Broadcast: Ecologics at Steven Holl Architecture 1992-2020

hello everyone I just like to do a quick welcome to the Columbia G SAP advanced studio six faculty projects talks session so this is a type of session that's part of our series of studio wide events and it's meant to explore connections between professors work in their offices and the studio topics in that professors exact studio and studio wide topics more specifically in recent semesters we've been exploring the themes of architecture and environments on the one hand and maybe more in a more focused way climate change at the building scale and in this particular talk I think we're gonna see some great examples of that kind of work and that kind of thinking from some people who you know well so Steven Holl of Steven Holl architects and Matias Schuler of trans solar need no introduction in this school in this context and I'm very happy to welcome them to you know generously give us their time for this lecture entitled ecologic saat Steven Holl architects 1992 to 2020 so welcome Steven and 40s thank you we have a small video Matias is coming from Stuttgart and it's what time is it there - dude it's too late 11:30 in the orient so I meet he's going to the well for us and I have a four-minute video it shows you where this is coming from and then we would we can start the top let's let's start with that four-minute video if we can play that showing you made this video for the Italians in a couple of architecture schools one of what we're doing at this moment this is my watercolor Hut right at the edge of Round Lake looking at a twenty nine acre springfed Lake in the woods this is the little tesseract edition of this house from 1952 was made in 2001 and that's my studio in the center with that big window that looks out and here in the foreground is the podium 40 spaced poets readings school for underprivileged teenagers in Korea competition it's due in about four weeks so I'm in the middle of doing drawings for this here you can see in watercolors and the way I work is I I draw on these five by seven watercolor pads and then we I take a picture of them and send them to my team in Beijing and my team in New York and we're very happy to be working on this competition we also have a project that went back on site and Shanghai this is a Health Center in a cultural center in Shanghai people were back on site I'm a construction site so it's very exciting a project going on and we're doing a prison initiative pavilion for bar right over here you can see some models these are some of the study models and I just presented this virtually last week to Leon Botstein the president and the trustees at Bard this is a little prison initiative pavilion that will also have an exhibition space and and a public event space at Montgomery place right near Rhinebeck so one of the great things about working up here as I do everything you can see the wonderful view from my table and work 5x7 water park pads there's the Korea project and I work on these and then we send them to the team and then they send back three-dimensional views you can see the projects that are going on in our office the Franklin & Marshall Fine Arts Building that site has been delayed because of the virus the Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton that site is on delay because of the virus the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston I carbon x and chen gen is back on site and other construction that's our archive building here which has just been finished Taiwan necropolis is back under construction this is the building I showed you earlier the health center and a cultural center in Shanghai is back under construction these are competitions that we recently lost this is building of it is not on hold right now we're also working on the Dublin creative Design Centre in Dublin Ireland and a concert hall that we won in Ostrava Czech Republic those projects are going on because they have schedules and everything is being done online so the people are working in teams working very well with the zoom and we have weekly meetings so all of our deadlines have not been postponed because of the crisis so those things are going on so we're very fortunate to have a global operation where some things are in Asia and are coming back on and other things are in Europe and they're in certain let's say categories but I think it's also a time of and I've been reading for example the poems of Paul sent on or rather dark figure but I think the poetry is is appropriate or even the homage to Robert Frost but Joseph Brodsky or Rilke Brook is always great and time of rethinking things and I think that's a kind of time we're in são Mateus we're so glad that you're joining us and what I was hoping is that like on many of these is a lot of technical we're gonna do quite a number of projects quite rapidly I think he should be taking 30 minutes I just wanted to read something that I wrote this morning like a logic is it fine then in the bracket environmental architectural work since 1998 and we have pushed these projects ecologically resisting all fossil fuels in our current crisis we must not forget the fight for our global climate perhaps we are inside the moment of a revolution like action if the French Revolution according to Hegel for the first time man dared to turn himself upside down to stand on his head and on thaw and to build reality according to it now its nature it's a natural history yet we need to wake up to and Hannah Arendt was modern philosophy starting with Hagel has to come to the strange illusion that man in distinction from all other things has created himself and I like what are both part the composer said to a Spanish newspaper I think it was yesterday the coronavirus has shown us that humanity is a single organism and he said in a way it has sent us all back to the first grade anyway I will go now chronologic a reverse chronology the projects get bigger and bigger of course this is just according to the chronology this is just just finished and it's architectural archive and research library and we built based on an idea of bracketing which means it threads through the trees and we had to build this super economically so I acted as the engineer the architect and I'm sorry to say Matias I was the HVAC engineer you know I decided on a single well 500 feet deep which was a closed loop I knew where a bundle of fingers takes the temperature and it's working but I took all the lessons we learned in the ex of in-house the radiant concrete floor saw six inches on center with the correct insulation I'm very proud to say that this building is performing brilliantly on a single well it was it was about 10 degrees outside and it was like 72 degrees inside the walls are super insulated is the minimum number of windows Velux skylights were donated by the deluxe corporation but you see that concrete radiant floor is writing on an installation slab and once that building heats up the geothermal well maintains the heat so here in Rhinebeck also in Princeton or doing the rooms the Commons for the Advanced Study this is a place where Einstein served his last ten years it's a very important building David Rubenstein donated and it was based on the concept of space curves the notion of a space that is made up of two intersecting curves so the whole pavilion then is gypte more heated and cooled with 20 wells right matthias 2120 well yes and matthias led this one all the way through and it's been a little bit delayed right now due to our problem with the fact that it's going to be opening probably in about six months there you see the inside from a couple of weeks ago and this is a very prominent position it's on Einstein Drive so in a way then it's merging with the landscape and that will redefine that entrance to the Institute for Advanced Studies I'm very honored to have won this and against some very important other architects there you can see a diagram of Matias it's work do you want to say anything to that diagram Matias yeah it exactly shows the connection on one side we see the closed loop of the geothermal system and we connect to improve the efficiency of the heat pump it would radiant system so we have radiant floors for heating and cooling because with the lowest heating temperature and the highest cooling temperature we can serve the rules by this radiant system and I think that's quite important that you always connect the source to the related system well there's a little a drama of you from a few a few weeks ago this is the Kennedy Center in fact if you go on Instagram today you'll see we just posted a new film of this I think it's about how long is that for about 10 minutes anyway this was a really exciting competition to win against I won't name the names and our concept was to instead of adding on to the 1972 building against it to go underground and link everything by but in the design process we couldn't float the pavilion from our competition entry that we we proposed to float in the Potomac River and I made this sketch and I made this sketch and I had to show this you can see now that at the bottom of the river Pavilion is up on ground but we got a bridge connecting over over the highway so we got our River Riverside connection and I made this I made this sketch and Deborah Deborah rather the director of the museum said you have to speak to the main donor David Rubenstein and I said okay and he came at 9:30 one morning and I showed him the sketches that I had to move this up on but great and but it's gonna be served below but another good the thing is all three of these buildings gonna work better environmentally and and then David said all right we'll do it what else do you need anything else I said well if you want the great details that I like to do I need another twelve million dollars and he said okay and he left that's a great client by the way and and this is these are these are you wanna say something about this Mateus yeah I think in this case what is quite interesting we do a geothermal system but here's well connecting it to the river which is as well at the moment serving the the existing museum so it's kind of the the river was always the source of the energy for the existing was new mainly kind of connected it to the town to serve now the extension and as I said you can see a much more thorough film just released about the whole concept of the building these are the glissando curves and indicate the building is connected down below and that's the structural concrete I'm a I'm a student of Kenneth Trent and I believe that structure ought to have an expression in the architecture and this one is certainly all the structures expressed by quite structural concrete and in the interior we developed a new kind of concrete these are the bearing walls for though holding up the landscape above but we developed this acoustic crinkle concrete and Derek Ambrose was doing the experiments that we made these Robert forms but the depth of these the the concrete allows for that kind of amazing acoustic vibration in that auditorium and it's a larger screen roof I think in Washington DC and you see the position here in the diagram of the geothermal wells Reece Rd had water in the pools yeah and I think as well a big advantage putting most of the program video crown is this well you are kind of buffering between the warmer inside and the outside because yeah don't lose energy in winter against a very cold outside or in some gain energy from the hot outside because you have buffered in between by the town okay this is the Institute for contemporary art at Richmond Virginia there was a competition we won and this was a very conservative town you know Richmond so we were very surprised how well they supported our project they were great clients and it's at the biggest intersection in Richmond the most busy intersection so we wanted to sort of intersection in front of the building to express that torsion and that movement of the intersection and then we thought about its program which is a contemporary art and we decided to make forking galleries and I said that there today instead of art being a kind of grand narrative like it was during Abstract Expressionism or like it was during conceptual art even there is no grand narrative in art today it's a kind of forking time where someone working in sculpture like Richard Serra or someone working in video like David Acton of someone painting like like Bryce Martin or anyone I mean the idea is that 14-time is where we are so that the the building kind of folds on the plain of the present but this was also a big stretch because they've never done geothermal wells and in Richmond Virginia mattias do you want to say something about this you know okay we were not on this but I think it's it's clear that in this more that's call it quantitative parts it's a battle in a sorry and I think Stephen in this case you are quite a convincing supporter for us engineers if big if the I detect is convinced this and Stephen in one project we will see later even Stephen even put it put it in his money to convince a crime though we we had a very great client there were a lot of resistance people on the various you know very easy client groups but the main client doctors and it's working perfectly by the way that's the system of forty wells is working perfectly everyone who wants to come and see the basement and see how this system works there's just some views there's the galleries of 14-time galleries there's the diagram bells going off and so they're not under the building they can be accessing the garden and the green roof and a tree and it really seems and LEED Platinum the highest least there's recycled water at the water garden at the cafe this is the meet this is the university side the building has two fronts like a Janus figure this is the main entrance from the University at the Lewis Center for Arts in Princeton a competition we won I think in 2007 it took ten years to build this because the moving of the Dickey Train and a lot of other things happening in the local town and the fighting of the university in the town but finally due to a great client a great president we've been a great a great donor and Peter Lewis we we got this through so the TSU order who were involved on this one right now only were we were watching it from outside okay so basically it's a it's a form below of water garden connects the three buildings the dance pavilion there there each one has her own idea a thing within a think the dance pavilion embedded for the poetry and literature and suspended the individual practice rooms suspended over the collective collective of the orchestral practice Hall and it's a LEED Silver building it has a hundred and forty wells recycled water cooled green roofs by performance envelope and it was a great find no no yeah II ran this one and it was a long process but now everybody's very happy with the project and as it started to unfold they invited us to do all the interior furnishings so we did carpet designs and and and there's the Welles diagram so in this case we had a very constricted site and a lot of the wells are practically there under the parts of the building which is fine yeah which is fine because to me you don't need to access this well you don't write you don't read I mean that's a common misunderstanding that you really don't need any maintenance on these things the maintenance is only on the water furnace right in the teeth right you may exchange the heat pump after 20 years but in many of them well Kenny's need run for fifty eighteen hundred years right and there you see the suspended practice rooms rented on steel rods in tension over the orchestral practice room and this is a house which I convinced this client who has too much money to make it totally a green a green building so it has all green roofs we call it planar villa it's been a and has a kind of texture that's a stark rule boundary not on the outside and let you weren't involved in this one either right no no so it went on for a long a long time and about 10 years in fact it starts in oh seven it has 44 geothermal wells and green multi performance clear and translucent and below the thermal mass construction reduces and again the client allowed us to do the furniture the cab mitrice all the details which I love to do in architecture I think that the the light and the space but then also the detail there you see the diagram of the 44 geothermal wells and that's the landscape we also work with we did the main landscape working with a colander there's a beautiful condition on the edge of the Hudson River this is our guest mouth at tea space it's a 915 square foot house with a single geothermal well but this one is open loop and there's also a video about this that you can see if you are interested in the concept but it's a recycled glass facade a solar flex panel loop a natural unfinished locally sourced wood of diaphragm construction and 3d cord starch-based light fixtures and there you can see all natural wood on the inside and the corn starch pendant lights pictures from our office and Mattias worked on this one right matias right yes yes I think and you know what I decided this is just about a thousand feet away from the archive building and I decided to do one closed move deeper well and I think that was a better decision than what we did here yeah it's it is took me you you learn you know and you improve and depending on the site either an open or closed loop is special we had minute or something like that on the other one once we did anyway we knew we learned that we learned about this but this is working fine but we had to replace the main water furnace I tried to economize we didn't have much money and I opted for a $3,000 unit and it went back last year and put in a $6,000 a lot of harness that cools and heats and that works perfectly now so that makes it much better house this is a this is an chengdu 2012 the largest project I think we've ever done approaches for million square feet offices apartments the main idea is it's that the client was always building a tower and in an office tower in a condominium tower on a big base which was a shopping center closed with floor surfaces and our ideal is to turn that around completely and make an internal urban space a big shape of public space mattias did you work on this yeah we worked on it and I think it was quite a backlog to convince the client to do this 450 512 and luckily this case because this was in the in the times the design during the world's crisis in 2008 I think the decision to do the welds was made already before the crisis came so there I had already dig the world and the system survived even the economical crisis and this also can change the only built work of levius woods my good friend the late levius Woods the pavilion of life which I saved from a difficult client they wanted to take this out and I said wait a minute you can't take this out this is the light fixture that likes the public plaza so they had to build in it there you see the dye around but you this is your diagram right right that's how would I in crime showing as well that building Steven as you did in building around the edge of the site this gives us as well more access to daylight or hold the program in the towers and I think that's as well I mean important point in even keeping a big natural little glass eye in the middle of the site there you see a diagram of the geothermal wells there are three sub basements so you can see this below the construction site when they're doing these wells this is decision you had to make was they were moving fast in the construction so and then that sub basement on top of our sub basement goes on so every every geothermal well is under the building in this there you see how deep the three sub basements you know the shopping centers are also downloading Mateus you want to talk to this one no no I think it's only that this I think this success that we could convince as well the client that we had a quite good reference approaching from link hybrids so we could refer them to a client which was totally convinced about such a geothermal system but moving from from pitching down to Chengdu was quite a because the climate is quite different right because still could convince the clients I think this was great development right there you see the water palm with the skylight that likes the shopping center below a glass in the bottom of each one of those water ponds that are part of our landscape but brings natural light to the shopping center and there's structural frame is exposed that's a earthquake bracing on a concrete frame this is a gallery and house in Seoul Korea opened in 2012 a great client the dayang shipping company mr. tube and it's a project which was very ideal like a little utopia so there's a water garden and it's at the heart of it a house and a guest house and it has geothermal heating and cooling green and recycled water pools and natural light to all spaces even all the spaces below you see the entrance pavilion when you come in the entrance pavilion there standing with that guy standing you could see that main hot oksana on the right on his right and the guest house on his left so you're inside but you're looking at an outside that's looking at two other insides we also did many of the pieces of furniture and selected the furniture so it was a wonderful client and there you see the con in Seoul Korea and here's the project the Mateus was talking about the hurting New Zealand Contemporary Art Project that we won in a competition in 2006 so it went on very rapidly there you see in the to the left a shirt factory turned into a museum once was a shirt factory in the shape of a collar so we had the idea because they had the largest collection of Pierrot Manzini we Manzoni we had the idea of shirt sleeves draped over two boxes as the main constant that would bring light on their curves and at this point holder Reem Berg who picked us in the competition he was a wonderful client but you know at this point we were nearing the breaking ground of the site and and we had just a few months ago in the drawings and he was resisting and resisting the geothermal well system and I said listen Holger I believe in this you know it works this is this is the future no more fossil fuels let's do geothermal I believe in this so much I'm going to give $25,000 out of my feet towards these wells and I was surprised but he took it but but Stephan named it in the opening of the Woodfield right when he opened the museum he was so proud this is the first geothermally heated and cooled Museum in Denmark I think yeah and Denmark is so privileged in respect of geothermal because they have such a high water level so you easily tap down and take it from the ground and reject it so with there are two wells it's not a closed group system it's an open-loop system we take the water out of and reject it further away and we again using similar what we saw in the u.s. project we're using it to condition the floor so it's mainly draw heating and cooling system in combination with a displacement ventilation where the air comes out of the ground out of the floor was groped along the walls to condition the space very carefully where the light comes from the top and there you see natural water ponds that reflect in the landscape we also did the landscape here I worked for four years as a landscape architect at Lawrence Halprin is in San Francisco and I always feel that landscape and architecture are integral you need to think about them right from the beginning this is our linked hybrid project in 2009 this is a project that I think was the first one that Matias and I did together is that right the tears right right yeah so remember it this is like a very ideal project because the client you know this was on the way to the Olympics the 2008 Olympics and they wanted to show off the greenest possible building they could build and and so they went a full distance on anything and then we really had to call Matias to the table and take some risks here because nothing like this had ever been done anywhere trying on you want to talk about it you know I think this was quite as well and Stephan and that says well my compliments that you did you were open we hadn't worked people together that you took the risk and it took me to go with a heretical solution on the other side I think especially in this nice combination of the geothermal system to the water pond in the center to the combination of the external shades so you know certainly it's all end the slab the integrated slab heating and cooling so it was also integrated that for the client at the end it was impossible to take one element out because the whole system would have collapsed and there you see the recycle of water ponds and I was Bruce about that because I thought they might smell because that's all the gray water from departments but there's an ultraviolet zapping tank that takes away all the bacteria from the apartment water before it hits the pond and then there's natural plants of water lilies and all so it doesn't smell at all in this water this whole pond system runs all year round so they ice skate on it in the wintertime there you see the diagram 660 geothermal wells a hundred metres deep no system like that had ever been done in China this was a huge risk what and what is very interesting on this that the client which at the end be totally convinced with this concept from B Iran in all his project right now doing tubes all all over in China so kind of and I think this is like we should spread the news oh we should spread and of the concepts that we convince a client that the client takes us and he builds this project without Steven and without ants but he learned that geothermal connecting to the bounds absolutely makes sense there's a diagram of the gray water system the toilet flushing in the pond water the grey water treatment system and this this is your diagram right exactly so we calculated on we showed visit our like sweet sweet that's we here in cycle because the question was could we in a sari make sure we get all the heat we dumped during summer time into the ground out for the heating in winter so you have to balance the system and therefore the finally the connection to the pond in the center that the pond in spring time we are using the pond to reset our geothermal system to make sure we are starting every year with the same temperature and it doesn't get warmer and warmer because you get a bit more cooling in pitching than heating so even insist such kind of systems you have to think on a balance that you are not getting it out of the balance that you take enough heat out the same amount you're dumping in during summer time there you see the typical installation of the radiant floors and tubes floating over installation very close together and thats your diagram as well right and you see it's not a floor system it's a slab system so it works downwards so it's in the exposed concrete ceiling and then we have a kind of minimum rice floor where we bring as well the basic fresh air into the apartments with a kind of a central system so even the basic ventilation is mechanically but they have all purple windows and I think what you see as well here then there is an external roll of shade and that was a tricky stuff because Stephen has you've seen one of the picture Stephen has this colored windowsills and Stephen insisted that you should even see the color when the shade is down which finally made it possible to install a quite more expensive system from Europe which is then let's the roller shade but it could take the curve to make this little the colored still even visible when the shades are out and it works great and they made so much money on this project it's unbelievable you know that well we will talk about the economics but they are the kind I think this is about Steve but Stephen I think it's still interesting to see that the value of this apartments when they were finished then to today rise by whatever five hundred percent yeah so amazing it's amazing in a certainly the it it was recognized as the greenest residential development in reaching in this push this fall the price right right and here's a project we won right after that project was opened in Jen Jen for the banking center and it was a competition and there's just gives you a diagram of how things work in China there's our model from July and there's the construction side one year later I think so I mean it's unbelievable it was a skyscraper freeing up the ground giving the landscape of to the public the tropical landscape and it was a great client because it's Wang Shu and but I mean I couldn't believe that we got the building permit in ten days you know I mean it was an amazing process and this was all materials designed we want to talk about it the tears yeah in this case as well and took me on one side connecting to the crown but then as well developing this external for this kind of fully exposed facade this kind of perforated Bluebird system with Stephen kind of in the combination in this collaboration between us and Stephen kind of developing what kind of glue was how they should look like how perforated there are what is their tilt to ensure that we are minimizing the external nodes and that was a competition diagram there was a height limit of 35 meters and I simply said let's just ship the building and put it all off at 35 meters so everybody has a view of the sea by the way if this if we ever get a tsunami wave it'll go right under the building but then we give the whole landscape to the public a tropical landscape and there you see is a phone show building you can see it's facing south and the mountains are on the north and the views to the sea though there are all maximized by this design it floats over a tropical landscape that was a concept model but this is a key part and I think this helped us win the competition we had a 60 thousand meters sight but when we raise the whole building over the green we keep 60,000 square meters and we have a green roof adding 15,000 square meters so now we end up with 75,000 square meters of green so this is a really the most green that you could make this is good only be done in the tropical landscape the the it's 20 meters off the ground so the Sun shines just enough to keep all the plants going nothing is in the shadow that won't let it and then the coolness of the shade of the building is something positive when walking around in this landscape inspired by Carlo Berlin Marcus and there's just a diagram of some of the sea breezes coming through now I think this is as well you get the shape by the building and you feel the breeze from the sea which makes you much more comfortable standing in the shadow but being still in the landscape and that's open to the public so they can use that landscape as they wish and the banking company is very generous that way this is your diagram - exactly this was about identifying what facades are getting the biggest node where we need to develop this excellent trading system to ensure that not only buy a high performance class but by this system and in we choose this kind of fixed or kind of total louvers we've seen one of the next slides as the protection from the outside loan right into the louvers the special louvers we design studying palm leaves palm fronds and with exact width of a palm frond and then reversing it punching it into a lumen the light and how the shading ways and it still keeps a high transparency of the building because if you look at like from the Sun from above it's quite shaded if you look from below you can look in between the louvers and that's another advantage we see with the solar system that with this reverse skyscraper Stephen was deciding we get the biggest possible energy collection rule because there is no cell shading in between towers because it's all a horizontal rule yeah and all these interior we're done in bamboo natural without any additive or finishes so that our dependency let's say ecological aspect of the material who used to finish the building this is wall shoes office and there you see a diagram right and you see kind of area this technique the louvers on the facade to minimize the external loads and it was the firstly platinum kind of certified building office building in China yeah first weeks will be platinum building in China they engrave the doors that you go in to the building the front doors with the with that award but they split they spelled platinum wrong that's all right and these are the cores that hold the building up the concrete cores so I use those as light fixtures as well and the glass is suspended off the concrete so all the plumbing chases of services that serve the departments and offices above come down between the core of the concrete core and that glass shade skin therefore they can be serviced and this is this is the first geothermal project that we did the Lake Whitney water purification facility in park and and it was in Hamden Connecticut and it began in 1990 this is a water purification plan and that was my that was my drawing from 1998 and that's what happens in the water per treatment plant rapid mixed location dissolved location clear well ozonation these different aspects then I said should come out into the landscape to become micro to macro expression in the landscape and what happened here was this is very early in the in the geothermal knowledge for us it's our first geothermal project and and by the way that's 22 years ago but it's it's because the client manager was an enlightened engineer and he had done a geothermal well in his own house and it worked so well he convinced this bureaucracy of the water treatment people to do this I mean that was like unbelievable you know and he convinced them of course we were because we want to build everything as green as possible so it's the largest green roof in the state of Connecticut it's got a gravity driven water treatment process that lemonade's pumping and skylight natural skylights to all the plant spaces and there you see Michael Van Valkenburg planting and the building itself is a kind of upside down tiered wall and you see it's sitting in this beautiful now it's really growing up it's been you know a long time this has been open there you see the pathway between the offices and the treatment plant itself and there's an overview of the incredible largest green roof and the state of Connecticut but I was up there a number of years ago and you know when they did this they were a nervous so they put a conservative 88 Wells 11 pumps and every one pump for eight wells and we were up there on a 92 degree day and there were only five or six pumps money so it's completely over designed but anyway that was our first before we even started to work with meteor sure but then he convinced me even after that I mean that we had a great client in this case but I think now would we would in fact I've turned down projects that won't go great green as we want them I think life is too short to be building anything run by fossil fuels I think the TS you have anything you want to say we can take some questions yeah I think let's take some questions okay well great I just want to so this is this is David again I'll just ask the first question and then I'm sure we have some coming in on the chat so if for the audience if you have any questions you can type them into the chat and Lila will help field those questions but I wanted to thank you very much Steven and Mateus for giving this presentation and for me it was a really fascinating context in which to see all of this work together and I really love the way that you know just as you describe the site and the program and the year of the building you're indicating the number of geothermal wells and the depth of the geothermal wells so essentially like elevating geothermal energy to the highest level of the project description that's amazing I wanted to just ask a quick question though what what are some of the challenges and limitations and trade-offs in the use of these kind of geothermal systems you know because you guys are the are the experts now are the challenges in terms of cost or climate or soil is there a trade-off between operational energy and embodied energy and I guess related to that I'm thinking what would it take to get to a critical mass in the adoption of geothermal systems to move the needle on global carbon emissions or like like you're saying Stephen to just like squeeze out fossil fuels forever well I think just one thing for sure it's a no-brainer when you're in a client a climate like New York or Beijing because of the swing you can harvest the the the cool in this in the in it in the summer and it's swings back and you get the warm in the winter so you know it I think people are foolish in these climates the question of it becomes difficult when you get to the southern and tropical climates right matthias it gets a bit it gets a bit more difficult but I think what it's interesting as well that okay a geothermal system relates to the ground our buildings are built on so it's kind of the base of the building is as well base of the energy system and what is clear if we want to get rid of fossil fuels we need to use the Sun now if we use the Sun depending on the time of the year the intensity is different so we need a storage and geothermal systems work as a birth perfect buffer is even described is that surplus heat in winter we are dumping down improving the efficiency and reducing the urban heat island because we are not dumping the heat into our neighborhood we are dumping it into the ground and we take it out with the delay in six months later to heat our buildings right so the name the main the main challenge is just convincing you know not very intelligent clients that that's what they should do yeah and it is one of the biggest problems we have in humanity are very small minds in high places right now right in anyway it's about and it's about cost in its gear that compared to the gas boiler the investment costs are much higher but if you account over the lifetime of the building then [Music] yeah that makes sense and so do you bring those arguments Stephen in addition to your your act of persuasion them insistence and contributing your own money that's brilliant but do you bring that up the kind of lifecycle cost you say that you know who return on investment in a certain number of years is gonna you know pay for itself it's not it's not even a certain number of years you know I mean for example the the first project I showed you has a single well that cost fourteen thousand dollars we had to go through stone it's 500 feet deep but it heats and cools a three thousand square foot building right next to it is a little house from 1945 it's running on an oil furnace I haven't had a chance to do anything with it in the month of January the oil bill was $1,000 February $900 you know that the archive the electric bill was $40 so that's the difference okay it's a it's immediately experienced in the that they you know the drastic check the difference in cost a monthly cost so you know you don't even have to argue it on a loan like payback over how many years it's immediately evident yeah that that makes that makes so much sense so I see I want to invite again if people are listening you can find it the chat button at the bottom of the zoom window and type in a question if you have a question I think Lyla will be fielding those so just looking here pulling up the chat myself um I I wonder this has probably beyond the scope of this presentation and lecture but I wonder if you if you either of you want to speculate about this moment taking advantage of this moment in terms of you know kind of like what you were saying Stephen it you know small imaginations and in high places I forget how exactly you put it but is there a way we can take advantage of of this moment to help people realize that a little bit more long-term planning and thinking well just terms of our architecture and our whole society everything that we're doing as a society the example of Korea of South Korea the example of Taiwan evident but both have healthy you know huge healthcare systems and hospital systems and both of them have an enormous league lower death rate and virus rate by a factor of a huge a factor I mean somebody did the calculation if we had the same system going on as Taiwan which is 24 million people the amount of deaths in America would be 83 that's how different it is we just need smart people to go out and you know and get on the on the on the fence and push this stupid government out get the right people in that we can get the right systems going I mean we have the knowledge to completely be off fossil fuels right right let's yes we did these diagrams before yes they could completely run without fossil fuels yes yes corrupt government that's in bed with the oil companies you know this is the biggest problem we have is the political problem it's an engineering problem we we have the knowledge now so it's the same the same thing we're facing with the virus you know it's just ignorance and not listening to science but that's not part of our lecture yeah David David coming back to your question I think what we can learn is exactly on one side okay we should be better prepared and carbon emissions which are as well a kind of endangering our house they are an additional argument we should keep in mind it's not only about today's operation cost it's about the health for the future right yeah yeah exactly Oh so yeah Lila I think you can take over your fielding some questions I see them in there so go ahead Lila yeah um so we have a question from James he asks if there are policy or Building Code challenges I mean obviously we're just speaking about sort of like the political will issue but in terms of maybe specifically building codes or specific policies that you would like to address that could be changed can you imagine incentive incentives or specific policies that would encourage more widespread adoption of these types of technologies and practices the tiers can you speak to that yeah I would see okay here incentives can always support a client especially clients which are kind of only looking on the moment investment cost to support it and often it's not the amount of money it's more than if you can argue that there's incentive which means there is a governmental or the institutional proof of this approach which then helps a client do you argue even is in his own circles to convince his own people that this is the right way to go so I think incentives they are often an argument support it's less the amount of money you get by it but it's kind of supporting that we need to step another to take another path just to take that a step further not that you will necessarily know this immediately off of your head but are you aware of the sort of percentage of the use of geothermal in the US versus Europe in terms of like overall adoption okay the northern part and so like state of New York it's pretty good in in respective geothermal furthest furthest hours the systems are not so popular compared to let's compare it okay they are I think Scandinavia is definitely this are the countries with the biggest kind of application of two thermal systems and then Central Europe Denmark Germany in Switzerland a big applications of this so there we I would guess we are probably factor three times more assistance related to the installed facilities then in in the US so by lying and I'm gonna interpret a question that came in and I'm not sure if this is what it means but it was it's basically a question about implications of using geothermal systems in the design of the buildings and I guess what I'm interpreting that to be maybe is Stephen do you think are there cases where because of using geothermal you either had to sacrifice on another design feature you were interested in or it's somehow even enhanced a design feature you were interested in well I've been interested in the environmental issues I since 1970 I was part of the founding member of members of environmental works at the University of Washington so I had to take my own Direction a long time ago and I believe that thermal mass is part of this kind of strategy and so when you look back at the 60s and certain people like buck Minister fuller when he says how much does my building weigh in it's better if it's lighter that work right Mateus that doesn't record thermal therefore even from the beginning I thought that architecture with a substantial mass is better it's more like a flywheel it's it's much better so I kind of that that I think that attitude is in the design work and it's it's about sustaining on a longer on a longer line not just being immediate gratification of of a geometric tectonic yeah and I think okay the integration often in two thermal systems need to water based systems so typically you try to activate the floors or the slabs which then is pramatta clear adducing the air duct system so the distribution system the suspended ceiling the hidden systems which are in the section taking out twenty thirty percent of the height of the spaces are explained yes another way to argue with this is if you have an radiant slab and you have the cost of the well and the water furnace but don't freak if the cost of the ductwork that you've eliminated if you eliminate on that sheet ductwork that's hanging around in the ceilings we don't have any of that with the geothermal I've been able to articulate that basically it's a wash an oil furnace with ductwork hanging are all around is just as expensive as you know an intrical concrete slab with six inches on center of the tubes floating on insulation and their geothermal well yeah that's it that's a great argument I had one other question I wanted to ask about the cooling so is just does that using the geothermal for running water and cooling does that is that a little less common does that present some unique challenges you know to do both of those and normally you know we might think that you know cooling is from above but you know do we it is are they are there new rules where it just makes sense to do both heating and cooling in the floors look at this this guy I would say this depends and it's clear we showed like we're turning out Monsieur more other museums looper laws in France that you can use in even in museums where the most load comes from people and lighting a radiant floor for heating and cooling even when normally you'd say cooling should come from above and heating from below that we totally today in more let's say residential applications reusing the floor for heating and cooling but in offices where typically the internal gains are much higher we are to reusing the slab because they are dominated dominated by cooling and not hunting so depending on the use you're either choose a slab over the floor

Channel: Columbia GSAPP

Views: 6,550

Rating: 4.9726028 out of 5

Keywords: Steven Holl Architecture, Mathias Schuler, David Benjamin, Steven Holl, Columbia GSAPP

Id: e_LE9g5gh-Q

Length: 59min 44sec (3584 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 27 2020