A new experiment opened at the University of Oregon last week: the John L. Jaqua Academic Center for Student Athletes. The community has been dazzled by the minimalist glass box, replete inside with sleek oak finishes, airy daylighting, glass walls, a gravity-defying stairway, streamlined furniture, and surfaces from floor to ceiling etched with the names of academically accomplished athletes, highlighted with artfully placed LEDs. In the advising wings, metal door frames are adorned with laser-cut room numbers; thirty-plus tutoring rooms are each equipped with large flat-screen display panels and fluorescent digital "chalk" boards; a well-stocked cafe on the ground floor and free student athlete parking nearby further ensure the comfort of this privileged campus contingent.
But enough about the social and political messages sent by this intriguing building. How will it perform?
An important item of context for this question is the University of Oregon's prominent commitment to green design, as exemplified by then-President David Frohnmeyer's signing of the American College and University Presidents Climate Commitment. Specifically, this commitment declares that
"Colleges and universities must exercise leadership in their communities and throughout society by
modeling ways to eliminate global warming emissions, and by providing the knowledge and the
educated graduates to achieve climate neutrality."
Climate neutrality is something even the best buildings rarely achieve. The architects of the Jaqua Center, however, are among those at the forefront of green design. If this center isn't the greenest building in the region, it isn't because of the designers. And, given the appearance, described as "staggeringly opulent" by OregonLive, it isn't because of money, either.
A second important contextual item is the Oregon State Energy Efficiency Design law: that all public buildings must outperform the ASHRAE 90.1 energy-efficiency standard by 20%. The Jaqua center, privately funded by the Phil Knight Foundation, originally attempted to dodge the SEED requirement on the grounds that it was a private building, only to be leased to the university. One engineer claimed that the owners acceded to pressures and agreed to complete the process; another insisted that it did not. In any case, the glass facade is reported to have required, and received, "special permission" from the Oregon Department of Energy.
Assuming that the building was required to meet the standard Oregon energy code, at least, we may surmise that it was DESIGNED (i.e., modeled) for passable energy efficiency. Indeed, a survey of the interior reveals a truly ambitious lighting design: LEDs are prevalent enough to provide navigational lighting in many areas, compact fluorescent pendant lights are present in tutoring rooms (see photo, above), and T8 linear fluorescent lamps are used in the lecture hall, classrooms, and the larger offices. Tutoring rooms and offices are arranged around the perimeter and atrium edges (again as shown in the photo), giving them appreciable daylighting despite tinted atrium-side glass, and task lights are placed low enough in most spaces to diminish the necessary wattage. The lighting design team from Interface seems to have done an outstanding job.
The heating and cooling systems are more suspect. The all-glass facade is the most arresting external feature of the building (indeed, it is the only feature, one might argue), of which the outer leaf appears fully sealed with the notable exception of the ground-level doors. A three-foot space between inner and outer glass layers contains a screen of flat metal strips, spaced irregularly, we were told, to evoke the image of falling rain, as well as a narrow catwalk. The bottom of this facade space is grated, indicating the potential for a cooling airflow, but no upper hatches could be detected. We assume, and University of Oregon professor Ihab Elzeyadi has confirmed, that the facade airspace is therefore intended for thermal buffering and shading only.
How effective will those thin metal strips be during bright sunny days of the spring, summer, and fall? One can imagine workspaces vividly striped with their shadows. Ubiquitous internal blinds on fully-glazed exterior office walls suggest that heat and glare problems are anticipated; we can only hope that the blinds will not remain drawn, with electric lights on, for months at a time.
Infiltration may be a greater problem than cooling, however, and infiltration is suspected to be a primary cause of discrepancy between modeled and actual building performance. At the entry, grandiose glass doors open directly to a fully-conditioned atrium without benefit of revolving doors or vestibules. Moreover, the glass doors are so heavy that most entrants use the automatic door-opening button rather than wrestle a door open by hand. These are swing doors, set to open and close slowly, so that cold outside air has a full ten seconds of unobstructed access to the warm atrium through a 40+ square-foot opening at each entry or exit. In fact, during today's busy weekday use, the doors rarely closed at all!
Let's hope that this building's energy performance is reported at some date, and that students of Environmental Control Systems I and II in the UO Architecture Department are vigorous in their analysis and in their subsequent communications to university leaders who have made such ambitious claims on behalf of their campus. If it is a great performer, then we have many valuable lessons to take away; if not, then the beauty of this building is, regretfully, only skin-deep.
No comments:
Post a Comment