First, a point of clarification: as far as I know, the first book entitled Radical Simplicity (Small Footprints on a Finite Earth) was written by Jim Merkel and published in 2003. I like your term radical sufficiency even better.
Here's one comparison of simple vs. complex: I was the environmental building consultant on the MIT Sloan School building by Moore Rubell Yudell close to 20 years ago. We set stringent performance metrics, including peak heating and cooling demand on the central utilities. On a day that exceeded design conditions, the cooling demand was 1,100 sf/ton (a bit under 35W/sm). About 1/3 of a typical new building. I can't link images, but that building is mostly punched openings and simple volumes, and even the glazed end towers are mostly highly insulated spandrel. Another building on campus built not long before by Gehry Partners is more in the "look at me" spirit of the Ingels' projects you've written about (though without loveliness in my eye) and with a similar building program, the Gehry project used 2.7 times as much energy per sf as the Sloan building. And it leaks.
I'm an engineer. To me, one signifier of a talented architect is the ability to make a box look good. In NYC Chris Benedict is one such architect. At the smaller scale of wood-frame affordable multi-family housing I'm working with Union Studio (Providence RI) on several projects here on Martha's Vineyard, where construction costs are nutz. At the outset of our first project I drew the simplest high performance wall section I know how to do and we agreed on that as the basis of design. Roof trusses with blown-in cellulose mean no mechanicals in the attics - simplicity often imposes more, not fewer, design challenges. The six unit buildings are two rectangles joined by an entry/stair element. Twelve corners total. Maybe the housing trust will be able to afford to build these.
There was also a 2005 book "radical simplicity" by Dan Price. It's why I prefer the term radical sufficiency as well, but I think for building form "radical simplicity" as Nick Grant defined it makes sense.
The Gehry building was a disaster "MIT’s lawsuit cited design and construction failures in the building. These included masonry cracking and poor drainage in the amphitheater; “mold growth at various locations on the brick exterior vertical elevations”; “persistent leaks” throughout the building; and sliding ice and snow." Bjarke buildings are the same.
Chris Benedict is the OG of energy-efficient housing! I saw her speak a couple decades ago and still think about that talk. Her expertise and sheer enthusiasm was super inspiring.
I remember when the Gehry MIT building was finished. It couldn't not leak. Whenever I see a big building, I always look to see if the windows can be washed easily. If not, it's usually not a good building.
An excellent apartment building. The only things I would change is that if we're building a 3 bed 1 bath today, the shower and toilet would be in separate rooms and each bedroom would have its own sink and medicine cabinet. One person taking a shower should not block someone else from brushing their teeth or using the toilet.
Bravo! This is an example of truly great design applied to affordable housing, with the emphasis on both design AND affordability. As someone involved in housing production for more than 30 years, I can see here a building that should be relatively low cost to build (for a mid rise housing tower), low cost to operate, AND low cost to maintain over time. There should be some kind of award for an architectural team with the bravery and audacity to put an 18% window to wall ratio on a midrise building in this day and age of glass towers and "Look at me!" buildings. I raise a toast!
Not sure what it’s like in other cities, but here in Seattle articulation of façades is written into the zoning code and is particularly fancied by Design Review Boards. The required solutions often involve varied materials in the same wall plane as well as numerous bumps and recesses.
Good to see Terry and David’s firm doing good work. (Are they still involved?)
“We need less Bjarke.” Truer words were never spoken. 18% window-wall ratio is SERIOUS. I did the conversion of EUI and came up with 35, which is not all that impressive. Unless my calc is wrong - I based it on 110 kWh/m2 converted to kBtu/sf, which is how we study it. Our net-zero projects (in school) aim more for the low 20s. What gives, I wonder?
Thanks for a fascinating dive into this project. My students are designing multi-family housing this semester, so I sent the article to them. The unit plans are fascinating, and I do have a few critiques. . .
Julie, I noticed the EUI of 35 as well. I think it's sometimes tricky to compare EUI numbers across building types and scales. The Living Building we did at Hampshire College (Kern Center) houses Admissions, some classrooms, and is a student center, so it's open 90 hours/week. It's bound to have an EUI higher than an office building (Kern was about EUI23 last time I checked.) A group of small affordable single family homes we did here on MV close to 15 years ago have an average EUI of about 25. It seems odd that a high rise MF building would be higher, but there are more parasitics (elevators; moving heating cooling and DHW around) and cooling loads tend to be higher. Occupant density is higher. So I don't know what a class-leading EUI is for high rise MF. Be careful not to mistake modeling for actual data too!!! I have looked at buildings where usage is >4X energy model :-)
I just looked at our own EUI (it's not a figure I keep track of as much in houses, but I should!) 1,300 sf house, two people plus a dog, coastal NE climate. It's a deep energy retrofit (though not as low embodied carbon as I'd like!) so not Passive House level, but the EUI is just under 10. With the addition a few years ago of an electric car we are now annually net zero (used to be net positive). Last year the 4.76 kW PV system made 99% of the energy used by house + EV.
Finally - from my monitoring of houses that are superinsulated and have heat pump water heaters I have learned that the energy use which is dependent on occupant choices and behavior dominates. We're abstemious in usage of plug loads/lights/appliances and yet they represent 54% of our usage. In the group of affordable homes I mentioned above, even though they have electric water heaters (built just before heat pump water heaters), the plugs/lights/appliance portion of total usage is the largest. Heating and cooling in these houses is often 20-25% of the total. My friend Andy Shapiro said, "there are no net zero houses, only net zero families."
Mark, this gets into one of the key problems I've had with EUI as a metric. It disregards the occupancy factor and basically "rewards' the design of buildings designed for lower density / lower intensity use. The bigger the building, with the fewer the people, the better (lower) the EUI. Some of our affordable housing clients are operating buildings at EUIs of 15-25, but with high density of occupants. Yet the standards, and quite often the incentives that follow from meeting those standards, are not acknowledging the reality of per capita energy usage. It would be helpful if there was a way to factor in occupancy to the metrics, and ultimately into the standards and the incentives.
Form should always follow function. My least favorite famous house architect is Frank Lloyd Wright. His house leak, settle, fall apart without expensive maintenance. They do look.nice, though.
From a letter to the Financial Times a few years ago:
Frank Lloyd Wright’s roofs, for moist example, often leaked from day one; Wright’s response was usually to utter some dismissive but quotable remark (to a client irked by raindrops falling on his head he said imperiously: “Move your chair”). The architect Philip Johnson called Wright’s famous Fallingwater “a seventeen-bucket house” (and owned that his own renowned Glass House was a six-bucket leaker). Indeed, the mistress of one Wright house, busily spacing buckets about her floors, was heard to say: “This is what happens when you leave a work of art out in the rain.”
First, a point of clarification: as far as I know, the first book entitled Radical Simplicity (Small Footprints on a Finite Earth) was written by Jim Merkel and published in 2003. I like your term radical sufficiency even better.
Here's one comparison of simple vs. complex: I was the environmental building consultant on the MIT Sloan School building by Moore Rubell Yudell close to 20 years ago. We set stringent performance metrics, including peak heating and cooling demand on the central utilities. On a day that exceeded design conditions, the cooling demand was 1,100 sf/ton (a bit under 35W/sm). About 1/3 of a typical new building. I can't link images, but that building is mostly punched openings and simple volumes, and even the glazed end towers are mostly highly insulated spandrel. Another building on campus built not long before by Gehry Partners is more in the "look at me" spirit of the Ingels' projects you've written about (though without loveliness in my eye) and with a similar building program, the Gehry project used 2.7 times as much energy per sf as the Sloan building. And it leaks.
I'm an engineer. To me, one signifier of a talented architect is the ability to make a box look good. In NYC Chris Benedict is one such architect. At the smaller scale of wood-frame affordable multi-family housing I'm working with Union Studio (Providence RI) on several projects here on Martha's Vineyard, where construction costs are nutz. At the outset of our first project I drew the simplest high performance wall section I know how to do and we agreed on that as the basis of design. Roof trusses with blown-in cellulose mean no mechanicals in the attics - simplicity often imposes more, not fewer, design challenges. The six unit buildings are two rectangles joined by an entry/stair element. Twelve corners total. Maybe the housing trust will be able to afford to build these.
There was also a 2005 book "radical simplicity" by Dan Price. It's why I prefer the term radical sufficiency as well, but I think for building form "radical simplicity" as Nick Grant defined it makes sense.
The Gehry building was a disaster "MIT’s lawsuit cited design and construction failures in the building. These included masonry cracking and poor drainage in the amphitheater; “mold growth at various locations on the brick exterior vertical elevations”; “persistent leaks” throughout the building; and sliding ice and snow." Bjarke buildings are the same.
Chris Benedict is the OG of energy-efficient housing! I saw her speak a couple decades ago and still think about that talk. Her expertise and sheer enthusiasm was super inspiring.
I remember when the Gehry MIT building was finished. It couldn't not leak. Whenever I see a big building, I always look to see if the windows can be washed easily. If not, it's usually not a good building.
An excellent apartment building. The only things I would change is that if we're building a 3 bed 1 bath today, the shower and toilet would be in separate rooms and each bedroom would have its own sink and medicine cabinet. One person taking a shower should not block someone else from brushing their teeth or using the toilet.
Bravo! This is an example of truly great design applied to affordable housing, with the emphasis on both design AND affordability. As someone involved in housing production for more than 30 years, I can see here a building that should be relatively low cost to build (for a mid rise housing tower), low cost to operate, AND low cost to maintain over time. There should be some kind of award for an architectural team with the bravery and audacity to put an 18% window to wall ratio on a midrise building in this day and age of glass towers and "Look at me!" buildings. I raise a toast!
“Sample Board Modernism”! 😂
Not sure what it’s like in other cities, but here in Seattle articulation of façades is written into the zoning code and is particularly fancied by Design Review Boards. The required solutions often involve varied materials in the same wall plane as well as numerous bumps and recesses.
Good to see Terry and David’s firm doing good work. (Are they still involved?)
Terry is totally retired, David is still on the people page.
Love the geothermal and heat recovery passive solar. Form follows function practical sized rooms and no floor to ceiling windows
“We need less Bjarke.” Truer words were never spoken. 18% window-wall ratio is SERIOUS. I did the conversion of EUI and came up with 35, which is not all that impressive. Unless my calc is wrong - I based it on 110 kWh/m2 converted to kBtu/sf, which is how we study it. Our net-zero projects (in school) aim more for the low 20s. What gives, I wonder?
Thanks for a fascinating dive into this project. My students are designing multi-family housing this semester, so I sent the article to them. The unit plans are fascinating, and I do have a few critiques. . .
Julie, I noticed the EUI of 35 as well. I think it's sometimes tricky to compare EUI numbers across building types and scales. The Living Building we did at Hampshire College (Kern Center) houses Admissions, some classrooms, and is a student center, so it's open 90 hours/week. It's bound to have an EUI higher than an office building (Kern was about EUI23 last time I checked.) A group of small affordable single family homes we did here on MV close to 15 years ago have an average EUI of about 25. It seems odd that a high rise MF building would be higher, but there are more parasitics (elevators; moving heating cooling and DHW around) and cooling loads tend to be higher. Occupant density is higher. So I don't know what a class-leading EUI is for high rise MF. Be careful not to mistake modeling for actual data too!!! I have looked at buildings where usage is >4X energy model :-)
I just looked at our own EUI (it's not a figure I keep track of as much in houses, but I should!) 1,300 sf house, two people plus a dog, coastal NE climate. It's a deep energy retrofit (though not as low embodied carbon as I'd like!) so not Passive House level, but the EUI is just under 10. With the addition a few years ago of an electric car we are now annually net zero (used to be net positive). Last year the 4.76 kW PV system made 99% of the energy used by house + EV.
Finally - from my monitoring of houses that are superinsulated and have heat pump water heaters I have learned that the energy use which is dependent on occupant choices and behavior dominates. We're abstemious in usage of plug loads/lights/appliances and yet they represent 54% of our usage. In the group of affordable homes I mentioned above, even though they have electric water heaters (built just before heat pump water heaters), the plugs/lights/appliance portion of total usage is the largest. Heating and cooling in these houses is often 20-25% of the total. My friend Andy Shapiro said, "there are no net zero houses, only net zero families."
Mark, this gets into one of the key problems I've had with EUI as a metric. It disregards the occupancy factor and basically "rewards' the design of buildings designed for lower density / lower intensity use. The bigger the building, with the fewer the people, the better (lower) the EUI. Some of our affordable housing clients are operating buildings at EUIs of 15-25, but with high density of occupants. Yet the standards, and quite often the incentives that follow from meeting those standards, are not acknowledging the reality of per capita energy usage. It would be helpful if there was a way to factor in occupancy to the metrics, and ultimately into the standards and the incentives.
Form should always follow function. My least favorite famous house architect is Frank Lloyd Wright. His house leak, settle, fall apart without expensive maintenance. They do look.nice, though.
From a letter to the Financial Times a few years ago:
Frank Lloyd Wright’s roofs, for moist example, often leaked from day one; Wright’s response was usually to utter some dismissive but quotable remark (to a client irked by raindrops falling on his head he said imperiously: “Move your chair”). The architect Philip Johnson called Wright’s famous Fallingwater “a seventeen-bucket house” (and owned that his own renowned Glass House was a six-bucket leaker). Indeed, the mistress of one Wright house, busily spacing buckets about her floors, was heard to say: “This is what happens when you leave a work of art out in the rain.”
I've heard it this way:
Upon complaining to FLW that the roof of her house leaked, he replied, "that's how you know it's a roof, madam."