2012 » Archives for April 2012

Archives for April 2012

Getting DIRTTy in Chicago

April 24, 2012 Joseph Maguire

Last week’s SERF Chicago party celebrating our newest regional office was a raging success.

Some 300 guests gathered at the Green Learning Center of our hosts, DIRTT (that’s Doing It Right This Time for the uninitiated) on the Chicago River next to the Merchandise Mart.

We ate, drank and made merry while celebrating three new Windy City certifications including DIRTT’s space (the first of our new certification for office suites), Norcon Construction’s clever adaptive reuse of an old storage facility on the west side, and 330 N. Wabash—formerly the IBM Building and soon to be the AMA (American Medical Association) Plaza.

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Prescriptive Approach to Energy Efficiency–a Cost Effective Alternative

April 11, 2012 Stan Samuel

Energy efficiency the most important factor defining a High Performance Building. There are two paths to increase a building’s energy efficiency in relation to a “brown building”. You  could use a performance-based approach in which a baseline energy consumption is established and the building is designed to reduce energy consumption below that baseline.

Alternatively, you could use a prescriptive approach to attain compliance under which the building is designed to meet the requirements of an existing prescriptive standard. Typical examples of such standards are ASHRAE 90.1 and the International Energy Conservation Code (IECC).

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