This Building Gave me Goosebumps...and the Sun was Shining!

A few weeks ago I had the good fortune to spend a couple days brainstorming with Amory Lovins and the illustrious team at Rocky Mountain Institute (RMI). Beforehand, we toured RMI’s new offices in Basalt, Colorado with ZGF Architects and JE Dunn contractors…and I honestly got goose bumps.

At 16,000 square feet and 50 occupants, the office building is representative of the majority of commercial buildings, at least in size. But that is where its similarities end. Whereas most building designs – even energy-efficient ones – just assume mechanical heating and cooling systems as a matter of habit, this one assumes no such thing. It asks the seemingly obvious question, “Why condition all the air in the building, when it’s the people that feel cold or hot?”

Americans can all joke about President Carter’s grandfather-like nagging to “put on a sweater” during the oil crisis of the 1970s rather than crank up the heating. In reality, he was on to something, but it was both inconvenient and low-tech, so understandably received a chuckle in response. However, RMI has made “conditioning the person” both convenient and novel, and should receive a standing ovation. Doing so has made it feasible to construct a net-zero energy building with no centralized HVAC (the valuable 200 square feet saved can instead be dedicated to a conference room and foosball table) in the coldest climate zone in the continental United States.

Here’s how they honed in on the thermal sweet spot while halving their energy usage:

• First off, we all know someone who bought a particular car for the heated seats, even if they won’t admit it. You need to tell them about the office chairs in this building, powered by laptop batteries, which heat or cool you – not your neighbors or the office around you — at your whim.
• Another nifty trick recognizes that those of us who sit at desks all day often feel the cold mostly in our hands, when we go to type. The answer? Heated mouse pads.
• Since our sensation of comfort is actually heavily determined not by temperature, but by air flow, so the sole mechanical system in the building is an air exchanger, bringing in fresh air in a controlled way, rather than through leaky window frames or walls, which can lead to unhealthy conditions.
• The remaining techniques are ones you might not notice if you’re not on the look-out. The building is oriented to maximize daylighting while minimizing solar heat gain, while the floor and select walls – still drying as we walked through the construction site — are built thicker than structurally necessary in order to act as heat repositories.

The result? A building that can be anywhere between 64-82 degrees F but feel like a textbook 70-76 degrees any facility managers would be proud of. The tiny sips of energy required to power the few mechanical elements will come from solar PV, a system which will also act as a “gas station” for the electric vehicles that visit, vehicles which themselves will eventually become the building’s outsourced battery.

The site itself blends into the Roaring Fork River banks, using rainwater harvesting and swales to slow and filter water while preventing flooding, and the building is “graywater-reuse-ready” once the powers-that-be in Colorado State update their laws to allow non-potable water reuse for toilets, likely next year.

For more, see: https://www.rmi.org/rmi_innovation_center