Gensler’s Director of Design Resilience Rives Taylor shares the evolution and responsibility for perspective correction, along with 5 starting points for action. Collaborator Dirk Kestner’s case study offers evidence.
Prologue: Then
Dallas, TX, circa 1996: I was standing in a Hilton conference room far below ground – in anything but a daylit room. I was speaking to the Texas Society of Architects about this “new thing” called sustainability. Not just as an architect, but as a client with the University of Texas Health Science Center in Houston. I faced the audience and posed a question for which no one had a response. I asked if they understood lifecycle thinking. Their blank stares delivered a clear answer.
I asked this question after roughly three years working with a campus that had been supremely challenged by 1970s and 80s buildings. Each had been designed with a short-term “at cost/ on time” mindset. Many had resulted in sick buildings, energy hogs, and increasingly problematic operations. I asked the architects in the room who delivered these projects across the state if they understood the legacy they left to their owners, operators and users, because often it seemed there was no concern beyond finishing the project with profit for their firm, and hopefully a bit of positive client feedback for future work. Again, my audience was flummoxed. “What do you mean we need to concern ourselves with the lifecycle of a project or how it works?” they replied. Even the notion of asking how well their buildings had performed – the infamous Post occupancy evaluation – would only become a term our profession embraced in the last 20 years. It seems human health, access, and inclusive design were not common discussion topics in those days.
Narrative: Now
Fast forward 25 years to an era where my students and I talk regularly about ecological footprint and lifecycle assessment. It’s now a common discussion. Not only in public health realms but also in materiality and building lifecycle – all looking at the AIA’s 2030 challenge that addresses our carbon footprint in the built environment and the impact we have locally and globally.
In the decades between 1996 and now, I learned the most about lifecycle thinking by partnering with the operators, procurement officers, and leaders of the Health Science Center as well as the university system. I also had the opportunity to learn about life cycle thinking from some of the discipline’s greats: Pliny Fisk, Bob Berkebile, Steve McDowell, David Lake, and Fiona Cousins. These design thinkers recognized early on that we needed to approach how our built environment works, and how it works long term in partnership with the owner and operators. The conversation about human behavior and how facilities shape the wellness, productivity and longevity of the people who use them is crucial.
My students at Rice and the University of Houston schools of architecture have historically been able to embrace this thinking. They recognize what we design in 2020 will last long after they’re gone – after the users of their buildings are practicing or living in them. The dialogue starts with the “big cost” of capital expenditures to build a building. I point out that a $1 million building might be roughly only 5000 ft.². Expensive building is not inconsequential. As an aside, I point out the low fees we get for designing those CapEx expenditures. With information and insight gathered over the years from facility performance research from firms like Gensler and ARUP, I explain that every dollar spent in the construction or capital expenditure of a project, equates to between $30 and $50 of operational expenditure over the building life, 50 to 75 years if not longer. That lifetime operation includes not only energy, water supply, cleaning, and security, but also the invariable updates, renovations and remodeling necessary to keep the building code compliant and supportive of its mission. What’s not included in that multiplier is the human cost. In the lifetime of buildings that support human capacity, One Dollar of Capital Expenditure equates to $250-$300 of human activity, depending on program. A hospital is quite different than an office building. That means for every dollar we invest in capital expenditure, (five cents in design costs), we have huge multipliers over the life of the building with real impact on society and the planet.
When I try to simplify the concept with my students, often in the more complex conversation of ecological footprint, I show lifecycle assessment of a simple $1 million CapEx investment for a building. Sometimes that’s too small – only the cost of a house in Houston. The first cost we design to has been our prime focus. As I start to show the larger pyramid stepping down to include the operational cost, the direct human cost, the indirect societal cost and lastly, the indirect environmental cost. But arguably, over the life of the building its impact on its environment, the network of highways in infrastructure plan which it depends, the human lives shaped by its location and quality workspace gets bigger and bigger and bigger. The location alone of our $1M building has untold consequences as it relates to adding more challenge to off and brittle infrastructure including roadways, adding to traffic, adding to people being stuck in traffic to the detriment of their health and family relations. We just take it all for granted in that we only see the first term cost.
On the other hand, with a plethora of websites available to help you calculate your carbon footprint or earth footprint, we are getting our arms around the variety of inputs that look at what it takes for us to continue to have a lifestyle to which we’ve become accustomed. We also seen in design more and more discussion about the environmental and health implications of the materials we choose to use in our buildings or products like furniture that sit in our buildings. The food industry has addressed health and ecological impact for generations – we see nutrition labels even on things like animal crackers while our buildings have nothing of the sort. The first conversation around lifecycle particularly focused on Wellbeing in the dawn of the era of sick building syndrome focus in the 1980s. That came about after we decided that to reduce “expensive energy” we needed to shut our buildings tight, get rid of windows, and occasionally put them underground – forsaking human health for energy savings. But over the last 50 years our life cycle mindset is focused beyond the cost of energy and water (even the latter has only recently come back on our radar screen). To owners and clients, the idea of thinking long-term around energy offers an opportunity to pay back that first cost capital expenditure.
New Questions – and Five Starting Points
If our perspective is finally changing, where can we find leverage to do something about it. I offer five starting points.
- Client Conversations
Having that return on investment, cost of money or net present value has intrigued me for years. How do we have the conversation with clients who are more versed in their cost of money? How can we challenge this concept of Capital expenditure which is key but is just a drop in the bucket of a lifetime of their ownership – if they even planned on it for more than a few years to build and flip. A number of years ago Gensler leadership initiated a training exercise about how to have a conversation with our clients and project managers about lifecycle thinking. We saw the need to educate them about the opportunity to assess how your client values long-term payback, their brand, and recruiting and retaining talent. This might align with the notion of lifecycle in a sustainable mindset. In those 10 years not only have our teams had far more success, but increasingly our global clients expect these questions! Increasingly, the question is not whether the C suite understands the value, but whether the local project managers or others on the front line of design and delivery will slow down to have the conversation. - Materials Transparency
We also recognized that those who manufacture products are recognizing their responsibilities for better materials transparency and the lifecycle implications of creation, employment, installation, operations. Potentially, not just the end of life, but the next life or use as well. Bill McDonough and Michael Braungart’s Cradle to Cradle method and others such as Living Future’s Declare and Pharos offer potential here. - Consensus Approach
In the recent conversations about life cycle assessment over the last few years we’ve seen many different approaches without any consistent approach. Do you measure carbon, or embodied energy, or ecological impacts, or human or biological direct health impacts? The number of material scientist specialists and third-party certifications like LEED or WELL are trying to do their best to educate us. The real conundrum is the diversity of approach that drives instructors and manufacturing partners to distraction. Gensler has partnered with industries and ownership leaders in a consortium called MaterialsCAN (Climate Action Network). Without advocating any specific tool, this organization is pushing for a consistency and transparency in the carbon conversation. A great place to start. - Water
At the same time, I’m passionate about the water footprint and lifecycle of materials and operations as they relate to an increasingly challenged resource: potable water. There’s not a client I’ve worked with that isn’t focused on water. Consumer product producer Procter & Gamble is leading the discussion about water use across the globe. - Wellness
Lastly, we’ve always focused on the impact of our design around human and biological wellness. But now, the recognition of not just inclusive design for the diversity of excess abilities of our human community, but also recognizing that our design has historically missed a great deal of the underserved communities we have in our cities. That conversation is only now unfolding. It requires us to step back and take a broader look at what it means to think about the life cycle of our designs from products to cities.
With an adjusted time-horizon and these five leverage points we can begin to make a difference.
To prove it, colleague Dirk Kestner offers details on one of our recent collaborations, the Houston Advanced Research Center.
Case Study: Houston Advanced Research Center Whole Building Life Cycle Analysis
So how does a team put life cycle thinking into practice? Once implemented, what does it accomplish for a project? The design of the Houston Advanced Research Center’s (HARC) new headquarters illustrates lifecycle thinking’s benefits to owners and designers in multiple ways. HARC is a “not-for-profit research hub providing independent analysis of energy, air, and water issues.” HARC collaborates with universities, private organizations, governmental agencies, and community groups to develop solutions to environmental issues and affect sustainability policy.
But HARC’s original campus, built in the 1980s, no longer supported this mission. Many of its offices lacked access to daylight and the building did not provide an inspiring work environment. HARC sought to build a new headquarters that directly reflected its mission – a workplace that could serve as a living example for regionally-appropriate sustainable design in the Gulf Coast region. Also essential was that the design respect the financial realities of a not-for-profit research institution.
From the earliest design stages project architect Gensler facilitated fully integrated planning sessions with the full ownership and design team, including mechanical engineer CMTA and structural engineer Walter P Moore. These sessions captured HARC’s project goals to focus on operational energy efficiency and minimize environmental impacts due to the materials used in the building.
The process employed a variety of analysis strategies, both proven and emerging. Energy modeling and daylighting analyses informed design choices and have since been validated by the building’s operational Energy Use Intensity of 16 kBTU/SF/Yr. This is lower than the modeled 22 KBTU/SF/Yr and resulted in an Energy Star certification rate of 99 (out of 100). That efficiency, coupled with the 88-kw rooftop solar array, also earned International Living Future Zero Energy Certification for the project.
Beyond these proven analyses, the team used Whole Building Life Cycle Assessment (WBLCA) to measure project environmental impacts through its lifespan — from design, material sourcing, construction, operations and maintenance to end of life. While WBLCAs are relatively new to the building industry, consumer product manufacturers have used life-cycle assessments (LCAs) for decades to determine product environmental impacts. To perform an LCA, manufacturers study products from the time raw materials are extracted from the earth until the product useful life is complete and the material is recycled into a new product or returned to the earth. This process quantifies energy input and emissions at each stage, enables analysis of a product’s impact, and suggests improvements to minimize those impacts. WBLCA uses the principles applied to consumer products at a whole-building level.
As is typical for most projects, HARC’s structural design team investigated different structural and enclosure systems during the schematic phase. However, the use of WBLCA permitted the team to include additional environmental metrics when assessing systems, and highlighted areas of maximum impact the team could address. This comprehensive analysis led to a design that sits lightly on the land to minimize foundation materials, with optimized concrete mix portions, and thinned slabs. The process also yielded a tighter building envelope.
The selected structural system, a steel braced frame with double cantilever girders reaching nearly to the building edge, leveraged continuity in the girders, while allowing the external wall framing to pass continuously by the intermediate floor. This scheme – as opposed to a segmented “tilt-up” exterior bearing wall, resulted in dramatically fewer joints in the exterior envelope and enabled the building to operate efficiently.
A holistic approach to minimizing environmental impact for a high-performance structure is essential. HARC’s operational efficiency and lack of onsite combustion minimized carbon emissions. This meant that all operational emissions would be due to electricity consumption and would decarbonize in proportion to the grid. The addition of the on-site photovoltaic capacity beyond building’s annual consumption meant the electricity consumed in operations was nearly emission free. This left the upfront embodied emissions — those due to materials and construction, as the dominant project impact. Implementing a lifecycle approach, including WBLCA, minimized those emissions to bring the project closer to true “net-zero” energy use.
Rives Taylor is Director of Design Resilience at Gensler. He has more than 30 years’ experience in institutional and commercial architecture focusing on strategic planning, programming, and sustainable design, scaled from facility operations to campus and city planning. A Texas-practicing architect/educator, Rives directs Gensler’s Firmwide Design Resilience Task Force and leads a Gensler Research Institute Resilience Center.
Dirk Kestner is a Principal and Director of Sustainable Design at Walter P Moore. As director of sustainable design, he provides overall guidance and resourcing to the entire firm, ensuring that all designs incorporate industry-leading expertise in sustainable strategies. Trained and experienced as a structural and materials engineer, Dirk applies his immense passion for environmental accountability in design to elevate the knowledge and expertise of all those around him, creating better results for clients and projects.