Examples in Chile of Sustainable Buildings

With Dr. Ing. Luis Ebensperger the GBTool system has been applied to assess the
environmental performance of the building that are described below, which were
presented at the internacional conferences indicated in each case:

Edificio VARELA
Presented by Norman Goijberg at Sustainable Building Conference, sb’00, Maastricht,
Holland, 2000

Location: Av. Del Valle 662, Ciudad Empresarial, Huechuraba, Santiago

Architect: Horacio Sotomayor
Energy Design: González & Bustamante
HVAC: Termofrío
Gross built area: 5.111 m2

Overview:
Climatization by water, that uses the natural temperature of the ground, by heat pumps,
cooling by evaporation taking advantage of the temperature differential between day and
night (summer), heat exchangers (fresh air-extraction), maximum natural light, plants that
require minimum irrigation, lighting with systems and equipments for energy efficiency,
occupation sensors.

1
 Results

Resource Consumption – Energy

The consumption of the building operation had a savings of 72% regarding a reference
building:
Consumption Varela Building = 169 MJ/m2 /
Consumption Reference Building = 594 MJ/m2

Potable Water
Potable water consumption has 60% savings regarding a reference building.

Environmental Loadings
Green House Emissions of all the energy used over the life cycle of the building is 65%
of the reference.

2
Headquarters Building ISAPRE CONSALUD
Presented by Norman Goijberg at
Sustainable Building Conference, sb’02, Oslo, Norway, 2002

Location: Pedro Fontova 6650, Huechuraba, Santiago

Architects: May & Soler, Santiago; dell’ Aquila & Voerzio, Italia
Energy Design: SUNNA, Dr. W. Stahl, Freiburg
HVAC: Gormaz & Zenteno, Santiago
Built Area: 20.567 m2

Overview:
Climatization by air, that uses the natural temperatura of the ground, through pipes buried
Ander the garden, vertical air distribution through structural steel columns and horizontal
through raised floor, natural light, shading of north windows, natural ventilation in gym
zone.

3
– Energy
The consumption of the building operation had a savings of 57% regarding a reference
building:

Consumption Consalud Building = 337 MJ/m2 /

Consumption Reference Building = 594 MJ/m2

The embodied emssions of the materials (steel structure), over the life cycle of the
building, is only a 46% of the reference.

Green House Emissions of all the energy used over the life cycle of the building is 62%
of the reference.

New Airport Región de la Araucanía, TEMUCO

Presented by Norman Goijberg at
Sustainable Building Conference, sb’05, Tokyo, Japan, 2005

Division of Airports, Ministry of Public Works, Transport and Telecommunications

Consultants:
General Contractor: ARCADIS GEOTECNICA
Master Plan: Rodolfo Chávez, Architect
Architectural Design: Juan José Bas, Architect, GEOCIUDAD
Sustainable Building Consultants: Norman Goijberg and Horacio Sotomayor,
Architects

4
PROPOSAL FOR SUSTAINABLE BUILDING
DESIGN
AIR
• Openings for natural cross ventilation
• A central patio with vegetation to stimulate climatic stabilization, humidification and
thermal convection. Adding oxygen and consuming CO2 from the indoor
environment.SUN AND NATURAL LIGHTING

It is privileged:
• Solar orientation, north openings.
• Use of materials that
aid thermal gain.
• North openings.
• Double pain glazing and fixed or mechanical shading
• Sun-roof lighting through sky-lights or light-ducts.

5
Energy savings is 43.8% regarding a reference building.\

Green Building – Sustainable Construction:

The architectural design can allow that the building gets a better energy and
environmental performance::

- Architecture environmentally efficient, maximizing passive characteristics with good

orientation, sunshine, shading, interior atrium, etc., allows better natural lighting and
vetilation and requires less mechanical equipment for HVAC and lighting.

- Good mechanical equipment for HVAC and lighting, improves energy demand and
efficiency.

- Adding sustainable architectural desgin to efficent mechanical equipment, means large

energy savings and reduction of emmissions. A building with sustainable architecture and
construction, through its entire life cycle shoud:

- Have an efficient energy consumption: consuming less without reducing quality, self-
generation, co-generation, and using alternative energy sources,

- Reduce potable water consumption: rationalize, treat, recirculate,

- Minimize the use of non-renewable materials

6
Reduce + Reuse + Recycle,
- Improve the interior environmental quality,

· Avoid environmental loadings or impact to the eco-systems.

In summary, more quality of life with less economic and material consumption. To
achieve that is necessary to organize multidisciplinary teams from the earliest stages of
the project development. Examples implemented in Chile demonstrate that it is possible.

OSC Research : 90 Days Later and Beyond

The Window: part PV panel, part light shelf, part sun shade, the Window concept for the
OSC is one example of a design that, with further research, could yield a successful
integrated economic development strategy for the regional building industry.

For the Living Building Challenge, defining the problem is half of the solution. But three
PSU students might tell you that defining the problem isn’t always easy.

These students helped the OSC research group with several items on their 90-day agenda,
which aimed to answer the questions most pertinent to the feasibility study.

So what makes defining the problem so hard? For one, the students catalogued every
ingredient on a list of 250 materials to see if they contained any items on the Living
Building Challenge’s Red List. They weren’t finding alternatives to these materials, they
were finding what they contained – an arduous task of poring over specifications,
Material Safety Data Sheets, and a host of other sources.

7
They found that 25% of the 250 materials that the research group suspected actually
contained one or more of the Red List chemicals. That’s about 63 materials for which the
team will need to find an alternative.

But it doesn’t stop there.

As stipulated by the Living Building Challenge, the materials need to come from within
the materials service radius. Once again, the students dove into the data, looking for
companies within 250, 500 or 1000 miles that carry products needed to build the OSC.

And the number of usable materials crept even lower.

But knowing constraints often opens up the biggest opportunities. The research group
constantly kept an eye out for opportunities to grow local business. Often enough, local
businesses are making materials in the region, but use, say, urea formaldehyde in the
process. So why not ask them to cut out the nasty chemicals and create a new market?

Or, businesses are making the perfect product, but they are based overseas. Why not
suggest they open a manufacturing branch in Portland? Or even better, why not find a
local entrepreneur to create an entirely new business to meet the need?

These are all questions posed by the OSC research group and illustrated by the students’
research. There is an ever-growing list of opportunities for growth and expansion that
spans industries from solar to wood products to curtain-wall. Below are some examples
of the opportunities identified:

• Living Machines as a potable water strategy

• Building Integrated Photovoltaics
• Integrated PV, Light Shelf and Shading Devices
• Integrated Box Beams that are structural and contain radiant heating and cooling,
displacement ventilation, integrated data and electrical and fire sprinklers
• Red List compliant replacements for products (e.g. PVC piping, electrical wiring
sheathing, roofing, flooring)
• Expanding the FSC supply chain for all the wood products used in buildings
• Construction Carbon Footprint Calculator
• A “Fractal Dashboard” that reports resource use at the building scale down to the
individual scale
• Occupant Behavior Modifier for Energy modeling software

8
 The Box Beam: Dubbed
the “seven-fer” for its
ability to perform seven
critical functions within a
single design, the Box
Beam concept – which
emerged early in OSC
brainstorming – is a pre-
fabricated concrete form
that could provide:
Structure; Passive heating
with the slab; Radiant heating and cooling; distribution for ventilation; Finished ceiling;
Chase for data and cabling; Chase for fire sprinklers. It could also spur innovation in the
regional economy by teaming existing pre-cast concrete manufacturers with radiant
piping suppliers/manufacturers, data suppliers, cabling suppliers, and local expert green
engineers (structural, mechanical and plumbing) to develop a new, replicable green
building product.

Other more immediate tasks on the 90-day agenda included finding the projected increase
in efficiency of PVs over the next two years (experts project about a 1-2% increase),
finding weather station data to help inform mechanical and passive system design (thank
you to David Sailor and the Broadway Building weather station), nearby parking garage
energy use (no longer relevant with net-zero energy achieved on site, but much higher
than expected) and analyzing the building’s optimization for daylighting (local expert
G.Z. Brown recommends a “thin building” approach).

The research group has much to dig into over the summer. They’ve also developed a list
of items for Oregon’s universities to tackle, including:

• Low or no energy replacement for cement

• Green roof product research
• Measurement of green roof stormwater retention and quality
• Measurement of green roof energy conservation
• Laboratory measurement of green roof systems
• Behavioral change to conserve energy
• Human health metrics related to green building
• EcoDistricts
• Legal / condominium / governance issues that are unique to Living Buildings
• Right sizing of water / energy / storm water strategies
• Energy conservation strategies efficacy testing and metrics
• Weather station data
• Expanding the FSC supply chain for all wood products used
• Construction carbon footprint calculator
• Large scale renewable energy efficacy and metrics
• Measurement and verification metrics
• Occupant behavior modifier for energy modeling software (e.g. eQUEST)

9
 Achieving
Water Independence

Sketch of rainwater’s course

through the OSC. Courtesy GBD.

“A Living Building is water

independent.”

So says the Living Building

Challenge (LBC), and so will be
the Oregon Sustainability Center,
employing water conservation
measures that will complement a
comprehensive rainwater
collection system and an on-site
sanitary wastewater treatment
system, the Living Machine.

As with energy, water in the built environment is an ecological issue that demands
significant attention from all new design. The LBC explains:

“Scarcity of clean potable water is quickly becoming a serious issue in many countries
around the world. Most regions of the United States and Canada have avoided the
majority of these limitations and problems to-date due to the presence of abundant fresh
water, but highly unsustainable water use patterns and the continued draw-down of major
aquifers portent significant problems ahead…

“The Living Building Challenge envisions a future whereby all buildings are designed to
harvest sufficient water to meet the needs of occupants, while respecting the natural
hydrology of the site, the water needs of neighbors and the ecosystem it inhabits. Indeed,
water can be used and purified and then used again.”

10
Example of a green wall, one potential stop for storm water on its path through a living
building. Courtesy inhabitat.com.

With this in mind, the LBC has defined the following prerequisites for a Living
Building’s water strategy:

• Prerequisite 10 – Net Zero Water 100% of occupants’ water use must come
from captured precipitation or closed loop water systems that account for
downstream ecosystem impacts and that are appropriately purified without the use
of chemicals.

• Prerequisite 11 – Sustainable Water Discharge 100% of storm water and

building water discharge must be managed on-site and integrated into a
comprehensive system to feed the project’s demands.

Storm water flowing into a

bioswale near Mt. Tabor
(click to enlarge). Photo
courtesy Kevin Robert
Perry.

Given the rainy climate of

the Pacific Northwest,
water issues are of
particular interest around
here. According to the City

11
of Portland’s Bureau of Environmental Services, it rains an average of 37 inches in
Portland per year. This yields roughly 10 billion gallons of storm water runoff, the
volume and speed of which leads to flooding, erosion, natural habitat destruction, and,
potentially, combined sewer overflows (CSOs).

Such an abundance of rain feeds the regional misconception that water conservation
issues are of a lesser concern, yet as the LBC points out, a lack of regard for water use
today, coupled with the mistreatment of the water that does get used, is foreshadowing a
significant environmental crisis just around the bend.

This challenge has driven the OSC team to commit to strategies to achieve net zero water
that will in fact move the project much further, toward a goal of hydro equity, giving
back to its local ecosystem clean water that it does not need.

The Oregon Road Map for Achieving Water Independence in Buildings (click to enlarge).
This study was prepared by a team from Gerding Edlen Development, Central City
Concern, SERA, and Interface Engineering, with funding by the Bullitt Foundation,
Cascadia GBC, Enterprise Community Partners, and Portland Development
Commission. You can find the complete report here.

Similar to the building’s strategy for net zero energy, the design team added water
conservation measures first, incorporating into the basis of design the lowest flow
fixtures available on the market today, most of which will be equipped with optical
sensors.

12
To achieve net zero water, the building will collect rainwater for potable uses from the
rooftops. As described in earlier posts, a 6,200 square foot bifacial photovoltaic (PV)
array on the 4th floor of the building, and a 3,000 square foot bifacial PV array on the 3rd
floor, will create a translucent canopy covering the OSC’s ground floor plaza.
Organically shaped PV arrays will also top the building, once on the 10th floor, and a
second time on the very top, adding another 18,400 square feet of impermeable surface.

Bird’s eye view of the OSC

solar canopies (click to
enlarge).

Collectively, the PV
panels (along with other
impermeable surfaces
throughout the site) will
double as rainwater
collectors, sending the
water into a 200,000-
gallon epoxy lined
waterproof concrete
storage tank, which will be
fitted with circulation
pumps to circulate water
within the tank, preventing
stagnation. The rainwater
will be treated via filters and a chlorine injection system before being pumped and/or
circulated into a 500-gallon/day tank. A duplex pump system will draw from this day
tank and deliver the treated
rainwater for potable uses
throughout the building.

Swales as part of the

stormwater management plan
for Portland’s South
Waterfront. Photo courtesy
Nevue Ngan Assoc.

On the ground level, porous

pavement, vegetated planters,
and bioswales will also
contribute to the management
of the storm water that is not
captured by any of the

13
rooftops. Together these features filter and slow the flow of rainwater as it makes it way
back into the ground.

To address Prerequisite 11, Sustainable Water Discharge, the OSC design will
incorporate an on-site sanitary sewer system that is known as a Living Machine, chosen
both for its low energy use and derivation from biophilic design. Living machines mimic
the natural cleansing processes of wetlands, employing plants, bacteria, algae and other
organisms to do the hard work of filtering black water. The OSC’s system will include an
initial screening and collection of solid materials from black water sources (ie. toilets) for
use as compost and fertilizer for onsite landscaping. The treated effluent from the living
machine will be reused for
flushing toilets and urinals
and at hose bibs.

All excess storm water and

treated wastewater that is
not used internally will be
either infiltrated back into
the soil on site, where it
will replenish the
groundwater supply, or it
will be used to irrigate
gardens and green roofs
throughout the building.
Ideally, the excess storm
water will also be funneled
back to the Montgomery Green Street for irrigation there, as well.

While the OSC itself will do the lion’s share of the work to achieve net zero water,
through its extensive catchment and filtration systems, ultimate success still relies on the
active participation of the tenants in the building. Metering the tenants’ use of water will
be imperative, and the team is looking into metering systems for each office and retail
space, to track usage on a daily, or even hourly, basis.

Water bills will vary according to each tenants’ level of consumption.But will that be
enough? What if, as was discussed during one recent steering committee meeting, tenants
had to swipe a card before using a toilet or urinal, so that every last drop of water
consumed was tracked and accounted for?Sounds crazy to some, but for others such a
step would be prescient. Not long from now, will we have any other choice?

14
 The Path to Net
Zero Energy
Ask Omid Nabipoor of Interface Engineering about
energy strategies for a net zero building, and he’s likely
to tell you first about a towel.

“Imagine you have a wet towel,” he’ll say, as he did last

week during a meeting with OSC tenants, “and you are
wringing it out, getting every last drop of water out of
this towel.”For emphasis, he gestures with his hands,
twisting an invisible towel, and we imagine a stream of
water – all the inefficiencies of a standard office
building spilling onto the floor.

Sounds easy enough. Eliminate waste, first.

Gone is the soggy (conventional office
building) towel. Make note of the
inefficiencies that comprise the puddle on the
floor, and cut them from the building’s
design.

With regard to the Living Building Challenge, the Oregon Sustainability Center is
considered an energy-driven building, much of its design tracing back to the LBC’s
Prerequisite Number Four, Net-Zero Energy, which requires, “One hundred percent of
the building’s energy needs supplied by on-site renewable energy on a net annual basis.”

The intent behind this prerequisite speaks to the most pressing environmental issues of
today. As the LBC explains:

“The majority of energy generated today is from unsustainable sources including coal,
gas, oil and nuclear energy. Large-scale hydro, while inherently cleaner, brings
widespread damaging ecosystem impact. The effects of these energy sources on regional
and planetary health is becoming more and more evident, with climate change being the
most worrisome of major global trends due to human activity. The intent of this
prerequisite is to signal a new age of design, whereby all buildings rely solely on
renewable forms of energy and operate year in and year out in a pollution-free manner.
Since renewable energy sources are inherently more expensive than energy efficiency
measures, efficiency as a first step is assumed.”

Assuming efficiency as the first step…back to Omid Nabipoor and his wrung-out towel.
Just how efficient is the OSC striving to be?

15
According to the 2003 Commercial Building Energy Consumption Survey on energy use
in office buildings, published by the Department of Energy’s Energy Information
Administration, the average facility in the United States has an EUI (energy utilization
intensity) of approximately 92 kBTU/square foot/year.

(click on image to enlarge)

With Oregon’s more stringent energy code and the climate of the Pacific Northwest, the
EUI average around here drops closer to 74. The Terry Thomas in Seattle, ranked last
year as one of the Top Ten Green Projects by the AIA, has an EUI of 37. The Oregon
Sustainability Center, by comparison, has set an EUI goal of 18-20.

16
In order to achieve this unprecedented level of efficiency, the OSC will incorporate the
following load reduction and mechanical strategies:

• Improved building envelope (overall wall U value of .04)

• A heat recovery ventilator with heating / cooling coils, supply / exhaust fans
and air filtration
• A geothermal, high efficiency water-to-water heat pump to provide heating
to radiant floors and a heat recovery ventilator
• Plate heat exchangers
• An injection well with regenerative turbine / pump and 3R control valve
• Radiant heating and cooling integrated into a topping slab on the structure
• Low velocity underfloor air distribution for ventilation throughout
• Night ventilation of the building’s thermal mass
• Carbon dioxide sensors throughout the building
• 35% vision glass that will be triple glazed with an overall glazing to be tuned
to respond to each elevation. For example, the south side will have a higher
shading coefficient and the north side will have a higher U value.
• Exterior shading devices with integrated photovoltaic panels to generate
electricity while reducing heat load on building. Interior light shelves will
help bounce daylight deeper into the interior spaces.
• Single gender bathrooms on alternate floors, which will make the floor
plate more efficient.
• A higher floor-to-floor height, allowing more light to penetrate the building
interior
• Roofs shaded with photovoltaics to minimize heat gain
• Daylight controls with continuous dimming for a minimum of two zones (0-
15’ from the window and 15’-25’ from the window)
• Highly efficient fixture optics that allow for individual control of fixtures
• Occupancy sensors for lighting throughout
• Individual tenant control of light levels
• LED lighting for corridors and lobby areas
• Dual day / night lighting in corridors and egress stairs with occupancy
sensors and time clock control

With each of these features and strategies plugged into the OSC’s energy model, the
building achieves an EUI of around 23 kBTUH/sf. Bringing the EUI down to its final
targeted range requires the engagement of the least predictable component in the
building: the tenants themselves.

17
(click on image to enlarge)

The design team has added to the OSC energy model the following occupant
enhancements, changes to typical office usage that are dependent on the building users,
and that, if successful, will bring the building’s EUI down to even less than their original
forecast, to 17.7 rather than the targeted 18-20.

Occupant enhancement strategies include:

• Plug loads that are occupancy sensor controlled

• Cleaning scheduled during unoccupied daylight hours, such as early morning
or late afternoon, when there are fewer people in the building but natural
light available
• Hot water use reduced to little or none
• Computer use limited to 80% laptops with a secondary screen / 20% desktop
• Printer use reduced by 50%
• Phantom loads completely removed
• Personal energy budgets monitored daily

Tenants will be able to actively draw comparisons between different plug loads (from
task lighting, space heaters, small appliances) as well as compare their energy usage
power metering, with software that provides power quality information and feedback on
actual power usage compared to others in the building.

At the individual scale, feedback will be possible with either a plug strip with integral
power metering or a plug-in meter for workstations in open areas.

The team is still looking into additional enhancements such as thin client technology and
a DC (direct current) loop, which would allow the energy generated by the photovoltaic
panels (described below) to go directly to an end use without changing its current type
(thereby eliminating the inefficiencies that come with conversion from DC to AC power).

18
After all energy conservation measures have been included, the nearly final push for the
building’s net zero strategy will be the incorporation of photovoltaics (PVs). For the
building’s energy model, PVs were analyzed using the most efficient panel on the market
today – the Sanyo HIT 205. Bifacial PVs are also being considered, for the soaring
canopy panels described in our previous discussion of the ground floor design.

The OSC rooftop, 10th floor canopy, sunshades, and plaza canopies contribute more than
85% of the energy needs of the building, while building integrated photovoltaics at the
south facing spandrels account for the rest. Altogether, the building has approximately
54,000 square feet of PV.

Greatest efficiencies, passive and active energy sources…so what, then, is the final-final
push for net zero energy?

As one of only two governing principles for the Living Building Challenge, the priority is
clear: Designation of a Living Buildings is “based on actual, rather than modeled or
anticipated, performance. Therefore, buildings must be operational for at least twelve
consecutive months prior to evaluation.”

As usual, the final responsibility for the success of a Living Building floats back to the
people. We won’t know whether the OSC will reach its 17.7 EUI, or its net zero energy
strategy, for a couple of years. Planned efficiencies and sourcing from renewables takes
us halfway there. The rest is up to every individual who commits to working in the
building each day. At the risk of becoming a broken record, we’ll say it one more time:
People are (still) the life in a living building.

19
Keeping Urban Design Wild

Meandering streams, a canopy of trees, dappled light dancing across a ground cover of
native grasses and shrubs…and then the streetcar rolls through. Hang on…where are we?

We could be at the entrance to the OSC.

Since last week’s critique, the team has been tinkering with the project’s urban design –
looking at how the OSC will integrate with its greater place. Two key factors influence
this: the site’s drainage, and its context.

Site analysis, with an eye for its natural drainage and relationship to surrounding blocks.

20
The first bit’s simple: water flows across the site from its highest point at SW 5th and
Harrison, to the north and west, funneling into Montgomery, and eventually to the
Willamette River.

The second bit – looking at the site within its greater context, at the edge of an urban
campus, surrounded by a bustling commercial and residential district – is inspiring.

For the OSC, the projects that have most directly informed early designs are PSU’s
Urban Plaza, to the northwest, and the Halprin sequence, a series of linked open spaces to
the east that were designed by the office of Lawrence Halprin in the 1960s. A quick look
at each reveals that many principles for this new project’s urban design have been in
place for years, the OSC offering the next evolution.

A study of the “ecology of form” by Lawrence Halprin. Courtesy HLC.

Taking cues from the topography of the Cascades, Halprin’s eight-block series of parks
and plazas (Portland’s first “green street”) starts with a Source Fountain at its
southernmost tip, moves to the Lovejoy Fountain (high desert), passes through
Pettygrove Park (the foothills, meadows, streams), and culminates at the Ira Keller

21
Forecourt Fountain, which, with its dramatic water features and vegetation, are a nod to
the northwest’s alpine landscape.

As Halprin wrote in 1981, “The space is choreographed for movement with nodes for
quiet & contemplation, action & inaction, hard & soft, YIN & Yang.”

The Urban Plaza, currently under construction to make way for the new Rec Center.

By contrast, the PSU Urban Plaza, completed in 2000, is an eastern gateway to the urban
university campus, an important throughway at SW 5th and Montgomery for the
streetcar, MAX, and thousands of pedestrians who either pass through in a hurry, or who
stop, sit on steps, eat lunch, and bask in the sun. Fittingly, its open-air design takes a
classical approach; it is a piazza, a rectangular room with classically defined edges,
semicircular features, and hard surfaces that combined reflect the ethos of the studies
taking place in the building on its site, the College of Urban & Public Affairs.

From an ecological perspective, having such divergent landscapes flanking its site begs
the OSC to serve as a transitional zone, and the design team is moving forward with this
in mind.

Studying the yin and yang of

the OSC and the Urban
Plaza.

Taking Halprin’s idea of

complementary opposites
very much to heart, Kurt
Schultz of SERA saw the
OSC’s own urban design as
the Yin to the PSU Urban
Plaza’s Yang.

22
He also saw an opportunity to add a new tributary to the Halprin sequence, one that is a
Cascadian forest floor, a natural transition from the harder landscape of the Urban Plaza,
to the west, to the softer, greener Halprin “river”, to the east.

Landscape plan for the OSC site.

The transition will be

dramatic. Working
with landscape
architects from Nevue
Ngan and Associates,
the team envisions the
OSC’s ground level
experience as akin to a
walk through our
native forests.
Photovoltaic panels
that are soaring
overhead – integral to
the building’s energy
strategy – will be
translucent, creating
dappled light rather than total shade, and large wooden columns will hold the panels in
place. Walking through the plaza, one is immersed in an understory of trees, a quiet,
sheltered space that is in stark contrast to the bustling open Urban Plaza across the street.

23
 Softer surfaces such as
raised wooden
boardwalks reinforce the
forest experience, as
they cross over
meandering streams,
small open runnels that
are carrying stormwater
from the building and
the site down to the
Montgomery green
street, the district’s
major “river”.

The streetcar tracks, which cut diagonally across the site, will not interrupt this forest, but
will instead be enveloped. While not unprecedented – grassy tracks have cropped up
throughout much of Europe – the grasses and trees between and around the streetcar at
the OSC will be native.

Continuing this theme into the building itself, the team is looking into wooden finishes
for the ground-floor ceiling, so that as visitors pass from the outside in, the distinction
between the natural and built environment remains blurred. This also introduces wood, at
an early stage, as a material that will be used repeatedly throughout the building.

The OSC, lower right, can be approached from all sides, leaving its primary entrance
ambiguous.

24
Equally unclear – in a good way – is the location of the building’s front door. As is
characteristic of many university buildings, visitors will be entering and exiting the OSC
from all sides. Students will access classrooms and the conference center from a grand
staircase that starts from the direction of the Urban Plaza, climbs over the streetcar and
enters the building on the second floor. Other visitors, perhaps wholly unaware of the
university across the street, will come in from Montgomery, lured into the building by its
uninterrupted flow of greenery from the street to the building’s rising green wall.

Once inside and on the upper floors, the building’s torque – the four degree rotation that
occurs on each floor – is directed back toward PSU’s Urban Plaza, the OSC’s curved
edges reaching out and across to the Urban Center’s straighter lines. The yin and yang
dynamic emerges once again.

Sketch of the Portland sequence by Lawrence Halprin. Courtesy HLC.

When further describing his Portland project, Halprin wrote in 1981, “The…approach
was to bring into the heart of downtown activities which related in a very real way to the
environment of the Portland area – the Columbia river, the Cascade mountains, the
streams, rivers & mountain meadows. These symbolic elements are very much a part of
Portlanders’ psyche – they glory in their natural environment & escape to it as often as
possible.”

The urban oasis, a great escape, without ever leaving the city. While Halprin wasn’t the
first to provide this for Portland (think Park Blocks, Forest Park), he certainly set the tone
for this SW Portland neighborhood, and in its wildness and reverence for the ecologies of
our region, it is a tone the OSC intends to keep.

25
Products with green technology

Green Power Technology

With rising energy costs and the threat of global warming, many businesses are now
recognizing the benefits of using green technology to reduce their carbon footprint and to
minimize waste. The Anpha Engineering provides resources pertinent to all businesses
interested in reducing their impact on the environment.

We can offer solar module and solar power system for wide range from 1 KW to 100
KW. Main products include:solar module ,solar power system,solar lighing system ,solar
cell ,solar garden light, solar lamp, solar flashlight, solar streetlight,solar fountain,solar
radio and so on.

26
How to connect solar power system in house

How to connect solar power and wind power system in house

27
Solar Water Heaters

Solar water heaters?also called solar domestic hot water systems?can be a cost-effective
way to generate hot water for your home. They can be used in any climate, and the fuel
they use?sunshine?is free.

Most solar water heaters require a well-insulated storage tank. Solar storage tanks have
an additional outlet and inlet connected to and from the collector. In two-tank systems,
the solar water heater preheats water before it enters the conventional water heater. In
one-tank systems, the back-up heater is combined with the solar storage in one tank.

How to connect solar water heater system in house

Improving Energy Efficiency

After your water heater is properly installed and maintained, try some additional energy-
saving strategies to help lower your water heating bills, especially if you require a back

up system. Some energy-saving devices and systems are more cost-effective to install
with the water heater

28