02 Module 1 Lstiburek

[Applause] my uh my daughter just moved to uh Texas and she's teaching me uh Texon and uh I learned that y'all is singular and all y'all is plural and I and uh anyway I I I I grew up in I grew up in Canada uh but I grew up in the southern part of Canada so uh we have a lot in common uh how you all been E I thought we'd go through a a thousand years of building enclosure Revolution uh to set the stage uh a thousand years ago we built things entirely out of rocks this is a a church in in Ireland and uh the roof is Rock the walls are rock the foundations are rocks The Rock are rocks the overall thermal resistance a thousand years ago was R2 about 500 years ago we began to add thatched roofs mostly for rainwater control the oriented nature of the fibers surface tension gravity allowed for a magnificent water control technology in fact we use this approach of oriented fibers and surface tension and gravity below grade in drainage mats and it's the most common water control method in Curt walls above grade anyway the overall thermal performance improved to R R4 um 350 years ago in Middle Europe we began to see post and beam construction and and waddle and do waddle and dob is a precursor to a a modern stucco the waddle was woven branches that eventually evolved into an expanded metal LA and more recently a eass matrix and the dob is you know uh now a u you know multicomponent U polymer modified ctitious uh rendering um the big innovation however was that we began to get air cavities air spaces and that dramatic 250 years ago heavy Timber construction uh this log cabins approximately R8 um 100 years ago my alma moer the University of Toronto the halane building uh single pane glass which was R1 but less than 10% of the building enclosure was glass approximately uh you know 90% of the enclosure was 36 in of mass and the average thermal resistance was R8 1972 double glazed non-thermally broken aluminum curtain walls are you know where we're going don't you R 1.5 in 2005 a lead award-winning building um double glaze thermally broken aluminum curtain walls are R2 so in a thousand years we've gone from R2 to R2 um are there any Architects here um I'll I'll speak slowly and use small words and uh you you can explain it to the engineers later what is singularly the most expensive part part of the building enclosure glass and what is singularly the worst thermal performing so if you want a really expensive building that doesn't work use lots of glass all right now there's a reason that we don't let Engineers design buildings that's because they'd have no glass and so um we need a balance between the engineer and the architect and that requires U judgment and and one of the things things that um I've learned I'm now in my late 50s and that is I'm I'm going to argue in favor of beauty over energy um I think that in order for buildings to last a long time which I think is a very good thing because I think that's the ultimate Definition of sustainability is people have to take care of them and I've discovered in all of my years that people don't take care of ugly things um less is not sustainable people will only take care of buildings that are beautiful buildings that people want to live in and work in and only then will they take care of them and so I'm always willing to give up energy for beauty and like anything if we begin to focus on one element over the others we get ourselves into a great deal of dis difficulty so I'm standing before you as an engineer arguing not to give up the beauty now if we end up with a beautiful building that's going to be around a long time we've created a machine that need that needs to be fed resources over its useful service life so it behooves us to have that machine Ultra efficient and there's no comp there's no contradiction between having a beautiful building that's energy efficient but don't let the energy blind you to what the function of the building is intended to be in the first place so if you have a choice between energy and Beauty take the beauty take it from from an old middle-aged guy who's kind of figured this out it's always nice to look at a beautiful building now Architects you're giv us the beauty but you're also giving us buildings that don't work very well so I think it's important that we apply some of the physics all right one more one more example um I think you all recognize this this is a a baseboard convector and let's let's look at it more closely that's an incredibly efficient heat exchanger we have a copper core with aluminum aluminum fins let's look at even more closely and then let's Orient it correctly and compare it to this award-winning building and this is the uh this is the aqua building in Chicago and it was uh uh designed by jean gang and uh she won a MacArthur award and uh I well here's the you know this is here's the infrared and and I I I called I mean I was so irritated um I called and and and and of course I couldn't get through to the great woman because you know I mean Joe Ste who the hell is that right and and so I got one of her lesser Architects and I I I said so this is a a lead building is it is well where's the insulation I mean you have glass and you have concrete well there was lots of insulation and I said well well where well we have an R11 Radiant Barrier paint on the concrete that was the right response I was very concerned that okay let's do this again so that we all on the same page the answer was well we have an R11 Radiant Barrier paint thank you I said well there's a bridge in book Brooklyn that's for sale we could like put it in some swamp land in Florida are you kidding me I mean this passes for well okay so but it got its lead point and I said well you know where's the bicycle rack isn't that what makes a building lead so I I I don't get invited to those conferences anymore apparently I I have an attitude problem um but it's not just this building I mean I mean I mean I went through my hometown of Toronto and I you I have no life so I have an infrared camera you know late at night I drive the streets taking you know there's a there's a bad cable TV show in the works there you know you know night night stalker I mean I mean look look look at this I mean you know you're you're you're freaking kidding to me I mean this is you know this one like irritated the hell out of me I you know this uh um the slabs are are can levered you know they're about 8 in 12 in wide and they're just wide enough to basically catch water and pigeon and and I mean you know I I said what do what are you what are you doing I'm talking to the arch what the what the hell are you doing I mean you know this uh this is just wide enough that the occupants can stand on the ledge and jump to their deaths when they get their utility bill what what are you what what are you thinking and then the architect tells me well I wanted the inner building to express itself Architects you know that this discussion took place because that's exactly right I mean you know you know this is exactly the comment that you're going to get and I said well okay I can see that but what we could do is we could we could cut it flush and then we could have continuous installation then we could clip on and nobody would know and the response was but it wouldn't be authentic and so that's when I decided the architecture profession is not serious about energy I I think you're all a bunch of Hypocrites and you're using lead to basically do the deal and and and and Engineers I view us as enablers we enable that crap to happen because see we don't actually measure energy we simulate it see because you know it's like we're we're we're accountants you know what accountants are like what answer would you like sir we can give you any any answer that you want but that's commercial buildings are a joke they're a disaster but residential buildings are not and the reason is in residential construction we have in the United States an incredibly sophisticated energy monitoring system once a month somebody goes to every house in the United States of America and reads the meter and at the end of the year you just add up the bill and and people are funny you know they know what they used to pay they know what their neighbors are paying and they know what you promised and if you don't deliver the retribution is vicious brutal and instantaneous right commercially we don't measure anything all we do is simulate well I saved 30% with this computer simulation I saved 8% Point 8.4 there's always a decimal do you ever notice that freaking decimal that's total nonsense you know if you're within 25 or 30% you know I'm I'm like whoa that is amazing and so I don't believe anything unless you measure it and until we start measuring real energy consumption I don't believe any of this stuff because I can give you any number you want and and here's to me what's important you compare the energy consumption of your new building after a year or two and the square meters or the square footage and you compare it to a similar building in a similar location similar occupancy built in the 1960s and if you haven't saved any energy sit down and shut up because I don't believe you and right now we're not measuring a damn thing all right this was not part of the presentation that I present I provide because I figured we'd get the hook but I'm I I'll tell you something else if I hear one more time that we're going to do a woy simulation I'm going to puke because woy you can get any number you want and it's not designed to measure airf flow it great it's great for Mass buildings Europeans are famous for Mass buildings but we're Hollow we have three-dimensional comp threedimensional complex are flow networks you can't model that so what do we do well we rely on experience and fundamental principles and it's like now but clients don't believe it they like the decimal place and they like the computer simulation because of the beautiful graphical interface and we've learned in our office you don't get the dough unless you do the show repeat after me you don't get the D unless you do the show now what we do is we do the show but we give them aill bu that's going to work regardless of what the show shows do do you follow and it's real simple and and the motto is Don't do stupid things so repeat after me don't do stupid things and let's go through how to avoid stupid things this is a stupid thing right I mean the balconies are giant heat exchange devices what we should do is cut the sons of off right throw out the windows wrap them on the outside with external insulation new cladding system and clip the balconies back and we're done end The Story come on we know how to do this I mean somebody on drugs did this it's not beautiful it's just ugly it's uh basically warming up the local climate of Chicago it's trying to moderate so that the rest of the buildings don't need many big don't need heating systems because this is going to warm up the local heat island and then look at this you know a double facade two you know we can't get one layer of glass right so let's have two I call these people facists why would you build a building inside of another building well we're going to have Magic Air going between the two layers of glass you see the thermal effect you know and that moving stream of air is going to cool and reject that heat well you know I did the calculations I mean I I used to be an aerodynamicist you need subsonic flow we would suck children and small animals off of the sidewalk and we would injected into low earth orbit to make this freaking thing work just I mean in the stupider the concept The More The Architects and the owners will accept it I mean I don't understand is it because we don't teach math or physics in high school anymore how we don't even teach kids how to read right we don't teach them anything useful in high school except how to feel good about themselves while they're unable to function in the modern world which is the only uh reason that I could think that an architect would accept an R11 Radiant Barrier paint on a concrete heat exchange fin in Chicago I mean I mean does that I mean it's so funny that you you know you have to laugh when you're not crying but what the hell this this is great and they want to retrofit this don't touch it you know I don't have a lot of glass and a whole bunch of rocks rocks don't burn repeat after me rocks don't burn and and Structural Engineers have figured out how these buildings should stand up I mean they don't fall down anymore you ever Structural Engineers are very boring you know why nothing ever freaking happens buildings don't fall down a hundred years ago they fell down not anymore an extroverted structural engineer looks at your feet while he's talking to you right right you on excitement talk to a mechanical engineer cuz nothing nothing works there you know us mechanical engineers in all these glass buildings were were professional turd polishers we're trying to compensate here make this efficient it's too late right that's why we have personalities because nothing works this is really awesome don't touch this one this one you know take a rock throw stones you know you know that lead award-winning building behind the church per square meter the church wins right too much glass duh all right so okay now now we come to the regularly scheduled presentation this is like therapy for me okay thank you for some people drink some people go to a psychiatrist I mean I'm an engineer and I Married An Architect oh my God the the therapy bills were incredible we we were we're going to have children and our both associations contacted us forbid us from having children they were worried about the nature of The Offspring we had a daughter and she be she became an attorney what can I tell you all right so what is a building it's an environmental separator its function is to keep the outside out and the inside in that's it that's that's that's the deal um back in the day like thousands of thousands upon thousands of years ago our environmental separator was you know hundreds and thousands of miles right that was the environmental separator we allegedly grew up in the grassy Plains of you know primitive Africa and we happen to like 70 75 Dees fah 35 to 45% relative humidity and uh you know you know the environmental we didn't need any environmental separation except to keep the animals out right uh but we couldn't you know we couldn't colonize the planet without basically creating and shrinking thousands of miles of environmental separation into couple of feet couple of inches now right so that's that's what a building is um in the 19 late 1940s Orly 1950s uh the rules of environmental separation were defined and and here they are this is what it needs to be this is what a building needs to do to become an environmental separator I mean it has to be beautiful okay we got that and we don't want it to fall down and we don't want it to burn okay so you know this fire structural stuff Beauty you know I'm assuming we're we're smart enough to figure that out but here are the rules when somebody asks us to evaluate a building enclosure this is the list does it control heat flow air flow water vapor flow rain ground groundw light and solar radiation noise vibrations contaminants environmental hazards and odors insects rodent and verment fire strength rigidity durability aesthetically pleasing and affordable that's how you evaluate a building enclosure now some of these were really really good at um you know the important ones you know they don't fall down because that's like a really big deal they don't burn that's a a really really big deal we're pretty pathetic with some of them and um every generation wrestles with one or two on this particular list our generation's problem are heat flow air flow moisture flow that's what we're struggling with meanhow we solved the fire problem after that cow kicked over that Lantern in in Chicago remember the Great Chicago Fire It's not like we didn't know that a a city would burn in North America London had burned three times by then Rome once America was due you couldn't build that way with that type of construction that close together it was going to happen we knew very next year Boston burned but nobody ever remembers the Boston fire because Boston always finishes second so the building codes have handled fire very well you know we had earthquakes and hurricanes and you know hurricane Ander really really got us a wakeup call and we fixed the codes and then the Northbridge earthquake uh shook things up literally and figuratively because it didn't behave like we expected it to and things changed so we we're pretty good with the the fire we're pretty darn good with the structure and now we're dealing with the energy and the water and the Heat and the moisture and we're we're struggling with it but we're beginning to figure stuff out and so I'm going to give you my version of what I think is important but important in the context of this bigger list because we've already done really good stuff with fire and structure and plumbing and sanitation do do you follow in other words I'm we're now knocking off the stuff that's not important as the other stuff that we've already handled because we're a we're a a reactive Nation not a proactive Nation things get intolerably bad before we intervene and then we we we intervene in a messy way Winston Churchill defined Americans as a a nation that can always be counted upon to do the right thing after all of the Alternatives have been exhausted and and so we're we're doing the right thing it just that it's taken us a while to to sort our way through it um so my focus on building enclosure is heat air and moisture simply because the other more important things were already doing extraordinarily well we're doing them well because we did them badly that you think about that tonight in the bar and that'll that'll make sense all right what destroys buildings well you take away the fire and stuff you end up with water heat and ultraviolet light um of the 80% of building durability issues that we have that aren't dealing with structure and those others these three account for the 80% and of the 80% water accounts for 80% of the 80% that so if we wanted to worry about something we'd probably want to worry about the water everybody with me on on this all right so we need a little bit of physics um this is again for for The Architects the engineers will never understand this because there's no numbers in it um so this is the second law of Thermodynamics translated into something useful this isn't you know entropy and the Heat death of the universe and and all that nonsense this is okay heat flows from warm to cold why because because it is because you got it it's because of the second law but who cares because Works moisture flows from warm to cold why because moisture flows from more to less why because air flows from a higher pressure to a lower pressure why because and gravity acts down there's one more rule that you need Architects raise your hand here it is this is for you you can't push with a rope if you know that and this you can get an engineering license in the state of New York not in Boston you have to be a Democrat too in Boston but you know in New York all right so let's say that we accept this and I'm I'm suggesting it's a pretty good thing to do we should accept this um this map has staggering implications for us right I mean up north there are only two seasons this winter and last winter know I grew up in grew up in Toronto you know home of the Naple Leafs it's a hockey team that hasn't won anything since 1967 so it's you know it's pretty easy to work you know to build in a cold climate the moisture flow and heat flow is all from the inside to the outside you go down to Key West you can you know see Cuba Canadians like Cuba cuz there are no Americans there so well these are good lines okay I mean you know this is you know so you're in you're in Key West right and and and and and you're always air conditioning and the inside is going to be cold and the inside is going to be dry so the moisture flow is always from the outside to the inside so you build in the cold you know I mean I mean anybody can build in Canada because the moisture flow and heat Flows In One Direction hell anybody can build in Key West and in Havana and even Miami because the moisture flows all and heat flows always from the opposite direction but the most interesting part of the continent is in the Middle where things go in both directions see the United States of America is unique it's the only industrialized Nation that's dominated by air conditioning so I was kind of laughing at you sorry cuz you're struggling with the air conditioning I mean you know Germans like to be uncomfortable and you're always heating this passive stuff doesn't work in uh Atlanta you can't conserve your way to dry and the better you are at saving energy the less your air conditioning system runs unless it dehumidifies so if you really do a job correctly you're going to end up having to spend the energy on dehumidification we learned this a long time ago this guy by the name of Willis carrier he wrote it in something called a book which is found in libraries but they're very very old books and you have to ask a librarian and that involves a social interaction which is why young Engineers never learn about this anymore so Willis the old guy before he died figured out that you had to separate the latent load from the sensible load everything we do to save on the sensible side means the AC doesn't run so now we have to add supplemental d ification and the biggest dehumidification load is ventilation it' be colossally stupid to build a tight building and then over ventilate it wouldn't it nodding here would be a okay nod this is a good thing and so we're R we're really anal about tightness and I think that's fabulous but to not ask ourselves what the right ventilation rate is in most of the United States where we have humidity see this you know dry part no nobody lives there I you you think about it right nobody freaking lives there so why would we build for places nobody lives I it makes no sense so you know this ventilation and humidity load is going to be the thing that you're going to have to wrestle with um that's not part of my discussion I'm just telling you that if we succeed which I think we should in building a tight enclosure lots of thermal insulation and really really good Windows the ventilation and the humidity control is the thing that is going to be keeping us up at night and we should go back to Willis carrier he actually figured it out it's that book thing all right um this is where it rains a lot all right so let's think about this we have hot dry hot humid mixed humid cold very cold subarctic these are hydrothermal regions and then we have rain exposure regions right we have low and we have moderate High Extreme all right so let's pick Las Vegas Nevada Las Vegas Nevada is clearly a hot dry climate right let's compare it to buxy Mississippi buxy Mississippi is hot humid um Las Vegas is a low rain exposure and buxi Mississippi is a high rain exuses so what's common to Las Vegas and baluy casinos what the hell is wrong with you people don't you freaking don't you freaking get out I mean casinos casinos are common to Vegas and buuy and here's the deal the companies that own design operate and maintain the casinos in Vegas own operate design and maintain the casinos and buuy and for all for all intents and purposes they were built exactly the same way you can't do that they don't freaking work right we discovered that eifs sealed Works in Las Vegas because it doesn't rain and putting vinyl wallpaper which is a vapor barrier on the inside of an assembly Works in Las Vegas because it doesn't rain and it's not humid but you know my God now putting vinyl wallpaper on the inside of a building in buuy with a faal the ifs and then putting a rooftop exhaust fan p all the air out of the building you basically get a building that sucks with a condom on the wrong side right and and and and and who do you blame you blame the contractor and the sub trades you built it wrong no how can you how can you compensate for installing vinyl wallpaper in a hot humid climate you there's no amount of workmanship that will make that work right so when they fail we we blame the Irish we used to blame the Irish because they were the immigrants right then we blame my family the the checks and now we blame the Hispanics or any immigrant class because immigrants build our infrastructure right these are not workmanship issues these are design issues and we have to be respectful of the climate um this sort of highlights the difference between quality control and quality assurance quality Assurance is figuring out what the right thing to do is and quality control is executing it we're phenomenal on the quality control we're horrible on the quality assurance if you do the wrong thing right it's still wrong right tonight all right so let's say that you didn't want to have to think about any of that I mean I I I teach at a university now and I'm I'm not allowed to fail stupid people anymore because that would be discriminating against stupid people see we're all the same so if you're an idiot I can't say you're an idiot I have to you know pass you so I've decided to make it really simple I've said look let's design a building enclosure that will work everywhere so that idiots who I basically have to pass can design and construct them does that make make make sense Okay so this is so this is it for for idiots all buildings need a water control layer everybody with me on this and the water control air is more important than the air control air so if you can't keep raining groundwater out of your building I don't care about air you know I I I haven't got a call oh my air barrier is flawed I get calls like my roof is leaking my windows are leaking my my Foundation is filled with water those are the calls that I get and you know quite frankly you know the water thing is more important than the air thing are you with me on this all right once you got the water thing under control then you deal with the air the air control is far more important than the vapor control I don't want to hear discussions about vapor barriers and woy and crap like that until we have air tightness all right once I've got the air tightness then I deal with the vapor control and the vapor control is more important than the thermal control the least important is the thermal control but the thermal control is the easiest to specify if it's not important and can be easily specified the building code obsesses over it our value this you value this lamb to this ah it makes me drink bourbon which is actually a a good thing the code is least specific in dealing with the water control layer and yet it's fundamentally the most significant isn't it there's good news and bad news there the good news part is that the code doesn't deal with it so you can actually do the right thing because most of the time the code is a consensus opinion of wrong things right come on we you know we're you know come on come on that's why I had hope with the Army I mean the Army could do stuff for making up their own code right and which is what they did with the air Titan is where where is Alexander where where is he is he you haven't got the hook yet well done young man well done yeah yeah okay so how would this look well here's what the perfect wall looks like and and this isn't my idea I wasn't even born when this this came out this is guy by the name of Neil hudon who figured it out independently of a Swedish guy named nander in the 19 late 1940s early 1950s but the swedes didn't read English and the Canadians didn't read Swedish and you know it was just you know nothing ever happened until the nor Norwegians took it across and they said oh this actually works and then they wrote it in books and nobody read it um anyway so here it is so we have the structure and on the outside of the structure we have the control layers that heavy black line is the water control layer it's also the air control layer and the vapor control aay on the outside of that is the blue layer which is the thermal control layer and it's blue this presentation because Dow paid me yesterday is there anybody for Owens Corning for the right price pink is a very attractive no you know very attractive color for this so you know they wanted me to make it green but the hypocrisy of the green movement is so great I can't deal with it because everything is freaking green hell the cab driver driving me in was a green cab driver it's such a meaningless term that you want to kind of throw up okay so outport of that that is the cladding and the cladding function is to protect the other control layers from exposure to water heat and ultraviolet light it's a sunscreen and it provides Aesthetics and physical protection to the other control layers and we want it to be V ventilated and back drained we don't want to it we don't want to seal it the only time you put sealant on the outside is for Aesthetics I mean why would you want to put a sealant to do something critical and the one location where it's most exposed to the damage functions which are what water heat and ultraviolet light you want to put the stuff to the inside right nodding here with see because uh you know these 30-year sealants um you know there's a neat study I I I it's not yet published it's coming out we didn't do it but I'm a reviewer and I'm not supposed to say these things but I will anyway cuz what the hell what can they do to me you know already been you know IR okay so um almost 55% of all sealant fail within the first 10 years and 85% of sealant don't make it past the 20th year I mean they're temporary if they're on the outside you put them on the inside they'll last forever because they're on the inside it's kind of one of those neat neat things that all right all right so this is the perfect wall oh wait a minute um it works everywhere let's go to Montreal let's build a humidified pressurized building in Montreal I mean let's build an art gallery with a famous architect in Montreal they never freaking work because they never build this wall but let's say that we did it so you've got the worst possible exposure humidified pressurized Art G oh let's put a let's also have it attached to a hospital and a data processing center with a swimming pool I mean I just that was one of my class assignments I said look let's we're going to build a hospital Art Gallery swimming pool and put it on top of a ski mountain outside of Montreal design a building enclosure well there it is I me you think about it this works so the moisture flow and heat flow air flow is all from the inside out and hits the black line and what happens nothing nothing cuz it's warm that black line has all of the insulation on the outside of it so I don't have a change in Phase if I don't have it go from a vapor to a liquid that's you know New Jersey for don't bother me none what happens if I have have a hole what are the odds that those kqa you know those syrup slurping poutin eating hockey playing kqa what if they screw it up well we don't care cuz it's going to blow through the insulation into the air cab City and be ventilated to the outside and the wall goes right so it's designed to fail in a fail safe manner right not nodding here with so this works okay so let's let's let's move it now to Miami so let's let's put it in Miami let's build Madonna's house so the inside is cold and dry and the outside is hot and wet and so the moisture flows from the outside to inside it's going to blow through the cladding blow through the blue stuff hit the black line and now what happens well it changes it condenses right it goes from a vapor to a liquid but it's condensing where on the outside it's like rain the wall goes I don't care it's outside my building my control layer is outside what I'm protecting now what are the odds at those sandwich squashing cigars smoking m but dancing um you know Cubans got it right well about the same likelihood of the kequ so there'll be a flaw or a failure and so what happens if a flaw or failure in that line it's going to get into the structure but as long as I don't put a barrier on the inside it's going to go through the structure and into the air and once it's in the air this mechanical engineer can freaking deal with it yeah I want to get that air to the coldest surface in the building and what's the coldest surface in the building the air conditioning cooling coils where I'm going to convert it from a vapor to a liquid and we're done so as long as I don't have vinyl wall coverings I don't have impermeable finishes like Epoxy paint I'm good to go so I put my defensive line on the outside when there's a flaw get the hell out of its way and let it go and get it out of the darn building but here's the rub I have to have it dry high and cold in the building for this to work now if I've done a really good job on my thermal loads the air conditioning system isn't running so it's not dehumidifying so I need to make it dry and so I need to have a dehumidifier now here's a little lesson for you energy recovery ventilators don't make it dry they maintain dry so they will only work in conjunction with with a dehumidifier so you need a cooling system to make it cold and you make need a dehumidifier to make it dry and then you maintain the cold and dry with the energy recovery piece but you need all three if we've done our job really well the absolute smallest is the cooling but if we're really good at it the biggest Tonk of energy is going to be on the dehumidification and if we over ventilate we're screwed does that kind of give you a so this balance between ventilation and under ventilation and over ventilation is the most significant energy environmental decision you're going to have to make because that's what saves the walls does that give you a all right so it works in Miami Works in Montreal What About Memphis Works in Memphis how about Muny Minneapolis Mojave Montery it works everywhere the only thing you have to decide is how much thermal resistance you want and here's my answer I've been doing this for 30 years whatever you think the right answer is double it because I was wrong in the 80s I was wrong in the 90s just talk to all of my Ex-Wives and girlfriends they'll give you a list of how well we weren't talking about thermal resistance but I was wrong about that too all right I take the perfect wall and I flip it one way I get the perfect slab and I flip it the other way I get the perfect roof this is another aha moment ah the physics of walls roofs and Foundations are the same so the perfect roof is a protected membran roof this actually comes to us from the old Soviet Union and Romania in the' 40s if you want to go back far enough oh my God the membrane's right on the structure underneath all of that insulation we should put it up at the top because if we put it at the top it's easy to get at to replace if you put it there you have to replace it right if you put it underneath you don't have to replace it now if you replace the the ballast with dirt grass and a goat that would be a green roof right I I think green roofs are a really stupid idea for energy reasons because dirt isn't insulation if it was we'd put it in walls and just wreaking dirt and insulation is cheaper than dirt and grass isn't a very good membrane it's not very reflective unless it's green and to make it green you have to water it are you kidding me putting water on the top of your building the whole idea to get the freaking water off the top of your building are you an idiot but you know they're beautiful and so I I love green roofs for the right reason Architects where are you give me a green roof for beauty and I'm going to be there with you every step of the way but don't give me all of the nonsense that it's environmental and it's sustainable and the heat Ireland effect and I want to store water on my roof the only reason the city planners like you to store water on your roof is because they've not invested in civil engineering infrastructure in the last 50 years rather than building sewers and roads and bridges and maintaining our infrastructure they're supporting you know all of these artsy fartsy groups give me a freaking break do your job don't you know waste money on the other crap give me you know and now we're trying to say well okay put the private sector in charge of this because we won't let you have the water that we should have been handling as a municipality this stuff drives me crazy but Beauty yeah all right flip it we've got the perfect slab right I Got Dirt Stones insulation control layer concrete God I love it now in California they're idiots on any levels but one of the things that drives me crazy is they put a layer of sand between the membrane in the concrete this is you're you're you're that's the dumbest thing in the world because what ends up happening is it ends up being a sponge it gets wet and it never it's not capable of drying so what you want is you want to put the concrete directly on the membrane so there's no Reservoir think oh well the concrete will curl no it won't just use the right water to cement ratio the magic water to cement ratio is 0.5 at less than 05 you have no bleed water we typically ask for 045 to give us a buffer because what we want is 0.5 but we ask for 045 to make sure this doesn't happen well you can't put concrete right on plastic in California I say you guys are how stupid are you across the street there's a two-story building right yeah well you have a fluted metal deck right yeah don't you put concrete right on the fluted metal deck do you put a layer of sand in the flutes before you put the concrete well no well how does it work the laws of physics clearly change between the first floor and the second floor then because on the first floor I have to put this freaking sand layer but on the second I I I I don't you're tricking me it's easy cuz you're an cuz you're an idiot see this only happens west of the Mississippi and I'm convinced on the Mississippi River there's a fence that prevents ideas from going from one side to to to to the other okay so let's take the let's take the perfect enclosure and put in the perfect wall the perfect roof perfect Foundation now we have another aha moment you ready we got to connect them yeah and how we connect them is Magic we connect the water control of the roof to the water control of the wall to the water control of the foundation then the air control of the roof to the air control of the wall to the air control of the foundation and then the vapor to the vapor to the vapor and the thermal to the thermal to the thermal I was taught this in 1979 I was told to do design reviews take a colored pen and trace it around your drawing set and wherever the pen leaves the paper you've identified a discontinuity I was kind of neat I looked at the passive House book and I saw that you stole it good idea continuity of the control layers that's the magic and you know we get paid a lot of money to do this it's amazing everybody can do this on their own in fact it's even easier you don't actually have to do the whole building failures happen not in the field of a roof or a field of the wall they happen where roofs meet walls and where we have penetrations what's the most famous penetration of all a window think about life as a window this is the the Zen part of the presentation right a window has to do everything a wall has to do and more it has to handle water air vapor and heat but it also has to handle radiation right you want the visible light portion of the spectrum to be admitted but you want to exclude the ultraviolet and the infrared right it's why we call them spectrally selective and every now and then some lunatic expects to be able to do what with the window open it well no wonder windows are so damag expensive we ask so much more of them right but we've got phenomenal Windows today right we have Windows that handle all of those control functions so how come we have more problems with Windows today than we've ever had well two reasons and and this is I'm only speculating here one is the window industry are are idiots I mean wouldn't it be neat if a window came out to your job site that was labeled and said this is our water control layer connected to yours this is our air control layer connected to yours this is our Vapor connected tears this is our thermal connected tears but I've been doing this my entire life and I have yet to see a window come out labeled that way and I don't even see it in the instructions and when I call them up well we'll get back to you on that well then I don't trust them right if they can't tell you right off the bat what is their water control layer you know you're in trouble and I even trust them anyway even if they claim to know so in our office we collapse all of the control layers on the innermost part of the glazing system so we wrap the window openings with the water control so when the window system eventually fails the consequences of that failure are directed to the outside a leak is not a leak if the client never sees it repeat after me a leak is not a leak if the client never sees it so that's one problem the other is is we've been relying on on one person to do this the last 40 years and I've been looking for him to get rid of them his name is buy others he shows up on all of the specifications window installation buy others shop drawings bu others Dimensions verified by others don't let this ESO be on your job site all right you want to know who's responsible look in the mirror that's who's responsible all right we are famous for building these Square buildings right no we're not those red circles are attorney's targeting diagrams right because that's where we have the three-dimensional connection between those control layers right that's where the failure is going to happen and and they're complicated and you never see them drawn three-dimensionally on the job on the drawings right okay I'm I'm part of an architectural firm we have 30 employees and I know how many Architects here we're going to I'm going to let them in on a secret on the architectural business okay first of all it's a business for the rest of you to realize it's a business and the profitability of the business is dependent on getting the drawings and specifications out in a timely fashion because your draws your financial draws are based on percentage completion of the drawings right you have your conceptual drawing sets your 50% completion your 90% can you know what I mean so the idea is always erase to push the drawings and specs out the doors as quickly as possible well it takes you roughly three times longer to draw a three-dimensional section than it does to do a two-dimensional section so when you know most architectural firms will take the section such that it misses every one of those circles right nodding here and and who does the drawings anyway is it the most senior and experienced person on the firm it's the intern I actually lied my daughter isn't an attorney she's an architect um she did it to defy me but I love her and so she just graduated and the first thing they did gave her to do was to draw details and the answer was well okay this is what we did five six years ago it's in the file put it on this drawing set right that doesn't that doesn't freaking work you know that that doesn't work but you know that's that's who it is and so the information is either incorrect or missing and so you're out at the job site and there's no information to the contractor or the subcontractors and Guido talks to Luigi talks to Lurch talks to Betsy talks to ho josea and they say what do I do here ah just it right the universal answer building science in the tube is it we call it the and lock strategy and I'll tell you something else some of these details are too difficult to actually draw up you actually have to do a mockup so we are absolute passionate Believers in mockups if you're going to put in two or 300 windows in a project or replace two or 300 Windows you should all get together and do one together and then figure out whether it works before you do the other Bunch because this is this is complicated nodding here would would work all right so here's here's the the three walls with some more meat on them this is the commercial wall I'll show you the sorry the institutional wall then I'll show you the commercial wall then I'll show you the residential wall um if I was going to build a museum or a hospital or I wanted to pass on a building from one generation to the next this is what id do I'd build it out of concrete and rocks put a fully adhered membrane on the outside lots of insulation an air gap and a cladding system that insulation could be anything it could be extruded polystyrene expanded polystyrene Rockwall fiberglass I don't care they all work for institutional buildings I happen to like fluffy rocks why rocks don't burn and on the inside I put sheet rock because rocks don't burn and I make sure that the wall can dry out and the wall can dry in and I can build it anywhere well not everybody can afford this so you build a commercial wall steel studs all the control control layers are on the outside you know so you put gyps and board without paper and the same control layers but no fluffy stuff in the cavity because putting fluffy stuff in a steel stud cavity is a thermodynamic obscenity if I put an r19 bat in a 5 1 half in steel stud wall I lose 85% of the thermal resistance it's effectively R4 that's because steel is 400 times more conductive than wood I know this because I've never seen wood wiring i' i' I've never seen a wood frying pan well I did once and so the only way to deal with steel framing is to insulate it where on the outside so this continuous insulation is a big deal I learned about this as a child growing up in Northern Canada as all Canadian children learn in Canada when it we were young when it got cold we learned to pull the sweater over the outside of us we we didn't eat it and shove it into our ribs so I mean you look at this this is you know the most efficient way to suck energy off of an enclosure so steel is not green I laugh about it oh it's sustainable we recycled the Pinos and the Corvair in it okay don't eat your sweater so I mean whether this is insulated internally or not is irrelevant because if we build two side by side and we measured them we wouldn't be able to tell the difference in energy consumption within the experimental experimental error of the measurement procedure but you know a little bit of continuous insulation on the outside is phenomenal a lot of continuous insulation on the outside is even more freaking phenomenal but none of that matters until you get the water control the air control and the vapor control see we don't want holes in the water control layer we don't want holes in the air control layer we don't want holes in the Vapor control layer and we don't want big holes in the thermal control layer and the biggest holes in the thermal control layer are windows and thermal Bridges so get good windows and deal with the thermal Bridges but deal with them after you've handled the water air and Vapor are you with me on that this is not complicated a wood building you can insulate the cavities because wood is not conductive and now this works everywhere with the stipulation is that the ratio of the insulation to the outside of that black line to the ratio of the insulation on the inside of the black KN line depends on where you are if I'm in Montreal I want 80% of the insulation on the outside and 20% on the inside if I'm in Houston I can live with you know 10% on the outside and 90% on the inside so the farther north I go the thicker I need to make the continuous insulation relative to the interior insulation but this is only an issue in a non-conductive assembly if we're dealing with wood wood is good it's self-replicating carbon sequestering micro self-replicating nanotechnology that's wood I'm trying to sex it up so that we actually you know wood really is good good luck with that all right so couple of examples this is our water air and Vapor control layer you can tell an engineer was involved because there's no windows but there was an architect because of the stupid curved roof on the outside of this is the cladding system and uh the continuous insulation there are five different claddings so that the building could qualify for an architectural award that that's a cynical comment that's the Architects are going well yeah I can see that and see it was meant to be funny and ironic because you you like complexity and I hate complexity um this has got Windows noticed how the opening is wrapped into or the openings are wrapped with the water control layer and Vapor control layer right notice how the windows are the openings are notched so that when we put in that window and it leaks the water control is the water is directed to the exterior on the outside of this we have continuous insulation and we have Granite this wasn't one of our projects this I I took this in 1989 I couldn't believe it I just moved to Boston I saw this and a little tear formed the corner of my eye ran down my cheek I was like my God Harvard you know who knew that you know Harvard could actually do something useful and so so how many panels are how many Granite panels there are about 5,000 how many joints 10 to 15,000 joints and what are the odds that Iger Guido Lurch Luigi Manuel Bubba Betsy Betty and Jose are going to be able to and seal 10 to 15,000 joints and have them installed on a warm dry dust free surface zero but we don't care because you know if all of the sealant fails the building actually works better doesn't it because I get more air circulation behind the clading so as this building ages and gets ratty and more disgusting looking it actually performs better and this is the same line I'm using with my wife so here's our uh steel stud building dance glass gold notice we patched the membrane at the corners because that's the weak link and we find we found over the years that membranes don't stick to furry stuff unless you have a primer so we've learned all about this stuff and we've learned that we have to terminate the membranes if we don't they peel away and they fish laap just ask MIT and Frank Gary on that building so you have to the top edge of the membrane if it's reverse lapped or you have to tape it but we learned I mean you know you you screw up over this um goes the insulation in the clading system this is my version of the Rainbow Coalition right the color doesn't matter here we we don't discriminate this is I have to be careful with that line don't I it's just don't call it a that was a so don't do stupid things the problem here was they ate the sweater they should have put the on the outside um but you I didn't care about this cuz this is MIT and they turned me down as an undergraduate so but this is a bigger problem this is uh Logan Airport Terminal A and they've got the control layer the water air and Vapor control layer but it's vapor closed and they ate the sweater the insulation needed to be on the outside and it would have been a trivial thing to do it during construction it wasn't like they were short of money right but they made the project green by putting PV panels on the parking garage that was a cynical comment that okay you got it all right draw a map then then I'm going to close on this because um every now and then something magnificent happens this is a smithonian this is the museum for the Native American and you see the capital Dome behind it and this is a one of the most beautiful buildings I've ever seen it's been done for a couple of years but you need to go have a look at it and and they did it right they had a a structure with concrete and and and and block a continuous water control air control and Vapor control air on the outside of it they had rigid insulation an air gap and a cladding they did it beautiful I mean I mean it takes your breath away to see a stunningly beautiful building that's going to stand the test of time that's Ultra energy efficient and so the message is don't do stupid things don't give up on beauty follow the physics and we'll be in all in good shape thank you [Music]

Channel: USACEsustainability

Views: 40,852

Keywords: Module, 1, Lstiburek

Id: d_BaIhq8Avk

Length: 62min 49sec (3769 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 27 2012