Party Walls

It’s October and a burgeoning category 3 hurricane is forecasted to make its way up the East Coast within the coming week. Somehow this all seems familiar.

It’s been 3 years since Superstorm Sandy came ashore in the New York Metro Area. Much of the damage has been repaired and structures rebuilt, but have we done enough to mitigate the impact of a similar catastrophe? I think we can all agree that likely, we have not. However, progress has been made, and at SWA, we have been working hard over the past 3 years to improve the strength of our buildings through providing resiliency assessments and remediation planning. It’s not a fix-all for the region, but it has helped some buildings to implement upgrades that might make a big difference in the next week. (more…)

If nothing else, people are adaptable. While something might be an annoyance at first, we often figure out a way to manage it and move on. Unfortunately, we all too often do this when it comes to our greatest life investment…our homes. Whether an existing or new home, we almost always are not comfortable in our home or at least portions of our home. One, several, or even the entire home may never be at desirable conditions, but we learn to cope with it by putting on layers of clothing or adding small electric heaters to cold spaces, or supplemental fans in hot ones. So we are not comfortable as we allow our conditioned air to easily escape our homes and our utility bills continue to be high. The simple question is…why?

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A recent SWA Accessibility project, City Market at O, was featured as a local case study on health in design during a recent event held by the American Institute of Architects in Washington, DC. The day-long seminar, Healthy Design, Healthy Building, Healthy City: An Interactive Workshop, featured key leaders in the field of health in design who spoke on new design initiatives intended to improve the health and wellbeing of building occupants.

SWA moderated the case study panel discussion which included City Market leaders Richard Lake, Founding Principal of Roadside Development and Andrew Taylor, Project Architect with Shalom Baranes Associates. The panelists framed the discussion around the AIA 6 Principles for Designing for Health to highlight ways in which the project successfully embodies health in design.

SWA consultants assisted in achieving the first key principle “Safety” by ensuring safe access for people with disabilities. Check out the rest of the team’s healthy design strategies below! (more…)

As a native Californian, I often marvel at my home state’s progressive attitude towards environmental conservation. In 1988, we were the first state to adopt air quality standards, which the federal Clean Air Act would later be amended to resemble. More recently, landmark legislation such as A.B. 32, or California’s Global Warming Solutions Act of 2006, set the first statewide requirements for GHG emissions reductions in the country. Today, cities like San Francisco have plastic bag bans and zero-waste initiatives. However, our culture is one of sustainability partly out of necessity—in January 2014, Governor Brown declared California’s severe and sustained drought situation a state of emergency. Despite our already resource-constrained present, California’s population is anticipated to increase by 14% over the next fifteen years to 44 million people. The good news is, we’ve made some big strides recently in planning for the future demands of an ever-growing population.

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Earning a green building certification is a significant achievement for a project as it represents a strong commitment to sustainability principles. When pursuing certification, it is essential to select the rating system best suited to your project type and performance goals.

In this blog piece, we will examine the anatomy of five popular green building rating systems, including their applicability to building type and a brief summation of typical advantages and challenges faced by clients pursuing certification. (more…)

Do you live in DC? Do you own, manage or reside in a multifamily building? If so, we would love to get your feedback!

The District of Columbia’s Department of Energy and Environment (DOEE) has engaged Steven Winter Associates to gain feedback from multifamily owners, managers and residents about their energy and water usage. To start off, we’re conducting brief surveys (10-minutes max), and hope this effort will have positive outcomes for future multifamily projects in DC by raising awareness of green/energy efficiency initiatives.

PURPOSE:
Survey responses will inform the potential development of a voluntary energy and water conservation program tailored exclusively for the multifamily rental sector in the District. This program will include a customized toolkit to engage residents and building managers in improving energy and water efficiency. It will also encourage participation in a peer-to-peer energy and water reduction competition.

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Last week, I had the opportunity to visit the DURAhome, New York City College of Technology’s entry for the 2015 Solar Decathlon. This project is currently nearing completion at the Brooklyn Navy Yard. Over the past 3 months, more than sixty students have toiled around the clock to finish construction in time for the contest, which will take place October 8-18 in Irvine, California. The Solar Decathlon is the U.S. Department of Energy’s biennial competition that challenges college and university student-led teams to design and build solar-powered net-zero homes that are affordable, energy-efficient, and aesthetically appealing.

TeamDURA’s focus was to create a prototype of post-disaster housing that is suited for New York City’s high-density urban environment, and could serve as a shelter in the aftermath of a catastrophic storm. As such, multifamily, multistory solutions were preferable to traditional single-family trailers, which have larger footprints. DURAhome consists of several prefabricated modules that can be packaged and shipped on standard-sized tractor trailers for quick response at low cost. These flexible modules can then be joined in standalone configurations or stacked for multifamily uses. Like the city, the DURAhome is diverse, urban, resilient, and adaptable.

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I love to cook. And like most cooks, I love to cook on my gas range. But I am also a building science researcher, and the researcher in me doesn’t understand how we allow gas ranges in homes. Building codes and energy efficiency programs have pushed the housing market towards all combustion appliances being sealed combustion and direct vent. Our furnaces, boilers, water heaters, and fireplaces are all going towards sealed combustion. Soon it is likely that building codes won’t even give you the option of using open combustion devices. This push for sealed combustion is an effort to drastically reduce the health hazards of carbon monoxide poisoning and other contaminants in our homes. As a researcher, this makes complete sense to me…but I, like many others, say “Don’t touch my gas range.”

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SWA Senior Mechanical Engineer Lois Arena discusses the recently announced community microgrid project based in the Village of Mamaroneck. The Westchester County village is among 83 New York communities to be awarded $100,000 by the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority (NYSERDA) to conduct a microgrid feasibility study.

Steven Winter Associates and Murphy Brothers Contracting, along with a team of technical experts and local leaders, will assess the challenges, benefits, and costs associated with using microgrids to improve resiliency and recovery time during a significant power outage, as well as to offset peak demand energy use.

This segment is part of LMCTV‘s videocast of the Murphy Brothers Contracting “10 Steps to Ensuring Those Beautiful Custom Homes are also Comfortable, Long Lasting, and Efficient” event. Watch LMCTV’s complete coverage of the event here.

 

When close to 90% of our lives are spent inside, you would expect extensive measures would be taken to ensure our buildings provide healthy environments in which to live and work. Unfortunately, more often than not, tested air quality inside buildings is much worse than outside.

Here are some common causes of these indoor pollutants:

• Pesticide use during regular pest control treatments
• Pollutants (asthma triggers) from cleaning products, smoking, pets, pests, fuel use, etc;
• Inadequate ventilation;
• Mold and moisture build up from water leaks and inadequate ventilation; and,
• Carbon monoxide from appliances, heaters or other equipment.

This problem is made worse by the way in which the pollutants utilize air movement pathways throughout the building. Anywhere air can move, moisture can move and pollutants can move. This presents an intersection of energy efficiency and healthy buildings; air sealing these leakage pathways in the buildings stops pollutants from traveling and saves heating energy.

Let’s revisit the common pollutants and strategies for intervention and mitigation. You’ll notice a common theme of “find the source, stop the source, seal the holes.”

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