I have been working to improve the energy performance of housing in Canada my whole career. The trend has been to incrementally improve performance requirements, while encouraging design teams to implement an integrated design process (IDP). Even with a focus on only energy efficiency, there has been limited success in getting the industry to adopt the IDP.  This has led to a huge range in energy performance levels achieved by different builders, and in the cost to achieve these higher performance levels. For those builders that have had a hard time keeping up with new energy efficiency requirements, we are heading for a future with a much wider range of performance requirements that go beyond energy efficiency.

There are many new performance requirements that are under consideration that may be required of our buildings by 2030, including:

• Near net-zero energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions
• Embodied carbon emission targets
• Potential seismic requirements whose objectives go beyond allowing for safe egress after an earthquake
• Indoor environmental quality requirements to maintain thermal comfort during extreme heat, and wildfire smoke events
• Other resilience requirements related to flooding and wildfire protection
• New accessibility requirements
• Design for disassembly requirements

The design team will need to consider all of these design requirements while trying to maintain some level of affordability and achieving other design objectives of the building owners and future occupants. The IDP is touted as the solution to achieve all these performance goals. The theory is that a team of smart designers can come up with a novel way to achieve our performance objectives at lower costs. The problem is that we typically start designs from scratch, which leads to an overwhelming number of possible solutions.

Yes, a good design team can generally find a way to achieve the different performance requirements. However, there it is unlikely that they would have found the best approach at the lowest cost. How can they, given the near infinite size of the design solution space? The reality is that there are likely few design combinations that could achieve all these objectives at a reasonable cost. How are design teams supposed to find this needle in a haystack?  New emerging technologies keep growing the size of the haystack, while every new performance requirement that gets added removes the number of needles in that haystack.

When my brother Martin started his career at Nortel Networks designing FPGA microchips, he couldn’t believe that designers started every new chip design from scratch, even though they needed some of the same functionality from one design to the next. He developed a design reuse library where specific code blocks that achieved repeatable functions could be reused and shared amongst designers. This is how humanity has developed such complex machines, by building on successful past designs.

As our buildings need to achieve an ever-growing set of performance objectives, we should reconsider how we approach design and practice more incrementalism.  Take the time to develop a design that works and that achieves our growing list of performance requirements at a reasonable cost.  Repeat that building while tweaking certain features to either improve performance at the same cost or reduce costs while achieving the same performance, or better yet, improving performance while reducing costs.

That is precisely the practice that has been followed by Innovation Building Group, enabling them to achieve net-zero ready levels of energy performance, superior indoor air quality and comfort, all at a cost that is significantly less than standard construction. Their buildings have been featured by ZEBx case studies:

https://www.zebx.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/OSO-Case-Study.pdf

https://zebx.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/ZEBx-Case-Study_Orion_2020-1.pdf

Follow up on Orion with energy consumption results: https://b2electrification.org/orion-real-life-performance-step-4-all-electric-building

Independent costing study: https://www.zebx.org/construction-cost-analysis-of-high-performance-multi-unit-residential-buildings-in-bc/

Similar to the re-use library that my brother helped implement at Nortel, I am working on a proposal with Innovation Building Group to develop a library of high-performance building designs. Unlike my brother’s work at Nortel, this library would be an open-source library such that any developer in Canada could make use of it. The designs follow conventional construction approaches, which means these buildings could be built by our existing trades.

Yes, we can still make use of the integrated design process while using a design library. But if we started with an existing design that achieved required performance objectives, teams could focus on fine-tuning the design to achieve the owner’s objectives. We can still start designs from scratch following the IDP. The design library could be used as a benchmark. If design teams can develop a solution that achieves all the performance objectives while maintaining affordability, that design can be added to the design library. The concept of the library is still at the proposal stage. If you are a developer or a non-profit that would be interested in making use of a design library, leave a comment to this Post or send me a note through the Contact section.