Project Details
- Project Name
- Ortlieb's Bottling House
- Location
- PA
- Architect
- KieranTimberlake
- Project Types
-
Office ,Commercial
- Project Scope
- Adaptive Reuse
- Shared by
- Hanley Wood
- Project Status
- Built
This article appeared in the November 2018 issue of ARCHITECT:
Using an online survey system and a sensor network developed in-house, the COTE Top Ten Plus winner finds the balance between energy efficiency and user comfort.
For years, Stephen Kieran, FAIA, and James Timberlake, FAIA, the founders of the Philadelphia-based firm KieranTimberlake, had wanted their own office building to accommodate their growing workforce. Finally, after the Great Recession, they got their chance: the owners of the Henry F. Ortlieb Co. Bottling House, an old brewery facility in Philadelphia’s Northern Liberties neighborhood, had dropped the building’s price in half. They pounced.
Built in 1948 in the International Style, the building had laid “fallow” since the 1980s, Kieran says—intermittently seeing use as a boxing arena, a jazz club, even a conservative synagogue. The firm saw the site’s potential for something else: not just a space for its 100 employees, but a test bed for some of its latest thinking about sustainable design.
“As architects, if we’re not willing to experiment on our own building, who are we to tell a client what to take up?” asks Billie Faircloth, AIA, a partner at the firm who oversees KieranTimberlake’s transdisciplinary research.
Above all, the firm wanted to know if it was possible to operate an office environment without air conditioning in a climate like Philadelphia’s, which alternates between freezing cold winters and hot, humid summers.
“If you can make it work in Philadelphia, you can make it work anywhere,” says Roderick Bates, a principal with the firm who focuses on sustainable design.
The building, which has two levels, includes a fabrication lab, model-building shops, and wheel-mounted desks so teams can reorganize easily. But the architects kept their interventions in the historic building to a minimum, a decision in line with its passive, hands-off approach to cooling such a large space.
The firm incorporated a variety of targeted strategies to achieve its goal, including dehumidification, night flushing, and localized fans. The building—essentially a massive shed—already had ample skylights and big open spaces inside, all of which helped with ventilation.
Whether these interventions could add up to a sufficient alternative approach to cooling was just a guess; the firm then had to test it against data.
“Once we had the hypothesis, we needed to design an experiment to test it,” Bates says.
To collect that data, the firm first installed more than 300 wireless, networked sensors around the building. KieranTimberlake had developed the sensors for previous projects, but never used them at this scale, and never to test such a complicated question.
The system, called Pointelist, was released commercially in 2016 and takes temperature and other readings every five minutes, which it then feeds into a computer program that matches the data with outside temperature and weather information. That way, if it’s a cloudy day, analysts will know why the internal temperature suddenly dropped.
Gathering quantitative data was only half the answer; the more important information was qualitative: namely, how did people feel inside the building?
For that, KieranTimberlake devised an online survey program, which they call Roast (a commercial version debuted in October). Through a customized set of questions, employees provided feedback about their thermal comfort level, framed by contextual questions like where they were sitting and what they were wearing.
“It’s a regime for measuring how a building performs—not just in terms of a systems perspective, but how people are actually feeling in it,” Faircloth says.
KieranTimberlake moved into the Ortlieb building in 2014, and for the next two summers it had employees answer surveys in Roast multiple times each day. The questions were kept simple—“Are you comfortable? Are you warm but comfortable?”—to encourage participation. In all, 10,000 individual survey sets provided a wealth of rich data to pair with the information gleaned from the sensor network.
After those two summers, the results were disappointing: the data clearly pointed to the need for some sort of artificial air conditioning. “We tried and we were wrong,” Kieran says. “It was painful to realize it was not going to work.”
But, he said, the lessons learned were worth it. For one thing, the firm was able to install a smaller air chiller than its engineers had recommended—a 45-ton unit instead of a 60-ton unit. Overall, the firm was able to lower its use of mechanical systems by 75 percent.
The firm also learned that the industry-accepted thresholds for thermal comfort are often much different from people’s actual thresholds. “Our perceived set point does not match our actual set point,” Faircloth says.
The combination of Pointelist and Roast, Kieran says, had allowed the firm to take a more nuanced, data-informed approach, and to see design not as something that ends when a building opens its doors, but that continues to inform and shape it for years afterward.
“We have high hopes for Roast,” he says. “It’s not just a tool for designers. It’s a tool for anyone who owns a building.”
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Project Credits
Project: Ortlieb’s Bottling House, Philadelphia
Client: KTRE, LLP
Architect: KieranTimberlake, Philadelphia . Stephen Kieran, FAIA, James Timberlake, FAIA (partners); Laurent Hedquist, AIA (principal); Jason Ciotti-Niebish, AIA (associate); George Ristow, AIA (project architect); Ryan Wall, AIA, David Gale, AIA (architects)
Mechanical Engineer: Elliott-Lewis; Transsolar
Structural Engineer: CVM Professional
Electrical/Plumbing Engineer: Elliott-Lewis
General Contractor: AJ Lewis Corp.
Lighting Designer: Fisher Marantz Stone
Historic Preservation Consultants: Jon Milner, Architectural Research and Cultural History
Size: 60,000 square feet
Cost: Withheld
Materials and Sources
Acoustical System: Tectum; Clipso
Adhesives/Coatings/Sealants: Dow
Building Management Systems: Honeywell; Tridium
Ceilings: Clipso Flooring: Haworth
Glass: Vitro
Lighting Control Systems: Lutron
Lighting: LSI; I2 Systems; Birchwood; ILP; Bega
Metal: Bill Curran Design; Zahner
Millwork: Pappajohn Woodworking
Paints/Finishes: Benjamin Moore
Plumbing and Water System: Duravit
Roofing: Sika Sarnafil
Windows/Curtainwalls/Doors: Peerless
Read expanded coverage of the winners of the 2018 AIA COTE Top Ten Awards.
From April 2018:
This project is a winner in the 2018 COTE Top Ten Green Projects Awards. It was awarded the AIA COTE Top Ten Plus designation.
From the AIA:
Faced with a growing firm and an increasing need for building and meeting space, Philadelphia-based architecture firm KieranTimberlake transformed a former beer bottling plant into a new studio and testing ground featuring a fabrication lab, model making shop, and breakout spaces. The firm took advantage of the mid-century building’s naturally ventilating form to create an energy-efficient retrofit that uses passive strategies such as daylight, thermal mass, and operable windows to reduce the building’s reliance on mechanical systems by 70 percent. By renovating the existing structure, the firm extended the building’s life cycle and preserved the historic character of a rapidly changing neighborhood.
This project is a retrofit of a historic bottling plant in a dense residential and commercial neighborhood in Philadelphia. Built in 1948, the industrial building was transformed into an open plan office for 100+ people with conference rooms, fabrication shops, and breakout spaces. The goal for the renovation was to achieve a comfortable, energy-efficient, and flexible working environment and retain the building’s original International Style characteristics. After the renovation, the building was added to the National Register of Historic Places. The building is a two-story red brick structure with large bands of windows on the west and north sides. The second floor is an expansive open space with glazed brick walls and exposed roof trusses, illuminated with daylight from the windows and a glazed clerestory on the roof. The architects took advantage of these features to employ environmentally responsible systems for conditioning the space and to minimize lighting and power loads. Natural light and ventilation, together with the thermal mass of the concrete structure, provided an ideal test bed to experiment with various combinations of passive and active ventilation and dehumidification for heating and cooling. The experimentation was scrupulously tracked with 400 data sensors and daily occupant surveys to arrive at a new model for energy-efficient thermal comfort. The renovation highlights and preserves the best attributes of a mid-century building, while incorporating novel approaches to office design to create a flexible, collaborative space that enhances creative pursuits. The vast open space and exposed steel trusses are a treasure rarely experienced in typical office buildings. Furthermore, the project preserves an important part of Philadelphia’s architectural heritage and maintains the character of a rapidly gentrifying neighborhood, highlighting the great potential of the region’s mid-century building stock to provide innovative, productive, and sustainable work spaces that support a growing creative economy.
Metrics Snapshot:
Predicted consumed energy use intensity (EUI): 59 kBtu/sq ft/yr
Energy use intensity (EUI) refers to total energy use by the facility including energy purchased from utilities and provided by on-site renewable sources.
Predicted Net EUI: 59 kBtu/sq ft/yr
Predicted Net carbon emissions: 15.1 lb/sq ft/yr
Net carbon emissions refers to net purchased energy use (total energy use, less any energy generated on-site from renewable resources).
Predicted reduction from national average EUI for building type: 35 percent
Predicted lighting power density: 0.52 W/sq ft
Actual Consumed Energy Use Intensity (Site EUI): 38 kBtu/sq ft/yr
Actual net EUI: 38 kBtu/sq ft/yr
Actual net carbon emissions: 11.2 lb/sq ft/yr
Actual reduction from national average EUI for building type: 58
Percentage of project floor area, if any, that represents adapting existing buildings: 100
Anticipated number of days the project can maintain function without utility power: 2 (Depending on the season, the building could be inhabited for several days, if not weeks in the summer, but business operations would cease without computers.)
CO₂ intensity: Carbon emissions associated with full building life cycle, including manufacturing, transportation, use and end of life (A1-4, B2-4, C& D): 806,214 kg CO₂
Estimated carbon emissions associated with building construction: 579,827 kg CO₂. This is the equivalent of 18.26 lbs/sq ft
Percentage of materials reused from existing buildings by volume: 84
Project Description
From the Architects:
Faced with a growing firm and an increasing need for a fabrication lab, model making shop, and additional breakout spaces, KieranTimberlake began searching for a new studio and testing ground in 2012. During their search, partners Stephen Kieran and James Timberlake came across a former beer bottling plant that was well-suited for an imaginative retrofit and also offered the opportunity for the firm to undertake an ambitious experiment in sustainability: could such a large, industrial building be outfitted to achieve a comfortable working environment using as little energy as possible?
A NEIGHBORHOOD LANDMARK
The historic structure, built in 1948, was once part of the Ortlieb's Brewing Company complex in the Northern Liberties neighborhood of Philadelphia. Designed by Richard Koelle, a student of Paul Cret at the University of Pennsylvania, the factory blends the International style popular in post-war industrial and institutional buildings with Philadelphia's traditional brick palette. Despite this unique aesthetic, a majority of the original brewery buildings, including the one across the street, had been torn down to make way for new condos. Hoping to extend the building's life cycle and preserve the history and character of a rapidly changing neighborhood, the firm chose to adapt the existing building to meet its needs.
SUSTAINABLE PRESERVATION
Because the firm's design process is grounded in research and sustainability, the building's design incorporates a number of sustainable strategies to reduce energy use, many of which involved the restoration of some of the building's original features. Constructed in the days before air conditioning, the original factory was built to be self-ventilating with an open floor plan and lofty ceiling that allow heat to rise from the first to the second floor before exiting the building through operable monitor windows that run the length of the building. To take advantage of these existing features, the firm restored the monitor and replaced the building's existing windows with fully operable, thermally broken sashes. These renovations, along with a new roof made of highly efficient Structurally Insulated Panels (SIPs), help keep the building's energy profile low by passively ventilating or rejecting much of the solar heat the building would otherwise absorb. The restored monitor and windows also track daylight like a sundial, ensuring that the studio is naturally well lit even on cloudy days. When artificial lighting is required, LED task lights are used to create an effective nighttime lighting solution that reduces energy consumption and heat gain.
In addition to renovations and restorations, the building uses a number of passive heating and cooling technologies to ensure a comfortable yet sustainable work environment. Operable shades help minimize or maximize solar heat gain depending on the season, while year-round the building management system uses data from both an indoor sensor network and a rooftop weather station to determine whether exterior temperatures are lower than interior temperatures. During the spring, summer, and fall, higher exterior temperatures or humidity levels will automatically close windows and activate fans to remove latent heat and prevent additional heat gain. These strategies have been largely successful and in its second year of occupancy, the building's energy use was less than half of that of a comparably sized office.
Though the building's sustainability and energy efficiency was of high importance, the firm also wanted to maintain the factory's original aesthetic. This respect for the building's history is reflected through the restoration and reuse of fundamental elements remaining from the structure's factory days. For example, the exterior brick, interior glazed brick walls, roof monitor, original piping, and industrial doors were all restored, and a former loading dock was converted into a fabrication shop that puts the shop's operations in full view and reflects the firm's emphasis on hands-on experimentation.
A 21ST CENTURY WORKSPACE
While much of the original details were preserved, new features were added to support the firm's fluctuating, collaborative office culture where ad-hoc teams reorganize quickly and frequently. The second floor studio plan is flexible, open, and non-hierarchical to encourage collaboration. Conference rooms and breakout spaces with writable walls flank the east side of the office and are separated from the studio by moveable partitions that also serve as pin-up space. To promote hassle-free mobility, the floor on this level is made up of tiles raised on a stilt-like platform. Because air vents, sensors, data, and electric wiring are located beneath the flooring, wheeled furniture with integrated computer equipment can easily be rolled to new locations and plugged into embedded consoles when teams reorganize.
The retrofit process blended the building's history with the firm's needs to create a flexible space well-suited to 21st century workflows. The building and its interiors thus play a supporting role to the firm's work, acting as a shell in which an ever-shifting variety of experiments take shape.
