder to achieve a high-quality, off-site fabricated timber-frame construction meeting high sustainability standards. Rather than eliminating green technology to remain within budget, the 1100 square foot home was planned for a phased integration of systems, budgeted to be completed with the couple’s current income without increased loans over the coming five years. All essential components of the sustainable design strategy are fully implemented in the original construction, including natural, renewable, healthy materials; optimized solar shading, day lighting, and chimney-effect natural ventilation; solar hot water heating; high-efficiency hydronic heating made ready for future geothermal ground loop and solar thermal roof panels; water catchment roof system planned for a future green roof; and efficiently sized spaces and gardens conducive to simple, indoor-outdoor living with minimal ongoing maintenance and resource investment.

The house is sited on a terraced, south-facing slope in a dense housing neighborhood, overlooking orange groves and a spectacular view of Kumamoto Castle and surrounding hills. The building is sited for maximum views and passive solar heating of the massive concrete floor slabs serving as thermal ballast, and with opening walls facing the prevailing summer winds. The north face of the home has a steeply pitched roof section oriented for photovoltaic panels facing south, and high, operable clerestory windows facing north and upslope, creating optimized day lighting without summer heat gain, and creating a chimney-effect natural ventilation draft drawing air through the home, and exhausting the kitchen, bath and sleeping spaces with cooling updrafts. The house is constructed of simple, robust materials, consisting of concrete, plaster, and locally and sustainably harvested timber.

Credits:
Anderson Anderson Architecture, San Francisco; with Nishiyama Architects, Kumamoto Japan

The Kinmont-Hupert Orchard House is a highly site-specific, cast concrete construction, rationally pre-fabricated through the use of a limited set of repeated, modular formwork, and standardized SIPS sandwich panel and pre-fabricated truss framing components. This approach allows a high degree of adaptability to the landscape, while keeping construction costs to a minimum.

Sited within a mature apple orchard in Sonoma County, the house is built in conformity with the strict rectilinear geometry of the tree grid, and equally exploiting the secondary diagonal surprises particular to human motion through an agricultural field. The site was intensely studied for the individual particularities of each unique tree within the orchard field, and the house design then developed this same character of individual conditions within a predominantly regularized system. True to the character of the orchard, the house is laid out as long sequences of interior and exterior courtyards, defined by the adjacent trees, affording long, metered views along the rectilinear and diagonal axes of the field. The massive concrete walls align with the rows of tree trunks, while the open volumes of the rooms and exterior courts align with the open space between trees, affording a direct spatial continuity between house and landscape, figure and void.

The house is a low, single story volume, wheelchair accessible throughout, built with a minimal range of materials: heated concrete slabs, raw concrete primary walls inside and out, with secondary walls and ceiling clad in white drywall on the interior, with galvanized steel on the exterior. Minimal cabinetry and millwork is manufactured of raw Douglas Fir plywood. Windows are fabricated, galvanized steel. The flat roof of the house is low, and kept well below the top limbs of the orchard.

LINK: http://www.dwell.com/articles/fertile-grounds.html

Designed for an anthropologist and a concert pianist, retiring from Phoenix, Arizona, to this small New Mexico town on a desert site fronting the Rio Chama—not far from Georgia O’Keefe’s famous home on the bluff above this house uses several relatively standard prefabrication systems. SIPs are used for the wall panels only, while the roof and floors are constructed of prefabricated 2×4 long-span trusses. Although it was originally intended to use panels as the roof and floor structure as well, the house was switched shortly before construction to a truss system to simplify the assembly and to reduce the structural lumber splines required in the long spans of the panels.
The owners have a number of animals, dogs and cats and occasional injured strays that they were concerned with protecting from the prevalent local hawks, eagles, coyotes, and rattlesnakes. Rather than compromise the design with the addition of a retrofitted chain link dog run, we developed a thoroughly integrated animal house. For budget reasons, local contextualism, and appropriately barnyard practicality, we settled on chain link as a major material system for the house, protecting domestic animals and people from other animals or from accidental falls from the upper terraces.
Chain link is an ingenious prefabricated system that can be rolled out and hung from above like curtains, stretched and bolted to the walls and frames with large, round, specially cut steel washers that can be inexpensively manufactured in quantity and made available as modular parts in the system. In some places the chain link stands away from the house, providing enclosure to exterior living spaces, and in other areas it hugs tight to the steel-siding-clad wall surfaces, providing visual continuity and textural relief to the large flat planes while at the same time providing a trellis for creeping plants that will grow up from the ground to further soften the profile of the house.

This portable classroom is designed to provide an optimized educational environment for students and teachers while advancing sustainable design principles. The classroom maximally conserves as well as collects and generates natural resources, including electrical energy, daylight, wind energy, and rainwater. As well as being strong, efficient and conserving, natural forces and resources are highlighted and exposed throughout the structure, and all systems and performance criteria are monitored and broadcast to the web. The building acts as a learning tool for occupants, other schools and the general public.

Design Overview:
The design optimizes photovoltaic roof surface orientation, naturally shaded north-facing daylight glazing, and modulated natural ventilation. All of these forces are balanced with the additional criteria of manufacturing and transport efficiency, functionality for classroom use, low operating costs and ease of maintenance. The manufacturing and delivery process, and the materials and products employed are all selected for minimum environmental impact and for maximum contribution to a healthy indoor environment. Wherever possible, materials are chosen to conserve resources, minimize initial and lifecycle maintenance costs, and to promote educational awareness of the natural environment and its relationship to comfortable and healthy living.

The design focuses on performance issues directly impacting the learning experience of its occupants and the environmental quality of its community—thermal comfort, natural daylighting, indoor air quality, energy and resource conservation and generation.

Materials and Peformance:
The building is prefabricated in either two or three easily transportable modules, reducing initial cost and energy, and facilitating ease of transport and reuse in the future, minimizing waste. A steel frame and steel and rigid foam sandwich panel floor and roof system minimize material use; maximize insulation and heat reflection; and deter pests and mold in the cavity-free structure. A simple, double wall metal cladding, along with metal roofing shaded by solar panels above a 3” ventilated airspace, creates a ventilated double skin greatly reducing heat gain. All glazing is operable and north facing and/or shaded to prevent direct sunlight, and to optimize natural ventilation and comfortable airflow. Interior surfaces are low VOC products. Exposed beams are FSC certified parallams, with exposed structural steel tracing primary structural forces. Interior walls are naturally finished recycled rice straw panels.

Daylighting analysis indicates that excellent work light levels are achieved throughout the typical school day in most locations without electric lighting. Thermal comfort analysis indicates the classroom will be comfortable in most high heat climates without air conditioning, although an efficient mechanical air conditioning system is planned as an option for school sites where air quality, or noise conditions preclude natural ventilation.

Chameleon House: Lake Michigan

This house is a tower rising above the rolling topography of its cherry orchard site, peering outwards toward spectacular westward views of Lake Michigan and the surrounding agricultural landscape. The site is minimally disturbed, other than the mounding of two earthen enclosures adjacent to the tower, created from the excavated earth of the foundation and offering a ground to contrast the tower experience above the treescape. Due to the slope of the site, the family enters at the third level, descending down to the kids’ bedrooms and bath or moving up to the main living spaces which look out over the orchards to Lake Michigan.

A house would appear as an unsympathetic intrusion in this pure landscape, and with its singular vertical presence rising above the orchard, the tower is intended to reflect the austere, scaleless non-particularity of the occasional farm buildings dotted elsewhere on the hills. To help mask the scale, the building is wrapped in a skirting wall of recycled translucent polyethelene slats, standing two feet out from the galvanized sheet metal cladding of the wall surface on aluminum frames that serve also as window washing platforms and emergency exit ladders. The translucent polyethylene material set out over the dully reflective wall cladding is chosen for its ability to gather the light and color of its landscape, dissolving the finely shadowed and haloed structure into the seasonal color cycle of snow, ice and black twig tracery; pale pink blossom clouds; pollen green leaf and grass; golden straw and vivid foliage. The double skin creates a micro-climate and thermal differential around the structure creating a rippling mirage updraft that in the summer sends steaming condensation or in the winter drips melting icicles.

In order to keep costs and on site labor to a minimum, SIPs panels compose the exterior walls.  A steel moment frame allows for the height of the structure and for loft like spaces within the main living area.  With the use of common materials and industrial detailing, a commercial contractor built the home in eight weeks.

This prototype is to be built near Granite Falls, Washington, in the Cascade Mountains about 50 miles north east of Seattle. A second prototype is in the planning stages for an urban site in San Diego. This house is part of a series of projects that explore the opportunities for using prefabrication techniques and new building construction methods and materials to build low cost, high quality, site-adaptable and program-adaptable manufactured buildings.

Although the building site for this prototype has quite unrestrictive zoning constraints, the challenging topography and geotechnical conditions play a strong role in defining the overall design strategy for this project and as a prototype for difficult hillside sites. The small ground floor building footprint/foundation reduces the cost of this expensive area of the house, and allows the points of attachment to adapt to varying slope and soil conditions with minimal disruption of the natural topography.

The building system is a marriage of two common, standardized, mass-produced building elements – a prefabricated steel structural frame (of the type commonly manufactured for light-weight commercial structures), and a structural insulated panel system (SIPS) that provides all non-glazed building envelope areas. Significant economies are achieved by using the same low-labor structural panels for walls, floors and roof. The system is designed around a small number of interchangeable, rearrangeable assemblies for efficiencies of time and cost, and to minimize the environmental impacts of on-site construction.

Although the materials and methods of construction are chosen for efficiency and affordability, the underlying design principles guiding the development of the system have the larger goals of producing affordable, high quality buildings that offer variety, adaptability, convertibility, strength, simplicity, spatial richness, and optimized access to views and light.