Page 118 - Zero Net Energy Case Study Buildings-Volume 1

CASE STUDY NO. 6 CLASSROOM & OFFICE BUILDING
Classroom & Office Building
Case Study No. 6
Data Summary
Building Type: Classroom Location: Merced, CA
Gross Floor Area: 103,000 gsf Occupied: January 2006
Energy Modeling Software
eQuest v. 2.55
Modeled EUI
37 kBtu/gsf-year
Measured EUI (Site) - 2008
44 kBtu/gsf-year
Measured EUI (Site) - 2009
41 kBtu/gsf-year
Measured EUI (Site) - 2010
36 kBtu/gsf-year
The Classroom & Office Building provides basic classroom and departmental office space for Phase 1, the launch state for the new UC campus. Like the Science & Engineering Building I, this building was one of the three major buildings designed simultaneously with the new Library; the Classroom & Office Building is the subject of the second case study project located at UC Merced.
Low-Energy Design Approach for the Classroom & Office Building
The UC Merced energy budget for this type of building in 2003 was set at 80% of the UC/CSU
benchmark for classroom buildings:
• EUI = 57.4 kBtu/gsf-year
• Peak Power Demand = 2.88 watts/gsf
• Peak Chilled Water Demand from the Central Plant = 1.6 tons (19.2 kBtu/hr) per 1,000 gsf • Peak Hot Water Demand from the Central Plant = 9.6 kBtu/hr per 1,000 gsf
As in the case of the Science & Engineering Building I, the Classroom & Office Building is per- forming better than its benchmark target by a wide margin. Because the three initial buildings were designed together, the three A/E teams were organized by UC Merced to coordinate and review each other’s work. This ensured a common approach to the integrated design solutions and the same vocabulary of building components that ensured a sense of common place for the new campus. As with Science & Engineering Building I, energy efficiency informed every design decision.
The results of the modeling for the Classroom & Office Building, the least programmatically com- plex of the three buildings, showed an annual energy use (EUI) at about 65% of the budgeted EUI.
Building Planning and Building Envelope
Following the pattern established with the other buildings, there are separate entrances to each of the large auditorium and lecture hall spaces on the ground level in order to avoid a large lobby and extended corridors. This is consistent with the objectives of reducing the amount of internal conditioned space and activating the exterior arcade spaces with student and faculty circulation.
Related to this, the building also adopts the common feature of light-filtering pedestrian arcade on the sun-exposed facade of the building facing southeast and the common outdoor quads. The arcade is the principal required architectural elements that provide shading of the walls that receive the brunt of the sun’s heat impact while also creating outdoor social spaces. Like the two otherthree-storybuildingsbuiltinPhase1toshapethisoriginalquad,thearcadedesignusesa system of horizontal sunshades to admit daylight while shading the exterior walls.
For noise control and acoustic isolation, cross ventilation is not a viable cooling strategy with this building.Naturalventilationoccursviaoperablewindowsonlyatspacesborderingtheperimeter. Similarly, the depth of the building and density of small rooms limits daylighting to the perimeter spaces and, at the third floor level, roof monitors for the land-locked general use departmental spaces.
The following is a summary of low-energy design strategies for the building envelope features, which effectively lower the base EUI for the building are:
Owner/Client
University of California, Merced
Design Team
Architect: THA Architecture, Inc., Portland OR
Structural Engineer: Forell El- sesser, San Francisco CA
Mechanical Engineer: Taylor Engineering, Alameda CA
Electrical Engineer: The Engi- neering Enterprise, Oakland CA
Plumbing Engineer: Capital En- gineering, Sacramento CA
Lighting Designer: JS Nolan &
Associates, San Francisco CA
Landscape Architect: Peter Walker & Partners, Berkeley CA
General Contractor
Swinerton Builders, Inc. 102
• • •
Operable windows for exterior offices; Daylightingforperimeterzonesandroofmonitorsfortheopenofficeareaonthetopfloor; Sun control provided for windows and glazing on the southerly elevations, reducing the cooling loads;
Zero Net Energy Case Study Buildings: Volume 1