Two Sides to Sustainability & High-performance

High performance can be defined as “a building that integrates and optimizes all major high-performance building attributes, including energy efficiency, durability, life-cycle performance, and occupant productivity”. The term high-performance design typically brings to mind images of a technologically advanced facade and state of the art, energy efficient building systems. Yet durability, life-cycle performance and occupant productivity are equally important attributes of a high-performance building. The new City of Hope Administrative Office Building, which will consolidate campus doctors and their staff, is designed with all these attributes in mind. Situated within a desert landscape, careful consideration is given to the materiality that would ground this project to this Southern California region environmentally and phenomenologically, while also providing a domestic sensibility to the workplace.

This case study will illustrate the evolution of the entire project, from its inception as a Net Zero building, to the current design which is targeting LEED v4 Gold certification. Integral to any successes this project may yield, is the multi-faceted, synchronous design process. A single 3D model serves as the environment in which parametric design evolves simple massing into fully optimized facade into contract documentation. The use of environmental analysis, graphical scripting, daylighting analysis, and real-time visualization temporally co-exist. This dynamic design process allows for rapid development, iteration and validation of high performance concepts as part of this fast track prototype project.

The final design applies aggressive and divergent facade strategies which respond to mitigate or enhance the natural environment. The programmatic and communal goals of the building planning equally influence the exterior appearance of the project and it is this push and pull that is continually informed by analytical process and experiential study. It is this duality that leads to the project’s two visual and functional identities, simultaneously echoing high performance and holistic sustainability.*1