The Living Lab

Several years ago, a group of architecture students huddled around the large frame of Dean Still as he unscrewed the lid of a giant bottomless mayonnaise jar imbedded into the wall of a straw bail building on the Aprovecho research campus near Cottage Grove, Oregon. "This is how I like to test the moisture level," Still exclaimed while thrusting his mitt of wriggling fingers into the wall. "Go ahead, stick your hands in there; you can feel it's dry." Researchers had installed a matrix of sensors throughout the structure that gave detailed data on moisture levels in the straw bales. But Still, Aprovecho's executive director (who last year accepted the U.K.'s Ashden award from Prince Charles), loved to show visitors his low-tech portal as a way to interact with the experiment firsthand. He aptly demonstrated how buildings serve as living laboratories, from teaching tools with interactive features to precise monitoring and data collection for research.

The concept behind the new wave of living laboratories is to create high-performance educational buildings that are immersive learning environments for sustainable technology and strategies. Each provides a platform for research and development while incorporating the building and its occupants as resources for studying building performance. The impetus behind this trend highlights the broadening base of stakeholders across the industrial, commercial, academic, and governmental sectors. While the momentum shows the growing interest in refining the current knowledge base, it also points to the marked rise of the stakes themselves: escalating energy costs, resource scarcity, and climate change. In terms of sustainable design, living laboratory buildings provide a toolbox of ways to make green buildings more interactive, informative, and stimulating.

The Interactive Building

The University of British Columbia's Center for Interactive Research on Sustainability (CIRS), due to open its doors September 2011 in Vancouver, is designed to push the boundaries of energy and water efficiency, while involving its inhabitants in the sustainable processes of the facility. The learning experience begins with the approach to the building. A wide swath of green wall cascades down the front facade and flanks the interior space called the Science and Technology Commons. The design team, led by architects Busby Perkins + Will, configured the commons so that many of the green features are visible from the space. A video wall will give a graphic summary of the performance of various features of the building. A "tipping bucket" device will physically demonstrate how much stormwater collected from the building and the site is being added back into the aquifer, after all the building and site requirements have been met.

"Given the imperatives of climate change, the new paradigm [of sustainable design] includes the idea of regeneration in the way we make buildings," says Alberto Cayuela, CIRS associate director. He asserts that the idea behind CIRS is to demonstrate that a laboratory-type building can operate with resources available on-site and be net-positive in energy and water harvesting. Much of the research at CIRS will revolve around the core concept of the facility: That buildings can have a positive impact on the environment through responsible resource management. Another focus of study (like all of the projects in this article) will be to address the gap between the projected performance of sustainable elements and their real-world performance. To this end, the facility will be a rich source of study with its ambitious energy and water systems thoroughly monitored. As is the case with all of the living laboratories projects, CIRS will collaborate with many industry partners in research and green product development.

One of the concepts of CIRS is to engage the inhabitants in the processes of the building. "We use the term 'inhabitant' to underline the concept of buildings as ecosystems—the people in the system aren't just passive users of building infrastructure," Cayuela says. The inhabitants are empowered by giving them the ability to open windows, have access to daylight throughout, and adjust the louvers on the displacement ventilation. In a uniquely democratic twist to the comfort zone, the inhabitants can request temperature adjustments at a special touch screen dashboard. The building systems management software aggregates the requests of the users to assess the temperature for a particular space.

The facility will feature a space called the Group Decision Environment Theater. The decision theater is a new model that uses state-of-the-art interactive digital media to foster the decision-making process by immersing participants in information and graphics. Virtually every vertical surface in the space serves as a projection screen, helping community groups and planners to visualize the environmental impacts of their actions, for example. Conceptually similar to a similar theater at Arizona State University, the CIRS space is designed to be very flexible, with the ability to accommodate many group sizes and configurations.

Like the CIRS project, the Syracuse University Center of Excellence (CoE) headquarters building in Syracuse, New York, uses itself as a teaching tool. Envisioned as a window into green design and research, the public face of the building is clad in high-performance glazing that introduces the building as a transparent and open facility. The intention of the design team, headed by architect Toshiko Mori, was to make an engaging form that invites exploration, according to Ed Bogucz, executive director of CoE. "As one walks from the sidewalk toward the building, one takes a journey," Bogucz says. "Early in the design process we imagined bringing people through a building where all of the systems would be visible," he adds. The building circulation is laid out so that the procession directs visitors to encounter both the sustainable features and the green-based research being conducted in the labs.

The designers put many of the sustainable building systems in a green gallery space where elements such as rainwater collection and mechanical systems are set up as interpretive displays. Visitors can touch the ground-source heat pump pipes to feel the difference between the temperature of the supply line coming up from the ground and the return from the building. "That sensory experience goes far beyond any visual experience in demonstrating the benefits of using the earth for heating and cooling," Bogucz comments.

The hallmark research space of the center is the Total Indoor Environmental Quality (TIEQ) laboratory that is designed to evaluate human response to indoor comfort factors. "Anything to do with indoor environments can be tested there," Bogucz says. "We can very carefully control temperature, humidity, air quality, lighting, and sound while studying human response to these factors." Where human subjects aren't practical for health or comfort reasons (such as measuring air flow and contaminants from one office cubicle to another), the lab technicians use thermal mannequins to simulate an occupied space. The more advanced of these mechanical stand-ins have multiple zones that can produce heat and moisture, and simulate breath.

A research feature that's visible from the exterior is the facade "test bed." (The term test bed refers to a functional mock-up.) It consists of an 8-foot-wide by 16-foot-high knockout panel on the south elevation of the building into which different wall systems can be inserted and evaluated. A solar concentrating facade that can provide electricity, heat, and daylight is currently being tested.

The facility accommodates a panoply of departments and disciplines. "It was always our intention that the building be a place to engage scholars and practitioners from multiple disciplines," Bogucz states. "We like to say that the building is like a gym—people are going to come and work out." Joining the mix are some 200 industry partners whose business is to develop products and services.

The Flexible Research Facility

The Carbon Neutral Energy Solutions Laboratory at Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta will focus on pilot-scale research for the development of carbon-neutral technology when it's completed this fall. The 42,000-square-foot building is designed to be carbon-neutral as defined by its target of net-zero site energy status. The energy and carbon targets are ambitious, given the extreme energy-intensive requirements of research laboratories.

"When we presented the idea of carbon neutrality for the building and having it meet the 2030 Challenge, the institute immediately latched on to the idea," says Princeton Porter, senior project designer for HDR Architecture. The main tenet of the 2030 Challenge eliminate fossil fuel energy use in buildings by 2030.

Laboratories can be one of the most difficult structures to make efficient, consuming ten times the energy per square foot of an office. "We broke the program down and assigned temperature and humidity targets for each space, rather than for the whole building," Porter says. The design team then compiled a list of possible strategies that compared energy savings, life cycle costs, and first costs. Using energy modeling, the designers determined which strategies would be most effective by weighing short- and long-term benefits and costs.

Spatial flexibility is critical when considering a test bed-type facility. The building is designed as an elongated box with a 40-foot-tall "high-bay" lab along the north side. The south half of the building has office area on the upper level and a mid-bay lab on the ground floor. This arrangement allows the structure to accommodate an array of potential uses. The high-bay lab has an industrial overhead crane that can move large pieces of equipment without disrupting the experiments below. A series of transparent garage-type doors facilitates the crane's ability to slide equipment horizontally into the adjacent mid-bay structure. The openings also allow experiments to expand into the larger space as they grow.

Many of the educational and green building research elements are placed on the exterior of the building, according to Howard Wertheimer, Georgia Tech's director of capitol management and space planning. "There are several types of renewable energy resources; different varieties of photovoltaics and building materials. We'll have the ability to plug and play (change out) some components for evaluation," Wertheimer adds. A 20,000-gallon rainwater storage system will highlight Georgia Tech's commitment to water conservation—the campus has approximately 3 million gallons in stormwater storage for non-potable uses such as irrigation and toilet flushing.

The design team is placing an interactive touch-screen dashboard in the lobby that will give visitors and users information about energy performance and water usage. The energy dashboard is becoming a common tool to inform visitors and give users feedback on the energy and water performance of buildings.

Flexibility is a defining concept at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory's (LBNL) Test Facility for Low Energy Integrated Building Systems. A new test bed series, due to be completed in 2013, will augment the lab's existing facility with an array of adaptable spaces. Typically, the structures consist of two identical side-by-side units at a variety of scales. Researchers can assess conditions while comparing, for example, an occupied space controlled by users to an unoccupied space controlled by building systems management software. The test beds are simple boxes used as armatures for the analysis of building systems, like HVAC, lighting, windows, or sun-screens.

In the world of building systems research and testing, the analysis media range from pure computer simulation to the study of occupied buildings. "In a general sense, simulation is flexible and powerful. You can repeat operations quickly, and test in any climate with many variables," says Stephen Selkowitz, head of LBNL's building technology department. "But simulation is limited in that it rarely captures behavioral factors and many of the details important in the real world," he adds. At the other end of the scale, monitoring a functioning building can be expensive and it's often impractical to change systems to accommodate research. "The test bed is the best of both worlds," he says. "The important thing is that you're evaluating something under pretty realistic conditions. It's kind of the sweet spot—a lot of realism, but with flexibility."

Human behavior is one of the biggest wild-cards in accessing building performance. Like all of these living labs, the LBNL facility will include research on the interplay between human behavior and new building technology. For example, in an LBNL study of electrochromic glass (glazing that can block light by becoming more opaque), the occupants were given control over the technology. In some cases, the performance got worse compared to automated control, Selkowitz relates. While users might not operate the blinds optimally, when asked for their reaction to having some control, their satisfaction went up.

Besides being a research base for Berkeley University students, the lab also hosts hands-on demonstrations for design professionals who come to see particular systems in operation. "A lot of architects and engineers come to the facility who have never seen components like an external shading system function," Selkowitz says. "Seeing how a system adjusts automatically to sun positions and how the overrides work is a very valuable experience," he adds.

There is strong interest from the green building industry in the new test beds, according to Selkowitz. One role of the new facility will be to validate the simulation tools used by industry to test products. For a component that's been designed using simulation software, using a test bed can facilitate evaluating the product in a real-world setting and help to fine-tune the accuracy of the simulation tools themselves.

Research at the Community Scale

Perhaps the most ambitious scheme now in the works is Texas A&M's north Dallas urban living laboratory project. Like many things in Dallas, it's big—it's also entrepreneurial and cultivates partnerships with industry. The 1.1 million-square-foot development will include residential, community-scale retail, recreation, and commercial areas. The concept behind the scheme is to build an entire community of some 2,500 residents that will serve as a large-scale laboratory for research and development for green products and strategies. The buildings will be monitored for energy and water consumption, and the occupants will participate by having their energy and water use tracked for research purposes. "We expect this to be used by a number of universities as a research and teaching platform," says Dr. Alan Jones, associate director of the project for Texas A&M's Agrilife, the state agency that is coordinating the effort. The project currently has some twenty partners from industry. Jones relates that the development will be open to research proposals from other universities in Texas and beyond.

Phase one of the master plan, developed by architects at HOK, is slated to be completed next year. This initial stage will include 300 apartments and, at the heart of the project, an educational interpretive center. "The center will showcase the products and the sustainable systems used in the development," Jones says. It will also house a data center where all the feedback from the monitoring equipment will be processed. The full project is expected to take five or six years to complete and is planned to cover 240 acres and include food production areas.

From the community scale of the A&M project to the previous projects' focus at the building and room scale, the importance of the new wave of living laboratories is that they are at the fulcrum of green education, research, and product development. They represent the next important step in refining products, improving the accuracy of simulation and building management software, and generally taking our understanding of complex building environments to a higher level. And for the next generation of green advocates, they will help teach the nuts and bolts of how buildings can be built in an environmentally responsible way.

Michael Cockram is a freelance writer, educator, and design consultant living in Fayetteville, Arkansas.

A ROUNDUP OF U.S. & CANADIAN LIVING LABS
PROJECT	PROGRAM
Aprovecho Sustainability Education Center Cottage Grove, OR	A nonprofit educational center on a campus to promote green building and land management knowledge for all ages.
Center for Building Performance and Diagnostics (CPBD) Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA	A rooftop lab addition that tests initiatives developed by researchers at both the student and professional levels.
James \| Swenson Civil Engineering Building University of Minnesota, Duluth	A building whose structural systems, connection details, and stormwater management strategies are exposed.
Oregon Sustainability Center* Portland, OR	Designed for net-zero energy use, this building will incorporate new research and be monitored and tweaked as needed by student researchers.
Algonquin Centre for Construction Excellence* Algonquin College, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada	Atrium exhibit wall and floor assemblies reveal cut-away sections and display building performance interactively.
*Unbuilt

The Interactive Building

The Flexible Research Facility

Research at the Community Scale

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