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INTÉGRAL: Revolutionary Engineering
INTÉGRAL: Revolutionary Engineering
INTÉGRAL: Revolutionary Engineering
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INTÉGRAL: Revolutionary Engineering

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Intégral: Revolutionary Engineering is a treatise of innovation in deep
green building design, featuring stories and ideas from some of the
world’s leading engineers and designers.

These inside stories share the challenges and lessons of many of
Intégral Group’s transformative designs around the world, including
the first net zero lab, the largest net zero museum, the Grand Mosque
in Mecca, healthy healthcare facilities in Europe, eco-districts in Canada
and the eastern U.S., and some of the first Living Buildings in the world.

The hand-illustrated stories demonstrate Intégral’s philosophical
principles of revolutionary engineering, which include throwing out
antiquated rules of thumb, transforming design processes to be intrinsically
integrative, and expanding the roles and relationships between engineers,
architects, clients, and occupants. Intégral: Revolutionary Engineering
is for trailblazers who care about advancing the building and construction
industry toward greater occupant health and happiness, and stronger
resilience and regenerative systems.
LanguageEnglish
PublisherBookBaby
Release dateJan 31, 2014
ISBN9780982690291
INTÉGRAL: Revolutionary Engineering

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    Book preview

    INTÉGRAL - Molly Miller

    communities.

    IMAGINE

    Imagine a world where buildings make people healthier, happier, and more productive, creating delight when entered, serenity when occupied, and regret when departed.

    – Amory Lovins

    Imagine

    How many chillers will it take to cool the building? That’s one kind of engineering question.

    Can we spray water on the roof, let it naturally cool down at night and then use it the next day to cool the building? Is there something better than heating and cooling air? Can we heat and cool the surfaces themselves by running hot and cold water along the beams or under the floors? Can we take heat from one place that needs to be cool and move it to another place that needs to be warm? Can we use the constant temperature of the earth? What’s around the building? How will the design change the occupants, the visitors, the neighborhood, the building industry, the future?

    These are entirely different kinds of engineering questions, asked by a different kind of engineer.

    Engineering as a discipline has a foundation of mathematics and science. It requires knowledge of thermodynamics and laws of motion, an ability to apply calculations to determine air and water flow, an understanding of how systems can provide enough heating and cooling and fresh air to make a building operational. This is standard engineering. Sustainable design requires these same foundations yet also requires a kind of profound curiosity and creativity that leads to transforming standard design to be more innovative, more imaginative.

    We need to imagine where we want to go, and that’s how we know where to start, says Kevin Hydes, Founder and CEO Intégral Group.

    My personal view of engineering is that on a foundational level you have to know the solution before you do the calculation, Hydes elaborates.

    With what we now understand about the environmental crisis, for example, we know we must calculate so our projects will hit net zero energy, waste and water and hit efficiencies as low as 15 kBtu/sf/yr EUI, continuing to perform at those levels or better. As part of high-performance design, we also have the opportunity to look ahead, ask imaginative questions and design our calculations around creative solutions that achieve greater occupant comfort and happiness.

    How, for example, can we have lots of daylight and not have glare and excess heat gain in our interiors? If you stop thinking so much like an engineer or architect and start thinking more like an artist, you might find a good answer, according to Associate Principal Geoff McDonell.

    I come from a family of artists and all of them have north facing studios with clerestory windows to capture that diffused light because they realize direct glare sunlight is bad and diffused ambient light is beautiful and comfortable. That’s unfortunately what some designers have forgotten, says McDonell.

    Back in the passive design age we had ‘punched’ windows, he explains. These windows were inset on the warm side of the wall, the insulated side, which cut out the thermal bridging and gave a little bit of shading from the side and overhead. An inset window provides a better quality of light and some efficiency.

    In Vancouver, where McDonell works, the glass look is very popular with architects but there’s a trend toward using a lot more fritted glass to capture this diffused look the artists love.

    This is pretty basic stuff for green design, yet the principle that looking at a building with an artist’s eye not only leads to more beauty but better engineering is one that can go much further as we imagine new kinds of buildings.

    The Engineer as Artist

    The engineer as artist is an interesting idea, according to Jason F. McLennan, founder of the Living Building Challenge and Intégral’s Chief Innovation Officer.

    Traditionally, the engineer wanted to practice almost as an invisible profession where the things the engineers are involved with are things you don’t see and the only time the engineer got feedback was when something was broken, he says, and that led to people over sizing systems so they had an adequate sufficiency and they didn’t worry about efficiency and innovation. And it also led to complacency and often just a lack of artistry because they didn’t think it mattered. Rules of thumb and tried and true practice has dominated the field.

    When you have projects where the engineering becomes part of the architecture, where the duct design has to be beautiful and where the systems are going to be revealed, I think that calls for the best out of the profession. That’s what’s needed for the new engineer… to not think ‘well, it doesn’t really matter how I run my pipes or my ducts because no one is really going to see them,’ he reflects. When you say it all matters, you start to

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