GETTING BUILDING PERFORMANCE RIGHT: POST- POST-OCCUPANCY EVALUATIONS

What you will see in Chapter 7, in many of the case studies, is that actual operating results differ from predicted results, often by

significant amounts, even in high-performance buildings with the best design and construction teams. The NREL RSF case study is in some ways an anomaly because an unusual procurement process and a highly motivated owner served to generate a building where performance of the Phase 1 building is within 1 percent of predictions and to con -tinue on with an immediate successor building (on the same site) where performance exceeded the first building by 17 percent, at 5 percent less cost. What can be done about building performance, especially after the first year, when all commissioning is completed and all warranty obligations are finished?

David Cook, a principal at Haas.Cook.Zemmrich architects in Stuttgart, Germany, expresses a prevailing opinion when he says,

“There seems to be a general feeling of ‘relief’ once a construction project is finished, and there is little enthusiasm for a form of continuous follow-up.”¹³

In research for a previous book on European green building approaches,¹⁴Yudelson found some intriguing approaches that make building performance evaluations and upgrades more readily available to building owners. For this book, we interviewed Adrian Leaman, the UK’s leading expert on post-occupancy evaluations, for his assessment of the key issues in building performance evaluation.¹⁵

Q: What’s the biggest problem in green buildings?

A: Unmanageable complexity is the biggest problem of all. Most buildings are too complicated for the people who must run them.

There’s too much technology that’s trying to do too much, there’s not enough resources devoted to running the buildings properly, and often designers seem to think that one size fits all. But it doesn’t.

Buildings are incredibly contextdependent. The context is increas -ingly the limited resources that people have to manage and run the building. People know how to design energy-efficient buildings, they know how to do it properly, they’ve got the technology, but many buildings fail. They intend to be energy-efficient but they’re not. Why?

It’s because they’re often too complicated in practice, the users don’t understand how to run them, and perhaps they’re not that interested [in running them]. To get an energy-efficient building, you need a motivated person somewhere in the system. And of course they can come from the design team or the client, but unfortunately our experience of green buildings is not universally good.

So management is becoming more and more important, and I’m afraid design is becoming less important. Designers will say it’s a management problem. Managers will say it’s a design problem.

Obviously [the problem is] where management meets design; it’s the place where the management, design, technology, time, and space go together, and that intersection is ignored. Too much emphasis is given to space, to the physical form of the building, and not enough to the invisibles such as congestion, security, safety, and usability.

Things like that are relatively ignored.

Q: What are the characteristics of buildings in which energy use actually comes close to the modeled performance?

A: Meeting user needs quickly so the building responds rapidly to requirements, whatever they are. They can be the facilities manager’s requirements in understanding the building management system, or BMS. Or they can be just the ordinary building users’ ability to intervene, control, do things for themselves, and not worry the management too much; [in this way] the building is giving them back the ability to control their environment or to leave the space if they want to and not feel inhibited by it or trapped by it.

All of those are characteristics you’ll find in a really good building.

Of course, a really good building will be energy-efficient and it also will be well managed. You won’t get energy efficiency without good management somewhere in the system. With twenty years of work in building performance, we found the same problems over and over again. There are two causes: One is very poor feedback in the construction industry and very poor awareness of the nature of these problems. Second, there is an almost pathological inability to solve these problems.

What we found in particular was that briefing (or programming) is very weak. The people didn’t really know what they were trying to achieve in a building. The design often was reasonably good, but when it came to handover, commissioning and after-care, the wheels started falling off the cart, big time!

After-care was very poor, but at the same time, when buildings were handed over, there were intrinsic faults, often very hard to fix, such as embedded software faults in systems (see Chapter 8) and tightness in fabric. Once you’ve got those problems, you’ve got them forever.

Q: What is the importance of “Soft Landings” for buildings?

A: The Usable Buildings Trust has just published something called Soft Landings.What Soft Landings is all about, is getting buildings to work straight out of the box immediately, so the client doesn’t inherit a building with lots of chronic problems that need fixing. The Soft Landings framework is the result of twenty years of post-occupancy evaluations. We actually call them building performance evaluations (BPEs), as we don’t like the term “post-occupancy evaluation.”

It became clear that we needed something more, an inter-professional collaborative framework, which covered architectural services and all other services, so people picked up the risky things before they actually got built and sorted them out. That’s what Soft Landings is about, and the name, Soft Landings, is the opposite of Crash Landings, because many buildings crash land! Soft Landings is all about a feather [floating back down] to Earth and touching lightly and not providing a whole mass of chronic problems. That goes back to the issue of unmanageable complexity—that’s where all of the unmanage -able problems come from.

A Soft Landing makes sure that whoever commissioned and procured the building gets a building that works. That’s the point. The point is to get an energy-efficient building with happy people in it, but one that also makes sense financially. You very rarely find a building that is good at everything including the financial side.

Many green buildings are incredibly self-indulgent. They often have completely over-the-top technologies. They often have what we call

“green bling,” bejeweled technology that doesn’t work properly and which is very hard to run.

[Fortunately] the tide has definitely turned. With green buildings, it’s a no-brainer that you’ve got to monitor them. You’ve got to look to see whether they’re better. As soon as you start monitoring for energy, you might as well start monitoring for everything else:

occupant needs and all the other aspects of buildings.

Q: How important are post-occupancy evaluations?

A: It’s actually relatively easy to study a building and see how a building works. The real difficult bit is to publish the results in an open and honest way that isn’t full of PR and spin and taking out all of the bad news and talking about only the good news. That’s the first problem.

The other problem is the feedback loops themselves. You need designers and managers to pick up on the faults and do something about them. If universities do post-occupancy evaluations, the information is published in consultants’ reports that might not reach the people that they’re supposed to reach, in which case the feedback loops will break down and this knowledge will not get to where it ought to be getting.

We set up the Usable Buildings Trust ten years ago because we wanted to put objective believable information into the public domain that people could learn from. The information that we’ve managed to put in the public domain is in much demand. But it’s unbelievably hard to get the funding for it and to get really good, professional-quality articles published.

Architectural research has always had funding problems anyway, everywhere in the world. But postoccupancy and building perform -ance work tends not to have great funding, because the client is always saying that the architect or designer should pay and the designers are always saying the client should pay. [As a result,] nobody wants to pay for it. The owner thinks, “Why don’t they provide this service anyway? Why should I pay for this?”

The Soft Landings [program] makes sure that if you’re following the Soft Landings protocol, then that money is earmarked for post-occupancy work, which is then protected from being nibbled away by other cost centers.

Also, the inherit tendency of designers is to want to get on with the next project and to walk away from what they’ve just done.

The designers design; they seem to lack a natural curiosity, an inquisitiveness, about the consequences of what they’ve done. It’s remarkable the extent to which they don’t go back and systematically examine the outputs and what has happened. (See Chapter 11,

“Afterword”.)

A good building is not just a question about having green features;

you’ve got to make them work. The checkbox lists for rating systems tend to do the opposite of what they are trying to do. They make things more complicated, which makes buildings harder to manage, which ultimately introduces a vicious circle which makes things worse rather than better.

Q: What are the keys to a successful BPE?

A: You need an energy survey, which covers both the supply side and the demand side. By that I mean, you not only count how much utilities—gas, electricity, etc.—and renewables are being used by the building but you also break down by use category—heating, lighting, and so on, so you can benchmark where things are going wrong.

A really robust energy analysis is the first component. Second, you need a robust occupancy survey. Our Building Use Studies occupancy survey protocol is widely used throughout the world.

The third thing is that you probably need a good introductory walk-through and interview with the facilities manager at a preliminary stage, so that the surveyors/assessors familiarize themselves with the building and with the good things and the bad things without being too biased.

The person doing the analysis should be someone independent from the design team and who has gone “around the block” a few times and understands how buildings work. We (the Probe Study team) added in an airtightness test as well. (The Probe Study is a very famous BPE study that illustrates our ideal of how a BPE should be done.¹⁶)

Q: Are there additional challenges of BPEs and POEs?

A: It’s very hard work. People do two things. They underestimate how hard it is to do these studies and write them up. They tend also to collect too much information. It’s much better to collect a small amount of information very well than it is to collect a large amount of information badly. People tend to measure too much, and then later they can’t make heads or tails of it.

Q: What is the future of BPEs?

A: Soft Landings are the future for us. Because Soft Landings is an approach that is developed from reflecting on the results of BPE surveys and saying, “OK, we’ve got all of these problems recurring.

What are we going to do about it?” The whole point is to improve feedback, improve the buildings, and make people happier and the buildings more environmentally efficient.

A warning: Don’t assume that green buildings are all good. People assume that there’s some kind of moral and ethical glow that comes off green buildings, that they’re somehow better. What we’re tending to find is that they’re repeating the same mistakes from ten or twenty years ago. I go right back to what we started with—they are too complex and unmanageable. That’s the problem. It’s not their greenness or their low energy. It’s just the sheer difficulty of being able to run the technology in them in an appropriate way.

Summary

It’s not possible for building teams to consistently achieve high-performance results without changing the dominant paradigm of architectural design and project procurement. This will be especially true as building owners and developers begin to push teams to deliver zero-net-energy buildings with much lower water use, even to the point of creating regenerative or restorative buildings. To make sure all of this happens, it takes an understanding client, the right design pro gram, an experienced design team, and a process that allows for insight and innovation.

But, given that the size of just the US commercial and institutional building market, even in a bad year, exceeds $200 billion, isn’t there enough money (and time) to do the right thing, instead of just “doing things right”? In the developed world, there is certainly the design talent, contractors who can build just about any design, product manufacturers who innovate constantly, abundant capital, financiers who can finance just about anything—all the right stuff. Why can’t we then build high-performance living buildings—in all of our market sectors—as a profound and beneficial legacy to future generations?¹⁷

Part II