The best attended architectural lecture in recent memory has to be the Vignoli lecture sponsored by Alpha Rho Chi, the student fraternity of architects, architectural engineers and landscape architects. Thanks to the efforts of Jeff Brown and the APX brothers, the audience was treated to a virtual tour of wonderful modern structures and an elegant oration. While the evening was enjoyable, a little voice repeatedly whispered in my head: “All that Glass!” 

 

The Kimmel Center in Philadelphia has a 3.6 acre glass roof. Surely Pennsylvania has energy code requirements to deal with the amount of glass permissible. It is hard to imagine that the glass roof structure meets the energy performance requirements in the codes. Other issues created by a glass roof include day-lighting control, managing heat gain and loss, and avoiding condensation. The little voice asked why those issues and their solutions were not discussed.

 

The Graduate School of Business at University of Chicago was designed with a glass box supported by steel and glass funnels in seeming defiance of traditional wisdom of roof design. A snow melting system is included in the design to reduce the snow to water which can be conducted away. Perhaps modern technology and the abundance of energy to melt snow could have spared Kahn and Wright of their roofing headaches at the Olivetti and the Johnson Wax buildings.

 

One slide of the IST Building revealed an extremely high ratio of envelope surface area to usable floor area. One can accept that a bridge by definition is long and slender. However, the treatment of the upper floors using overhangs and skylights, and bisecting the thin building cross-section with an open-air walkway may have unduly inflated the energy requirements.

 

In contrast, the February 18 issue of Architecture Week featured the article “Architectural Global Warming”.  The article highlights the office of Mazria, Riskin, Odems’ effort to positively impact the global energy consumption and carbon dioxide emissions. “Using DOE-2, architects can compare predicted building conditions. Mazria believes that (architectural) design work accounts for 80 percent of the reduction in energy consumption, while he attributes the other 20 percent to the mechanical/electrical systems.”

 

The article stressed “when architects design buildings and specify construction materials, they are responsible for the building’s energy consumption pattern for its lifetime. Rather than depending solely on technology to bring down building energy use, Mazria believes design strategies concerned with siting, fenestration, and material selection can go a long way towards energy efficiency.”