Beauty may be more than skin deep, but when you’re talking about energy-efficient buildings, it starts with the building envelope.  Strategies for detailing and specifying for high-performance building enclosures are discussed in “Energy performance starts at the building envelope,” in the December 2011 issue of Building Design + Construction (BD+C).

The article features three members of Shepley Bulfinch’s in-house Technical Advisory Council – Greta Eckhardt, Mark Finneral, and Dan Salive – among the design and construction professionals who offer their insights and strategies regarding thermal performance and materials.

Energy performance ...[more]

Creating an environment that promotes healing complements the development and practice of treatments that heal. That was the thinking behind the design of Smilow Cancer Hospital at Yale-New Haven Hospital, which has received an Award of Merit in the Connecticut Green Building Council’s (CTGBC) 2011 Green Building Design Awards. Norman Roth, Yale-New Haven’s Senior Vice President of Administration, accepted the award at the June 21 ceremony in New Haven.

The hospital was designed by Shepley Bulfinch and landscape architects Towers|Golde, and built by Turner Construction.

Eight years in the making, the 516,000 square foot cancer hospital ...[more]

Who says building science can’t be a competitive sport? Shepley Bulfinch, which has set the standard for building enclosure design for more than a decade, came out on top in the Air Barrier Challenge organized by the Boston Society of Architects’ (BSA) Building Enclosure Council to design and test a window installation in a wall.

Shepley Bulfinch fielded one of nine teams from architecture firms, consultants, and manufacturers’ representatives in last month’s competition. The goal was for each team to design and install a successful window-to-wall interface, perhaps the most ...[more]

A prime concern in the renovation of Gallatin Hall was the preservation of existing exterior masonry while ensuring the building’s energy efficiency. The masonry had behaved consistently through the freeze/thaw cycles of the previous 80 years, and we were concerned that complying with modern energy codes and LEED standards could have an adverse effect by moving the location of the dew point. Using energy modeling programs, we were able to determine that with 1” thick spray foam insulation, we could achieve an exterior wall assembly with an R-Value of 6 that didn’t drastically move the dew point from ...[more]