It was October when I rushed to the corner of Ferst Drive and State Street in Atlanta to tour the site of the forthcoming Kendeda Building for Innovative Sustainable Design on the campus of Georgia Tech. After maneuvering through a row of scrappy bushes to greet John DuConge, senior project manager for design and construction at the institute’s Office of Facilities Management, and Rachael Pocklington, communications manager, I found myself facing not a hub of construction activity but an empty parking lot.
“This is it,” DuConge said, pointing down to a bright yellow line painted on the asphalt to demarcate the building’s footprint. As we walked across the outline of what will be a two-story, 37,000-square-foot flexible academic building, he described what students and the public will see come 2019, when the project is scheduled for completion. (The project held its official construction launch on Nov. 2, with construction activity expected to ramp up in early 2018, according to the Living Building Chronicle, which documents the site’s progress.)
Pedestrians will approach the building mainly from the outline’s northwest corner, where the parking lot meets a small grove of trees that has stood for a century, if not since the institute’s founding in 1885. The building’s west entrance will sit under a dramatic canopy of photovoltaic panels that lends the design concept its nickname, the Porch (more on that later). Large expanses of curtainwall glazing and windows open the building to the outdoors, while thermally treated wood clads the building’s western volume, and brick, made entirely from recycled materials, clads the eastern mass. Building insets break up the rectangular building façades, highlight entryways, and invite in natural light.
Inside, maker space, offices, classrooms, and teaching laboratories will surround a double-height atrium offering common spaces. A 5,300-square-foot roof garden and apiary will top an approximately 170-seat auditorium on the north end of the building. More than anything, the project aims to become as an educational resource and gathering place for Georgia Tech and the greater Atlanta community.
[See more floorplans and renderings of the project in the design development phase here.]
The diverse program and 18-hour-a-day, 365-days-a-year operating cycle would be challenging for any project. Factor in the building’s pursuit of the International Living Future Institute’s Living Building Challenge (LBC), and you get history in the making. One stressor removed from the project has been fundraising. As part of its agreement for donating $25 million for the design, construction, and operations of the building (plus $5 million for post-occupancy activities), the Kendeda Fund asked Georgia Tech to become a partner for advocating sustainable design and construction and the LBC in the South, says Howard Wertheimer, FAIA, the school’s assistant vice president of capital planning and space management.
The design duo of global firm Lord Aeck Sargent (LAS) and the Seattle-based Miller Hull Partnership isn’t fazed by the prospect of meeting LBC’s rigorous standards in a city known for its humidity. While Atlanta-based LAS senior associate and lead project architect Joshua Gassman is confident that the building will achieve Living Building status, he acknowledges it will “take the tremendous effort of everyone involved in project, from design, construction, and the owner’s team to get us there.” Having lived in the city for two decades, Gassman is quick to politely challenge any notion that the city’s weather is unbearable. “While it is hot and humid here, Atlanta also has a mild winter,” he says. “The climate is manageable and quite livable, which is why a lot of people live here.”
According to the National Weather Service, the average temperature in Atlanta this past July was 81.2 F, with an average relative humidity (RH) of 72 percent. The average temperature for December 2016 was 48.9 F, with an average RH of 68 percent.
Selecting the Right Team
LAS’ design portfolio in the South coupled with Miller Hull’s experience in progressive green projects, such as the Bullitt Center in Seattle, earned the team a spot on Georgia Tech’s shortlist for a three-month-long ideas competition in late 2015 and early 2016. During two all-day workshops, three teams—which also included Perkins+Will and the combined team of Collins Cooper Carusi, Eskew + Dumez + Ripple, and Hellmuth + Bicknese—were given an eight-acre parcel of land near the heart of the campus to propose a site and design. The process was held under the observing eyes of Georgia Tech staff, which wanted to assess the chemistry of the interdisciplinary teams as well as offer their feedback. “Often times there’s an alpha-dog architect who says, ‘Let’s put the building here, and you figure it out,’ ” Wertheimer says. “This process respected the voices of all of their partners.”
“It was an exhaustive, thorough competition and interview—almost like a dating game,” says Miller Hull partner Brian Court, AIA. “Georgia Tech was trying on the three teams, seeing which one fit the best.”
The winning team, Wertheimer says, had to commit to transferring the knowledge and experience gained from the project to further sustainable construction in the South. For example, along with the coupling of Miller Hull and LAS, Portland, Ore.–based PAE Engineers, which also worked on the Bullitt Center, was paired with local M/E/P firm Newcomb & Boyd.
In fact, in a two-day kick-off charrette following Georgia Tech’s selection of LAS and Miller Hull in March 2016, a diverse group of stakeholders identified the most important goal for the project was to “change the industry to instead of saying ‘why?’ to say ‘why not?’ ”
Improvements Beyond the Site
Back in the parking lot in October, DuConge describes how the project’s impact has already been “exponential.” He gestures to the west at the checkerboard of cars in an even bigger parking lot than the one in which we were standing, and the low-slung Beringause Building—both of which will be demolished—and back to the grove of majestic trees to the north. “Our long-term masterplan calls for us to bring back the forest to the campus and help create the Eco-Commons,” a green belt of open space, pedestrian paths, and tree growth that will encircle the entire heart of the campus and help the university become stormwater-neutral, he says.
Within the parcel of land allotted to the Kendeda Building, Court says that Miller Hull and LAS vetted more than 40 different building configurations to see how each would perform in the LBC. In the end, the team found themselves at the site’s southeast corner with a structure oriented in the north–south direction. Though it was not the optimal solution with respect to the LBC, since an east–west orientation would better facilitate passive solar heat gain and photovoltaic power, Court says, it was best for the greater master plan: “This project also has to become part of the campus.” (Interestingly, Wertheimer noted that all three competing teams zeroed in on this corner in their proposals.)
The building mass will act as a buffer to noise and exhaust from street traffic and the neighboring Marcus Nanotechnology Building to the east. “It was about the building deferring to the site,” Court says. By occupying the corner of the site closest to development, the Kendeda Building will reserve the “open space for people and landscape to occupy instead of having the building out there.”
Crafting the Porch and Structure
The design concept draws its name both from the space created under the roof-life photovoltaic array on the western elevation of the building and from the porch’s venerable stature in the south. “Before air-conditioning,” Court says, “every house had a porch—front porch, side porch, and back porch—and that’s really where life occurred during the day.” Miller Hull principal Margaret Sprug, AIA, says the solar array porch will cover approximately 5,200 square feet of space for "spill out classes and classes that engage with the Eco-Commons to the west of our immediate site."
Currently, the team is looking at a mass-timber structure on a cast-in-place concrete foundation. Gassman says the team chose wood for environmental, economical, and aesthetic reasons, but that they are integrating other materials to optimize structural performance. Instead of using glulam beams of substantial depth to achieve a 30-foot clear span of the open commons areas, the team worked with the local structural engineer Uzun + Case to create a composite queen-post truss that incorporates 1.5-inch-diameter steel rods with the timber members. Construction manager Skanska recently explored the economics and assembly time of using a nail-laminated timber deck for the second floor in a firsthand experiment.
Obstacles to Green
One of the Kendeda Building’s biggest challenges, Werthmeier says, will be achieving net-positive energy. Pinpointing the predicted energy use intensity (pEUI) for the Kendeda Building has been difficult due to its flexible program. Throw in a bunch of college students whose waking hours cover all hours of the day and the Southeast climate, and you end up with a complex calculation. Sprug currently estimates the pEUI to be between 30 and 35; for comparison, the pEUI for the Bullitt Center, an office building with predictable occupancy, was 16.
Additonally, Gassman notes, that other certified Living Buildings—14 to date—have gotten “tremendous visitor usage, and Georgia Tech wants to make sure we’re future proof against that.” The variable pedestrian traffic “increases demand on everything from toilets to lights, and to the HVAC system, which translates into demands on the photovoltaic array and [the net-positive water supply],” he says.
Court expects the mechanical HVAC system to be one of the building’s largest loads. “We tried to get natural ventilation to work,” he says, but even during the few weeks of the year when Atlanta’s humidity is manageable, another factor comes into play: pollen. “From a maintenance perspective, you wouldn’t want to open those windows,” Court says. Thus a strategy of nighttime flushes to help cool the building is not feasible.
Instead, the building will use radiant heating and cooling, ceiling fans, and a dedicated outdoor air system for dehumidification. Gassman says the team is working with the institute to expand its standards for thermal comfort to leverage the six areas that influence people’s comfort: temperature, humidity, air speed, radiant temperature, clothing level, and activity level. Still the LBC requires projects to have operable windows, which are hard to find elsewhere on Georgia Tech’s campus.
The LBC’s Red List of 22 materials banned from Living Buildings is another practice the school is considering implementing on future campus projects, Sprug says. However, finding acceptable commercial products available within the LBC's restrictions on transportation has been difficult. “What we hear from manufacturers is that if they don’t hear from architects and designers that we don’t want materials with toxins in it, they’re not going to volunteer to [change their process],” Sprug says.
Furthermore, Georgia Tech, a public institution, has asked the team to identify three comparable products for every specified material to create a “competitive bid situation,” Sprug says. “That’s definitely a higher bar. The Southeastern market is not used to these kinds of demands on them.” But through collaborations with manufacturers and the entire project team, including PAE and Skanska, she says, “we’re getting there. There are some cultural and even political barriers [in the Southeast] that we’re struggling with, but we’re making progress and that’s the whole point of the Living Building project.”
A Legacy Begins
The Kendeda Building has already nudged design and construction practices in the Southeast to become more sustainable, Gassman says. Not only are the firms on the interdisciplinary team viewing their work on other projects in a more holistic manner, but Georgia Tech is also reviewing its design standards and requirements for future campus projects.
“The Kendeda Fund is trying very hard to create not just a building, but also an entire process with this project,” Gassman says. “The LBC is a lot in the way like how we thought of the U.S. Green Building Council’s LEED Platinum rating in 2002 and 2003 in that it’s paving new ground and asking people to think differently.” And he believes the effort will be worthwhile. “People at the forefront will have to work harder to get the needle to move, with the understanding that the people behind us will not have to.”
