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 Savings By Design Confers Honors for Energy Efficiency Integration and Design Excellence in Nonresidential Buildings |
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| 2002
Savings By Design Energy Efficiency Integration Awards
Award of Honor Governor’s
Office of Emergency Services, Headquarters and State Operations
Award of Honor Camp
Arroyo
Citations — South
Coast Watershed Resource Center
Ross
School
International
Terminal at San Francisco Airport
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Five outstanding nonresidential buildings have been recognized for their integration of energy efficiency and architectural design as the culmination of the 2002 Savings By Design Energy Efficiency Integrations Awards competition. The winning design teams received their awards at the 2002 AIACC Awards Celebration in San Francisco on Sept. 22. The announcement was made jointly by the competition’s cosponsors: Pacific Gas and Electric, San Diego Gas and Electric, Southern California Edison, Southern California Gas Company, and the AIA, California Council. “This year’s entries raised the level of competition across the board,” commented Janith Johnson, AIA, manager of nonresidential new construction programs at Southern California Edison. “It made the jurors’ job more difficult, but it was gratifying to see better examples than ever of the integration of energy efficiency in new building design that we are fostering through the Savings By Design program.” The jurors chose two projects for Awards of Honor, citing their intelligent integration of energy efficiency into aesthetically outstanding building design. They bestowed Citations of Merit to three more projects for achieving specific aspects of energy-efficient and sustainable design. Governor’s
Office of Emergency Services, 
Located at the 12-acre decommissioned Mather Air Force Base, this 111,000 sq. ft. building is the strategic command center for the State of California Office of Emergency Services and it handles a full range of emergency response activities, including information gathering, strategic planning, collective decision making, and information dissemination. The facility is a 24-hour, high-security facility whose design furthers the dialogue surrounding the emergency operations center as an evolving public building type. The design
approach, headed by RossDrulisCusenbery Architecture, Inc., finds resonance
in apparent opposites: high security and symbolic permeability; operational
need for controlled lighting and psychological desire for natural light.
The design priorities included the use of daylighting that created a
stress-mitigating public safety work environment. The
message emerging from the project is that the social and technological
aspects of the center can combine to create a public safety building
not reliant on “bunker” imagery, traditional civic formality,
or suburban anonymity. 
“This is an elegant composition, a mature work by a team that’s competently extending their knowledge of how to make building performance the basis for good architecture,” exclaimed the team of jurors. “It is a really important project because of the way in which it incorporates social, cultural, psychological, and economic considerations.” The jurors
praised the design team for their well-organized approach to complex
problem-solving, and for designing the quality of the engineered environment
to meet the needs of the people using it, instead of the other way around.
An example of this is the whole issue of using daylighting and including
views and a sense of the time of day as an intrinsic part of the daylighting
strategy while maintaining security. At the same time, the project achieved
outstanding energy performance: Occupants don’t turn lights on
in the primary spaces during the day. Camp
Arroyo 
Designed by Siegel & Strain Architects, Camp Arroyo is an environmental education facility and summer camp comprising 18,000 sq. ft. that includes six duplex cabins, a dining hall, a swimming pool and two bath houses. It employs careful siting, three different approaches to structure, and low-tech means of conserving energy and minimizing environmental impacts to demonstrate ecological design. The Savings By Design jurors found this project to be a wonderfully understated and subtle expression of resource conservation that demonstrates the accessibility of many sustainability strategies. “The entire project achieves its energy efficiency and environmental goals through thoughtful site and envelope design rather than the introduction of complex mechanical and control systems,” they stated. “These are real gestures—not just symbolic—that are easily transferred to other projects.” 
Ross
School 
The Ross School in Ross, Calif. is a modernization project that deconstructed some existing classrooms and added 16,100 sq. ft. of new classrooms between and connecting to existing buildings. Designed by EHDD Architecture, the project avoids the use of mechanical air conditioning through the use of sun shading, spectrally selective glazing, a cool roof, night ventilation cooling, and cross-ventilation. In addition, half of the classrooms are fully daylit. 
The
jurors awarded this project a Citation of Merit for its sophisticated
approach to a very constrained site and its skillful integration of
several energy-saving strategies. “This is an important model for
school projects throughout the state,” the jurors stated. “It
demonstrates that you can use a variety of strategies from the deconstruction
issue and site reuse through daylight and ventilation in challenging
modernization projects.” They also commented that the project is
notable because it served the program goal of getting an extra classroom
by trading away mechanical air conditioning. In their estimation, the
project provides very comfortable spaces for kids, and its configuration
around courtyard space, hands-on educational feel, natural vegetation,
and water pond will engage students in the learning process.
South
Coast Watershed Resource Center 
This project is a rehabilitation/restoration of a vacant former ranger residence and grounds in a county park containing a heavily-visited public beach. Designed by Blackbird Architects, the Center educates school groups and the public about the role everyone plays in reducing pollution of creeks and oceans. The building and land space are programmed and designed to showcase green building principles and serve as a model for the public. The project was designed to be extremely energy efficient from the start, to reduce the load that the integrated solar roof shingles could offset. It also features on-demand water and space heating, efficient lighting, salvaged materials, drought-tolerant native planting, and a bioswale that filters runoff. 
International
Terminal at San Francisco Airport 
The third Citation of Merit winner was the International Terminal at San Francisco International Airport, which houses international arrival and departure facilities including those of the Federal Inspection Service. Designed by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill LLP, the 1.8 million sq. ft. facility features a double-cantilever roof design that significantly reduces the need for electric light sources and displacement ventilators that cool only the occupied strata of public space. “This
is a beautiful architectural expression driven by a sustainability idea,”
declared the panel of jurors. “ The
project grew out of the mandate for thoroughly integrated daylighting,
which was the driver for its elegant form and strong aesthetic expression.”  
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