Getting Closed In – and right before the snowstorm

November 23, 2010

With the snowstorm that hit Monday afternoon at 3:30 just as the jobsite was shutting down, everyone is thinking about winter – how to get home, for one thing, and, looking ahead, how the new building will perform to keep us warm once we’re living inside. 

Our project’s energy model is designed around what we call a “super-insulated shell.”  The roof, walls and windows will all be high performing, meaning we’re insulating at a much higher level than code demands.  The greater insulation will keep the building from experiencing the large interior temperature swings that plague normally-insulated buildings.  Those buildings, in turn, use more heating or cooling energy to keep the interior temperature constant.  Our building is designed to use much less --  in fact, we’ll use only about 32% of the energy required by a standard new office building in Seattle and the Puget Sound region.   This will make ours the most energy efficient office building in Western Washington.

Once our R-50 roof was on, attention turned to the walls.   Our big concrete shell received its first new winter coat, late last week – a 1” thick layer of spray-on, closed-cell polyeurethane foam on the inside of the 8” thick concrete walls.  This insulation layer will be joined later by traditional fiberglass batts in the wall furring.  Together, they and the 8” thick concrete walls form an R-30 barrier against the elements.

Interior framing is underway and the office plan’s central open space – the forum, we call it – is taking shape.  This is where we’ll hold firm-wide gatherings and invite the community in for after-hours events. 

- Steve Rice, Partner

Rice Fergus Miller

The New Roof

We were able to frame the new clerestory monitor with reclaimed material from the removal of the original roof.  You can see the old roof joists re-used at the top of this photo.

The layers of the new roof are shown here. At left is the layer of insulation. To the right, the coverboard and sheathing. And, to the far right, the roof membrane is being laid.

There was a rush to have the roof complete before the rains began. Several of Tim Ryan Construction’s roofers worked in the pouring rain to finish the roof. As a side note, our roof surface is white to reduce the urban heat island effect. (Please see the previous post about our sustainability goals and approach.)

Our Sustainability Goals and Approach

The decision to purchase and renovate an existing building came after much careful and calculated study.  Our search to find the right building to relocate our growing practice lasted eight years and investigated almost twenty properties.  The former Sears Annex (vintage 1948) offered many positives: a central downtown location, great visibility, more than twice the floor area of our existing office space, 30 parking stalls (2/3 of them secure and under the building), a strong concrete shell, exciting possibilities for interior renovation, and the opportunity to practice sustainability on a very serious scale.

However, the Sears Annex presented many challenges, too.  Having been used mostly for automotive maintenance and light repair (tires, batteries, oil, etc.) and as a warehouse for appliances, building systems were minimal and antiquated and finishes were nonexistent. The building had been locked up and left vacant for 25 years, so no maintenance had been done. Water flowed freely through the roof and upper floor framing, running down the inside faces of the concrete walls. Pigeons ruled.  Frankly, it was awful.

Our practice was founded downtown in 1987, at a time when businesses were beginning to flee our once vibrant core for greener pastures next to the new mall out by the freeway.  The 90’s were tough downtown.  Finally, after the turn to the new millennium, development began to take place in small, measured steps.  Downtown is better today, but it is by no means burgeoning.  The decision to make a major investment now is based both on our desire to stay true to our roots and to be part of the solution for downtown.  We decided to do what we know needs to be done here – it’s the same thing that’s needed in almost every small downtown across America.   We’re investing.

 

The existing building’s makeup and urban location has allowed us to purposefully aim investment dollars toward systems and improvements that will bring function, efficiency, flexibility and value:

- Very few dollars spent on site work:  As an in-city, already-developed site, no dollars are needed for  grading, excavating, filling, storm ponds, access, roadways, parking or utilities infrastructure.  We will create a new sidewalk with landscaping and human-scaled street lighting immediately in front of the building.

- Sensible and cost-saving approach to environmental air quality and conditioning: rather than provide a traditional HVAC system with high operating costs under 90% of outdoor environmental conditions, we have engineered and will install a system of components which, together, take advantage of the moderate Pacific Northwest climate.   We can demonstrate via our building energy model that we will realize significantly lower energy costs to provide conditioned indoor space.  Our engineer claims we will be 50% more efficient than the most efficient office building currently operating in nearby Seattle.

The new Rice Fergus Miller office will be certified under the USGBC’s Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design 2009 Version 3.  A Platinum Certification is expected.

To our knowledge, this project could be the first LEED Platinum certified project in Western Washington, not built from the ground up. In true sense, this project will be a model for others to follow. Possibly:

 - First LEED Platinum Building in Kitsap County

 - First LEED Platinum Building on the Olympia Peninsula

 - First LEED Platinum Commercial Office: Major Renovation, Western Washington

 - The top 5% (or higher) based on performance of all LEED Buildings Built in Washington

The building’s energy efficiency measures include:

- A Super-insulated envelope

- A highly efficient Variable Refrigerant Flow (VRF) zonal heat pump system 

- Ceiling fans used for mixing and destratification

- Highly efficient lighting design combined with daylighting controls

- High performance glazing systems

- Passive solar overhangs

- Heat recovery ventilation

- Shower drainwater heat recovery

- Heat recovery from the server room

Combined, these measures are expected to save the company almost $23,000 in electric utility costs per year. 

The building is designed for optimized energy efficiency with a focus on keeping things simple. In addition to the highly efficient HVAC system, the building will take advantage of Bremerton’s relatively mild marine climate.  Automated controls will switch the hybrid HVAC system from active to passive mode based on an outdoor temperature range.   The building is also equipped with a night venting system to pre-cool the building mass at night during the summer months.

Occupants are encouraged to play an active role in the fine tuning of the building. An integrated web-based feedback system will provide occupants with real time building energy performance.  

Finally, the building will reduce potable water use by 65% over a standard building through the use of low-flow plumbing fixtures combined with a large rainwater harvesting system used for toilet flushing and irrigation of the green roof.  The project is projected to save over 36,000 gallons of fresh potable water per year.

This innovative building will serve as demonstration lab for Rice Fergus Miller’s clients, showing that energy and water conservation measures can be readily implemented, even in a retrofit project.

The building features many energy-saving innovations in the design of the lighting and power systems, including lighting control, occupancy sensors and task lighting. The electrical distribution system is split into branches for different types of loads.  The lighting, mechanical, and convenience power (“plug loads”) are all served from discrete sources.  This allows the metering of the different types of loads, and in the case of the mechanical equipment, the metering of individual branch circuits.  This metering capability allows the users of the space to get real-time feedback about their electrical energy usage and to thereby actively participate in reducing energy use. Investment in these innovative measures will contribute to reduce the building’s life cycle operating costs in perpetuity. 

We have looked for ways to carry forward elements of the existing building and weave them into our renovation story – to keep a historical continuum.  These largely creative gestures are another way to reinforce our decision to renovate the building, rather than to tear it down:

 - We will cut a hole in the upper floor so as to better “connect” the two main working floors. The removed heavy Douglas Fir floor joists are to be sawn into boards which will clad a feature wall near our office entry, where we will display a graphic timeline of our firm’s 23-year history.

- The expanded metal screens from the old freight elevator will be recycled to filter light coming from the south-side windows into our main “forum” space.

- Heavy steel rails, pulleys and counterweights from the old freight elevator shaft will be refashioned into a manually-operated system to hoist and lower what we call a “flywall” --  a 7’ x 18’ two-sided display wall that will move between two tall interior columns to act as pinup wall, divider or  projection screen at the main, mezzanine and upper studio floors.

- When we cut new window openings in the existing concrete walls, we’ve exposed raw ends of reinforcing steel which need to be protected.  It was decided a cover would be the least intrusive, most economical way to accomplish this.  In the spirit of the building’s auto repair and maintenance history, we will salvage radiator caps from automobile junkyards and paint them for this new purpose.

In addition to accommodating the normal workings of a professional design firm, this building is designed as a working example for clients, potential clients, and the wider community of how sustainable development projects can make operational and financial sense when approached with creativity and common sense.


- Steve Rice, Partner
Rice Fergus Miller

The Cisterns are Here

Two 2,500 gallon tanks arrived and were rolled into place today. It took five men to roll the cisterns up a ramp and into the garage, stand them up on end in the deepest part of the garage, and then move them into place.

The building will reduce potable water use by 65% over a standard building through the use of low-flow plumbing fixtures combined with a rainwater harvesting system used for toilet flushing and irrigation of the green roof.  The cisterns will provide for 95% of toilet flushing needs over the course of a year. This is projected to save over 36,000 gallons of fresh potable water annually.

The Old and the New

As construction continues, we are seeing glimpses of what's in store for our building re-use. We have looked for ways to carry forward existing elements of the building and weave them into our renovation story. The juxtaposition of the old and new is becoming apparent. Old beams under new roof joists and wood blocking will create the base for our new clerestory.

Roof Removal

We found we needed to remove and rebuild the entire roof. Rot and mold were discovered in many areas of the roof structure.  The existing roofing material contained an asbestos underlayment that was adhered to the wood structure, was difficult to remove, and proved to be a future hazard.  The decision was made to remove the roof sheathing and joists and replace them with locally harvested lumber, including Forest Service Council certified plywood.  Any salvaged portions of the existing roof structure will be reused in the light monitor roof framing.

 -- Dan Rasmusson, Project Architect of the Rice Fergus Miller New Office and Studio project

Selective Demolition

The old alley skybridge recently came out...

Beginnings

Early in my career, I first experienced one of the strangest emotions related to my work. I had been doing CA on a hospital project for about 2 ½ years, and spent the last 4 months of construction on site every day. I was very attached to the project, and was excited to see it completed. However, I went to the opening party, and then it was done. The harsh reality set in quickly that even though I’d devoted 2 ½ years of my life to it, this wasn’t my building. I didn’t own it. I didn’t work in it. In fact, I had to make an appointment to even visit it. I felt a little lost.



This won’t be the case with our new office. While I don’t own it, I will visit it every day, work in it, hear the comments of my colleagues, and live with the design decisions that were made. It’s a much scarier thought than feeling a little lost!


How do I even begin to put this project into perspective? Lots of surprises - some good, some bad, some… well, just surprising. It seems to be a running theme, but I guess it comes with the territory on a project like this. Just stay flexible and roll with it – I think we understood this from the beginning. We never tried to achieve “exactness.” Instead, we came up with a set of goals and guiding principles for ourselves, and have used these as we’ve moved through the design and construction processes.


What we did know is that the project had to perform well on three completely separate, though completely related, fronts:


1. Connection to the community
2. Support of the way we work and the culture of the firm
3. Sustainability


The first two were set from a programming exercise that took place in 2006, long before we found a building. The third grew out of studies into what the first two meant to us as a firm.


It’s also probably worth mentioning here that the fundamental design concept for the project, The Black Box Gallery, came out of this same programming exercise in 2006, and became a filter to test available buildings. First surprise - the most unlikely candidate for new office space floated quickly to the top of the list.


An unlikely candidate:
You guys are really going to work in that?!?


In the early 1940’s, Sears built a below-grade maintenance bay across the alley from their 4th Street store in downtown Bremerton. The roof of the maintenance bay was a surface parking lot that accessed from 5th Street. In 1948, they came back and put a building on top of it. This served as the Sears Annex until the early ‘80’s when Sears moved out of downtown Bremerton to the newly constructed Kitsap Mall in Silverdale. The Sears Annex has sat vacant, with the exception of some pigeons, ever since.


So, what attracted us to such a place?
- Well, the location is ideal. We were insistent upon finding space in downtown Bremerton. The firm was born here, and it just wouldn’t be right not to be here.


- The building is ideal from a sustainability standpoint. Most people interested in purchasing it would immediately demolish it. By re-using it, we’re able to give a new life to an old building, and keep it from going into a landfill.


- The layout of the building is conducive to the way we work. There are two full floor levels and a mezzanine between. The upper floor is large enough to house our entire design studio, leaving the ground floor for reception, admin and meeting space, with plenty of room along 5th street for retail lease space.


- The floor-to-floor height between the two full levels allows for a dynamic central flexible space called the “Forum” – one of the key spaces that came out of the 2006 programming exercise.


- We fell in love with light at the upper floor coming in through large south-facing windows and dropping in through a raised roof area running down the center of the space.


- We’re an architecture firm – we prefer spaces with character and design with challenges. And this one has plenty of both.


Ironically, when the Partners made the decision to purchase the building last year, I was working on a project in Minneapolis and had temporarily relocated there for the spring. When I returned, a selective demolition had been completed. I regret that I didn’t get to see first-hand the condition of the building the way they did. But, I immediately fell in love with the space and saw a ton of opportunity waiting.

The view of our building as the old, deteriorated roof was removed.

After a little over a year in design, we’re finally about two weeks into construction. I find myself distracted as I look out the window at my desk to the back of the Sears Annex. It’s amazing how quickly the building changes, even throughout each day. It’s a good thing that I’m moving desks next week or I might not get any work done between now and next April.

- Jeremy Southerland is project manager and lead project designer of the Rice Fergus Miller New Office and Studio project.