AEC professionals should push for net zero projects

Architects, engineers, and construction professionals should move aggressively to encourage more clients to build to net zero, says Gunnar Hubbard, FAIA, LEED Fellow, in a column posted at Real Estate Weekly.

Dire warnings in the latest climate report by the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change require bold action in the built environment, Hubbard writes. “Not all clients are environmentally aware or proactive to the same degree,” he writes. “Regardless, we must do everything in our power to educate them, and should not wait for them to ask how their projects can be more sustainable.”

The AEC profession has the knowledge and the tools to achieve net zero, and in many cases the budget allows that standard to be reached, he writes. This can be done by making the investment and ROI clear, “and getting away from unreasonable paybacks of 3-5 years as a cap on improved performance.”

Thermally sound, climate-responsive architecture including taking into account sun path movement and wind direction, and defining levels of comfort for the building type are critical. That approach, combined with smarter system selection for ventilation and comfort that can be tuned for increased controllability and performance will help achieve the net zero goal.

New York City has two very large buildings dedicated to answering the 911 calls of its five boroughs. With more than 11 million emergency calls annually, it makes perfect sense. The second of these buildings, the Public Safety Answering Center II (PSAC II) is located on a nine-acre parcel of land in the Bronx. It’s an imposing 450,000 square-foot structure—a 240-foot-wide by 240-foot-tall cube. The gleaming aluminum cube risesthe equivalent of 24 stories from behind a grassy berm, projecting the unlikely impression that it might actually be floating. Like most visually striking structures, the building has drawn as much scorn as it has admiration.