Metropolis - May 2011

a byproduct, and oil pressed out of the algae and processed to provide some of the building’s power. Walzak designed the tubular setup as a neat, panelized grid that gives the building far more than a metaphoric green cast.

Team members agree that Walzak’s living cell provided the “Aha!” moment, when biomimicry emerged as their core principle. “It was no longer about countering energy use; it was going back to the beginning,” says John Jackson, a 30-year-old team architect at HOK. As for the algae, “it was definitely an out-there idea, but not so out-there that it couldn’t be done.”

Team members say that Walzak’s living cell provided
the “Aha!” moment, when the biomimicry concept
emerged. “It was an out-there idea,” John Jackson
says, “but not so out-there that it couldn’t be done.”

Process Zero argues for fundamentally reengineering the building. For that, Quinn reached for expertise beyond architecture. Jackson recommended his former Penn State classmate Brandon Harwick, an engineer at Vanderweil’s D.C. office, who in turn brought along three colleagues: Patrick Murphy, a project engineer, and Stephen Lahti and Iyabo Lawal, energy modelers from the Boston office.

Harwick crunched daunting numbers. Energy use would need to be reduced from 85,800 Btus per square foot a year to 14,000 Btus, which is the amount of energy he calculated that various solar and algae systems could generate. The first power hog was office equipment, which consumes a whopping 40 percent of the building’s energy. The retrofit plan would save 80 percent of that by removing heat-generating computer processors from every desktop in a building-wide shift to cloud computing.

Artificial lighting accounts for a quarter of the building’s energy load. The solution: introduce daylight to “ 100 percent of office space” according to the proposal, which cuts three large atria into the windowless interior based on sophisticated modeling. (Research by Ming Hu and Monika Kumor led to an unusual curvilinear form: the shaft design is perpendicular at ground level, but two atria have been rotated to meet the optimum angle of the sun.) Eight additional light wells are punched into the building, shrinking available floor space but flooding the interior with daylight.

“One of the key problems was how to break down walls to allow
light to flow,” says Antony Yen, a 31-year-old architect at HOK, who
proposed demolishing interior walls and partitions. The Process Zero
report concludes that achieving net zero requires “changes in occu-
pant behavior” along with new systems. Yen was happy to replace
cubicles with open work space to enhance opportunities for collab-
oration. “Corporate America is shrinking offices,” he says, and the
GSA is “stepping up to convince clients that this is the way to go.”
Heating and cooling systems accounted for another quarter of the
energy load. The louvers in the new atria enhance natural ventilation,
minimizing the need for artificial cooling. Harwick determined that
the primary creature need would be heat. Two systems address that:
solar-heated water that radiates heat from the continued on page 133