Tiffany King
In the world of green building, there is no time to waste! The green building scene is fast-paced and contractors have the challenge of fastidiously keeping up with the rapidly intensifying requirements of the market – or be left behind.
The U.S. Green Building Council’s LEED program (Leadership in Energy & Environmental Design) was the lone star rating system for new buildings for a long time. Entering the industry in 1998, the LEED Pilot Project Program (also known as LEED Version 1.0) addressed basic green building strategies, exploring topics like site and material selection, air quality and energy and water use reduction. It quickly caught on with building designers, and LEED became a common vernacular in spec books. The amount of additional responsibility for contractors was minimal, so keeping up was a simple task.
LEED has since gone through several versions, most recently releasing LEED v4 in July 2014. And v4 has kicked it up a notch! It examines a much larger scope, requiring increasingly more stringent energy use reductions, and asking participants to investigate all aspects of building materials, from where the extraction of raw materials takes place, all the way to how they’ll be disposed of at the end of their lifecycle.
In regards to energy usage, Passive House (a European innovation) goes a step further than LEED in pushing designers to create buildings that are super tight in order to maximize gains and minimize losses. Here, the focus is on perfecting the building envelope.
The basic premise of Passive House design is the combination of an extremely insulated and non-porous building shell with a piece of equipment called a recovery ventilator. The combination allows for the fresh air required to avoid the problems typically associated with tight buildings. The design must be thorough and the installation meticulously executed. The installation requirements for contractors in the field are strict and do not leave room for error. A small gap in insulation or a single missed caulk joint can drastically reduce the effectiveness of a Passive House building. Passive buildings typically cut energy consumption by 60 to 80 percent, compared to code buildings.
Commodore Builders, a commercial construction management firm based in Boston, is currently building The Distillery project in South Boston. The historic 110,000-square-foot Distillery building has been preserved, while the adjacent bottling plant is being replaced by a two-phase, 65-unit residential building. The first new building will be Passive House-certified and the finished development will be the largest Passive House building in the United States. The primary goal in building a Passive House building is to use it as evidence of the benefits of better design and construction techniques and to set a precedent for future construction.
“Currently, we have started the foundations of the first new building” said Jim Loud, construction manager. In planning the project, we are extremely vigilant in inspecting every detail starting during preconstruction and inspection of the current drawings to ensure the specific Passive House Package requirements are addressed. Closely collaborating with every subcontractor and worker now is extremely important as during construction, these details, particularly airtightness and thermal bridging, will greatly depend on the diligence of our crews.”
The Distillery is expected to be completed at the end of this year.
