Julian Watt, from LPA Inc. sat down for a conversation with Ladan Ghobad, Assoc. AIA, AIACV COTE Member on June 23rd, 2021, for the Urgency of Now article series. The transcript below has been edited for clarity. Listen to the whole interview, here.
Hello everyone, my name is Ladan Ghobad. I am the CEO and Founder of a sustainable design consulting firm called ENERlite consulting in Sacramento. Today on behalf of the AIA Central Valley, I will talk to Julian Watt, the associate principal and studio leader at LPA, a local champion here in Sacramento in high-performance building design.
In 2020, LPA won the AIA COTE Top Ten award, the industry’s most prestigious honor for high-performance sustainable design. AIA has defined 10 principles of design excellence. Would you please briefly talk about them, their value in your projects, priority in the design process, and the role of building performance among other design principles?
I think the real strength in the AIA Design Excellence principles is that they are well-rounded and driven by the talent of the whole design team, and not just limited to architects. As a firm, LPA addresses the framework in our projects’ goal setting. We structure our goals into four key categories: performance, user experience; health and wellness, and community. We structure these goals during the SD phase as a key part of our design narratives. They are then tracked through the design process to the project completion. The projects are reviewed at each phase and the project team are held accountable to the project goals. Regarding priority, there isn’t any one Design Principle that has priority over another. Like any design, you can be inspired to start off in one particular aspect, and head down a path and start investigating around others at the same time.
AIA 2030 Commitment requires reduction of predicted EUI in buildings and elimination of fossil fuel energy consumption by 2030. LPA was able to meet the 2030 commitment and it reached 70% energy consumption reduction in 2019 for the second year in a row and this supported LPA being awarded the 2021 AIA California Firm Award. Could you tell us some major factors that contribute to LPA’s success?
The key factor was making the 2030 Commitment an important top-down goal for the firm, directed by our chairperson Dan Heinfeld and CEO Wendy Rogers. It then became a requirement for all of our projects to challenge and respond to. Have the direction from the highest level of leadership puts a laser focus on things and enables the whole firm to move in the same direction. This direction enabled the expansion of our LPA team to incorporate energy modelers to support each project and inform the design at the earliest opportunity.
It’s important to make sure those energy models are being used as design tools and not something that is just for compliance. Because if it is just compliance, then it is too late as the design is complete by that point.
Based on your experience working in various architecture firms, what do you think are some barriers to make the 2030 commitment and meet the goals?
There are plenty of firms that have committed to the 2030 Challenge but haven’t made that move from the top down that then leads to implementing changes to achieve the Challenge. It’s not easy which is why there have been fewer firms complying.
The other factor is that LPA is an integrated design firm with all in-house disciplines. The driver is not only from architects but also from the whole integrated design firm of engineers. Having that resource on tap from the beginning of the project and to ideate your opportunities for each project is crucial. For those firms without a fully integrated team, it is important to build your own ‘go-to’ team of engineers and designers that you trust, and you have validated their lateral thinking and design skills. At my last firm I was forever buying coffees and beer for like-minded structural and mechanical engineers.
And how do you create a balance between high quality and budget efficiency during the design process?
There is always a budget challenge and that is why budget is one of the key linchpins. With any project you still need to pick your moments where the budget can be more concentrated and create a greater effect. This could be in the materiality of the building, or the systems selected that have a higher upfront cost but have a greater impact on the life-cycle cost of the building and overall energy reduction.
Something that I’m focused on is trying to remove layers, we have added many layers to our buildings over time creating complicated composites where each layer adds to the building cost.
Could you please provide an example?
One is to model the building for thermal mass, once the exterior concrete walls are 10-12” then you have the option to not insulate the interior or exterior of that form. Insulation will improve the performance. The wall then operates as external and internal skin in one. The optimum is a sandwich panel, 6” external concrete panel, 4” insulation, 6” internal panel, no other finishes. The challenge then is to develop a tidy reticulation strategy for the services that excludes any being buried in these perimeter walls. So, there are examples like this that peel back the layers and achieve your energy efficiencies while exposing the interior concrete finish to support regulating the interior environment. But you have to realize that each decision you make is going to have different tradeoffs.
I want to ask about your previous experience working as an architect in different countries. Does sustainability mean different things to people and architecture firms in different parts of the world based on your experience?
It changes depending on the country, and in response to the climate; for the most part, it is unfortunately designed by the legislated minimum, and it comes to what those code minimums are in each location. Those codes were more stringent in the UK than New Zealand, and the requirements of Germany were even more advanced than in the UK. I remember battling for 2” of under-slab insulation in New Zealand while my transport work in London had over 4” of under-slab insulation just to meet the code minimum.
So now that we talked about different countries, it just reminded me of the traditional architecture of Iran, the country that I come from, and sustainable design in those old buildings. So, I want to ask you if you think that the computer-aided design process that uses modeling tools in architectural practice has taken away some qualities of traditional architecture?
I believe computer-aided design has improved the efficiency and speed of project delivery. We can make mistakes and revise them faster than before. Computer modeling does not mean avoiding paper and pen for drawing and generating ideas. Both are complementary elements for creating a good design.
I think there is still a lot more to learn from the traditional passive buildings and even the ones in the more recent past. In the buildings that you described as letter buildings, with letter shapes, the exterior walls were not terribly far away, because they were relying on the daylight and natural ventilation from the exterior windows; there was no HVAC and mechanical system to enable those buildings to operate. We have to re-learn from traditional architecture because we’ve become so accustomed to relying on artificial light and mechanical systems to enable these deep plan floorplates to actually work.
And as the last question, I would like to ask you or how you feel about the future of architecture in Sacramento? And what are the trends and some changes that are happening in architecture today, especially here local to Sacramento?
There is real energy in Sacramento that perhaps has not been there before. I say this through perception as opposed to experience because I arrived at the beginning of 2017, so I am relatively new. In terms of going forward, I think it’s fantastic because there is that energy within the community, not just with the design community, but within the development community. It is great how developers talk about their developments; how they curate the program and subsequent tenants to support the sustainability of the development taking into account what else is happening in the neighborhood. This is leading to an increased richness in the urban fabric of Sacramento. It’s also far more advanced than the conversations I used to have with developers in other countries. There is also significant development led by the State in new buildings and in the repositioning of their building stock, all of which leads to the improvement of Sacramento’s downtown.
Thank you so much for your time; I really enjoyed the conversation.
To read the rest of the articles in the Urgency of Now series, visit www.aiacv.org/cote