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]

The Brody Learning Commons at Johns Hopkins University, which has been packed since its doors opened last August, has something big to celebrate this week: LEED Gold certification from the US Green Building Council. It’s the first new construction on the school’s Homewood campus to earn this distinction.

The Learning Commons’ sustainable strategies include:

Managing solar gain: Heat gain and loss from the glass curtain wall system was combated by high-performance glass, automated interior shades, and perimeter (hydronic) heating and cooling.
Energy efficiency: While the under-floor air distribution system ...[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]

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]

There are some topics that keep coming up when we talk about leveraging BIM for Building Performance Analysis (BPA). In presentations to peers, clients, and students alike, discussion inevitably comes back to the applicability and timing of BPA, and the interoperability of BIM models and BPA models. What does this mean for design teams?

Last year a colleague at Vanderweil Engineers approached me with a challenge: “How do we leverage our BIM models for Building Performance Analysis?” I took the bait. Armed with the support of our firms and numerous knowledgeable resources, we ...[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]

Colleges and universities that are looking for ways to improve energy efficiency and resulting cost savings are realizing that some habits start from the ground up, as discussed in “How to achieve a tight building envelope,”� which appears in the June 2012 issue of College Planning & Management.

In the article, Jonathan Baron talks about the value to owners of investing in building component mock-ups and building commissioning, as well as the importance of evaluating the compatibility of different materials used in creating the building envelope.

Jonathan’s remarks on building ...[more]