Green Building Ottawa
Conference

SESSION ONE: 10:45 AM - 12:15 PM

Session Code:  1PRA

Green Building Showcase: Case studies of built projects that are changing the way we view design. This session will reveal unique strategies for adaptive reuse of buildings and sites that foster relationships between the existing building and the new users.

Adaptive Reuse Case Study: Le Saint Denis (former École-Cadieux)

Presented by:  Clément  Guénard

This case study will look at the adaptive reuse of the former École-Cadieux, a 2-story school originally built in 1959, which has been converted to a 3-story, 50 unit condominium and the construction of 19 town homes, built to infill the former schoolyard. The case study will include a discussion of the synergies between adaptive reuse and green building strategies contributing to the targeted LEED-NC certification. The case study will include a discussion of the technical difficulties as well as advantages of adapting abandoned schools to serve as multi-unit residential buildings and the applicability of this model to other communities.

Maximum Re-Use through Intervention: a Design and Sustainability Strategy. University of Waterloo, New School of Architecture in Cambridge

Presented by: Janna Levitt

This project is the conversion of a 100-year-old, steel and wood silk mill into the new School of Architecture for Waterloo. We developed a unique strategy for this adaptive re-use project called “Maximum Re-use through Intervention”. The strategy is thematic in that it illuminates the high level architectural parti through which the specific character of the historic building can be revealed & juxtaposed with the careful insertion of new elements. It is also inherently sustainable, as the approach embodies the desire to retain much of the existing building through re-invention. For the School of Architecture, we focused on three interventions — carving, assembly and objets d’art.

A Case Study in the Diversity of Green Buildings in Ottawa.

Presented by:  Shawn Carr

This presentation will focus on the design and construction of three Green Building projects in Ottawa. The projects include a multi-unit residential development (MURB) on a brownfield site, a commercial office space revitalization that achieved LEED™-CI Platinum certification and a police station working towards LEED™-NC Silver Certification. The approach used in each project was to provide a healthy, productive, resource efficient development. We will share the successes and challenges related to each project.

Session Code:  1MAT

Material Connections: Making physical connections between existing buildings and new sustainable materials is an art of construction and design. This session provides a critical look at materials and construction in terms of durability, change and adaption to new systems.

Material (in)difference: Contemporary Connections to Traditional Construction

Presented by: Sheryl Boyle  

With the focus on the "performance" of contemporary construction has come a loss of knowledge about traditional materials and techniques. Good adaptive reuse requires that an existing construction system work in synergy with new systems. This presentation will investigate three connections between existing traditional construction and new modifications that highlight the contrasting ideologies of the two systems and aims to illuminate a broader concept of sustainability.

The Life of a Building - Designing for Durability

Presented by:  Jamie McKay

Contemporary focus on the sustainability of our existing building stock has led many to question the lifespan of our new buildings and the potential for reuse, adaptation and disassembly in the future. This presentation looks at the lifecycle of a building, from cradle to cradle, focusing on building assemblies, their components and the various aspects of durability. The presenter focuses on new cladding designs with exterior insulated wall assemblies, composite panels and integrated energy systems.

Ranch Redux,  Revisiting an American icon

Presented by: Liliane Wong

The ranch tract house is a twentieth century phenomenon that dominated the field of American residential architecture from 1945-1970. As a mass-produced commodity, the ranch tract phenomenon comprises aging suburban neighbourhoods across the US, none of which are energy efficient, and, all of which are in great need of rejuvenation. A group of students at the Rhode Island School of Design participated in a design studio in which they looked to mass production and modular methods, the same means responsible for the success of the ranch, to transform it through retrofit into 21st century housing for sustainable living.

Session Code:  1INN

Open Session on innovations in institutional and commercial buildings. This session provides hybrid concepts in energy system design through discussions on Ontario Feed-In-Tarriff solar program and Integrated Plant Package chillers.

Sometimes an Institution’s Most Important Asset is the Mechanical Room

Presented by:  Rob Clements

Ultra–Efficient Chilled Water Plants
With the proliferation of high level communication between micro-controllers comes the ability to optimize systems beyond anything thought possible just a few years ago. A typical chilled water plant is controlled by individual micro controllers to optimize individual pieces of equipment. A fully integrated control system allows the plant to be optimized as an entire system improving annualized operating efficiencies by 50% or more. This session will provide participants insight on how to optimize their existing chilled water plants and provide the tools to access whether your plant is a candidate for an ultra-efficient chilled water system.

Solar Photovoltaic Generation: Retrofitting Renewable Energy on Existing Buildings

Presented by:  Robin Hutcheson  

Solar photovoltaic power has become the “Holy Grail” of the Ontario economy under the provinces “Green Energy and Green Economy Act (Bill 150). The bill introduced a Feed-In-Tariff (FIT) program, paying upwards of 80.2¢ for each kilowatt-hour generated. As a result, the market has become flooded with interest in this technology that converts photons of light into useable electricity. This presentation will provide:

• the rules under the FIT program,
• successful strategies that meet the domestic content requirement,
• building integration options,
• technical and regulatory issues
• an overview of economics for rooftop solar

The audience will be armed with enough information to move forward to carry out a preliminary assessment of their building’s opportunity to host a solar generation facility.

SESSION TWO: 1:15 PM - 2:45 PM

Session Code:  2PRA

Housing retro-fit projects making a difference:   How can we learn from them?   This session uses various case studies in residential retrofit from Ottawa and the Toronto Equilibrium Project to highlight concepts in sustainable retrofit.

Extending the Life of Homes through RetroFit

Presented by: Toon Dressen

Through provocative case studies, this session will investigate how residential renovations, adaptive reuse and retrofit can extend the life of an existing home by providing opportunities for:

• Energy efficiency upgrades and retrofits
• Allowing an aging population to extend the time that they can live in their house
• Increase the value of an existing home to make it more attractive to a new generation
• Retain and rebuild existing community connections to walkable community services
• Adapt out-dated buildings and reuse the embodied energy in major systems
• Preserve heritage structures and/or preserve existing urban fabric to maintain or enhance existing communities.

Renovating Existing Homes for Energy Savings

Presented by: Jamie Shipley

The Now House was a near net-zero retrofit of an existing post WWII house as part of the National Equilibrium housing competition held in 2007. The retrofitted home now has an energy guide rating of 94 and has inspired more deep green retrofit projects around the Province. This session will highlight the techniques used on the building envelope and  renewable technologies/systems. We will identify the challenges and barriers the team had to address and share the lessons that were taken to other projects in the Province.

Session code: 2MAT

Material Amnesia: This session will explore materials and construction methods in traditional buildings not found in contemporary construction that could have a role in the future of sustainability and durability. This session brings the depth of meaning in trades and construction to bear on a world obsessed with highly technological sustainability.

The Telling of Material Traditions Within the Architectural Trade

Presented by: Marco Frascari

The present amnesia of the tradition of construction is the result of the informational teaching of building construction. The tradition was based on storytelling. Nowadays, storytelling is annulled by information. Information is antithetical to the essentially useful formative nature of storytelling. Information conveys dry, isolated facts and figures; it explicates impersonal objects and events. Storytelling by explaining nothing and implicating presents and absents generates architecture. The paper will presents a few emotional and sensorial stories about plaster making.

Looking to Our Past for a Greener Future

Presented by: Jeffrey Price

A history of lime in mortars, plasters, and coatings is a history of building construction itself. As the most common mineral in the world with deposits available in nearly every corner of the globe, man has used lime to create architectural treasures for millennia. This lecture will examine the benefits of historic construction and will illustrate how modern building can use this timeless material to form a hybridization of the two. By utilizing lime in the place of cement in mortars, stuccos, and even building block, and adapting our building practices to accommodate these changes a new form of building can be created that is carbon-friendly, sustainable, and healthy.

Session Code:  2POL

Policy Gymnastics: How do policies that guide urban projects in your area interface with your sustainable design strategies? This session looks at policies across Canada for both the barriers and opportunities they have created in sustainable growth.

How Do You Measure Up?  Municipal Green Development Policies That Work

Presented by: Ian Theaker

What are Canadian municipalities doing to guide their growth towards sustainability? How does LEED fit into local policy-making? What authority do municipalities really have? How can a community become a leader in green development? This presentation will summarize common sustainable development policy elements from over 15 community and policy projects, including precedents from Canadian, US, and international green development initiatives. The seminar will share lessons learned — good and bad — from the perspective of a major green consulting firm with nationwide experience helping Canadian municipalities develop policies and programs informed with hard performance analysis of options.

Barriers and Obstacles to Greening the Residential Sector

Presented by: André Potworowski

This presentation outlines the results of a project that examines the barriers and obstacles to reaching a sustainable society. The first phase focused on the residential housing sector. To dramatically reduce energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions from the residential housing in Canada would require the deployment of some 55 technologies. Many of these are embodied in the latest net zero energy houses built by CMHC. In brief, we have all the technologies we need. What we need is to change our system to encourage their deployment. We examine the barriers and obstacles related to institutions, federal and provincial laws, standards and codes, availability of skilled trades and other impediments to deploying these technologies. The study was funded by Natural Resources Canada, the Gordon foundation, the Canadian Gas Association, and the National Research Council.

SESSION THREE:  3:15 PM - 4:45 PM

Session Code:  3PRA

Techniques for Adaptive Reuse. This session looks at the relationship between existing buildings, their initial program and future programming of the space.

Generating Potentials

Presented by:  William MacIvor

Adaptive reuse is not a new idea in architecture, though the scale at which we are approaching it is, especially when considering urban post-industrial structures. Have our tools of investigation, analysis, and production evolved to reflect and harness the complexity of these pre-programmed sites?

The collage principle has been argued by many social and cultural critics to be the fundamental model of contemporary thought. Studying built precedents and projecting forward to future work, I argue that a method of architectural study specifically invoking collage techniques is able to unlock a rich form of unconscious semiotic reading and writing for both the author and the viewer, while allowing for considered interventions on historical structures which both evoke the shared cultural memory of place and augment the strength of contemporary interventions.

Techniques for Adaptive Reuse: Designing to Accommodate Change in High-Value Heritage Buildings

Presented by:  Chris Warden

The Parliamentary Precinct’s former Bank of Montreal Building contains extraordinary classified heritage interiors and exteriors, creating significant challenges when accommodating the proposed re-use, especially with its technical required elements and their variable life cycles. To accommodate this, while minimizing heritage fabric disruption, a conceptual approach for designing for this evolution employing integrated flexible containers was developed. Planning for future change and frequent event changeover potentially reduces the pressure for significant future interventions and decreases premature building element removal required to replace obsolete components within the Main Hall, thereby protecting important heritage value and minimizing waste.

Session Code:  3INN

This session will look at innovative solutions to building design and retrofit at major educational institutions in Ottawa.

IP-enabled Building Automation Systems (BAS) on a Converged Network will Deliver Sustainable Benefits for Carleton University’s new “Canal Building”

Presented by:   Darryl Boyce & Michael Oster

Carleton University’s new and sustainable 95,000 sq. ft. “Canal Building” (opening December 2010) will house programs in Sustainable Engineering, Biomedical Engineering, and Aerospace. For the first time at Carleton, Building Automation Systems (BAS) will operate not on a purpose-built Facilities network, but on a converged network based on IP (Internet Protocol) with equipment from Cisco Systems Canada, BAS from Delta Controls and integration services from Regulvar. Carleton Executive sponsorship includes the AVP Facilities Management and Planning in collaboration with the CIO (Chief Information Officer), with organizational alignment to deliver sustainability benefits that we will describe in detail.

Sustainable Retrofit of UofO Law Building 

Presented by:  Pierre Gagné

Named after the Supreme Court of Canada Judge, Gérald Fauteux, Fauteux Hall was built in 1974. It houses the largest Law School in the country, containing both the Civil Law and Common Law faculties at the University of Ottawa.

The $900,000 retrofit resulted in a 90 per cent efficient 18,000 cfm air-to-air heat exchanger on the roof. The reduction is a 70% percent heating, 550 tonnes of CO2 equivalent, 700,000 KWh of electricity and 8,000 GJ heating and humidification savings, bringing the annual energy cost from $468,000 to $234,000 (or 50% reduction) per year.

The Algonquin Centre for Construction Excellence – putting sustainable development innovation into practice

Presented by: Claude Brulé

The Algonquin Centre for Construction Excellence (ACCE), a $79 million 180,000 sq. ft. LEED Platinum-aimed facility scheduled to open in September 2011, will be a showcase for putting sustainable development innovation into practice. The presentation will focus on two innovations in particular: the application of Integrated Design Process to Design-Build construction project delivery methodology to create a high performance building; and the use of the building as a “living lab” through a combination of visible elements of sustainability, interface with Building Automation System, sensory network and demonstration platforms, to allow for integrated and inter-professional learning

Session Code:  3POL

Policy Gymnastics: How do policies that guide urban projects in your area interface with your sustainable design strategies?  This session looks at the concept of sustainable neighbourhoods through various metrics such as LEED ND, The Model National Energy Code for Buildings (MNECB) and their relationship in meeting Toronto's sustainable policy targets.

LEED and Green Neighbourhoods: Privately Driving Urban Sustainability

Presented by: Gary Martin

The Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) rating system is a recognized brand in the field of sustainable construction. Green Building Councils in North America have just released LEED for Neighborhood Development (ND). This paper first explores the history behind the LEED suite of rating tools as well as evaluations of LEED from both the trade and scholarly literature. The balance of the paper explains the revived interest in the neighborhood as a unit of analysis and the potential for LEED ND as rubric for sustainable neighborhoods.

Community Energy Modelling: How Can the City of Toronto Reach its GHG and Energy Targets?

Presented by: Richard MacIntosh

In 2007, the City of Toronto set bold targets: a 21% reduction in energy use by 2030, and 80% reduction in greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by 2050, with interim targets set between now and then. The authors worked with the City to understand what’s necessary to meet these goals, by creating a community energy plan for the City’s Westwood Theatre Lands (WTL), a mixed-use brownfield development for approximately 5000 residents. This presentation outlines the analysis approach taken in the Energy Plan, and discuss the implications of its findings.

The Renewal/Replacement of High-Rise Social Housing Clusters in Toronto and Chicago

Presented by: Ben Gianni

This paper compares and contrasts the tower renewal/replacement strategies undertaken by the cities of Chicago and Toronto.   It examines approaches in relation to the larger question of the economic and social sustainability of communities of towers and of modernist planning in general.  Among the issues at play are differences in context (urban/suburban), differences in funding and agency (public/private sector) and differences in strategy (retrofit/tear-down).