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commentLooking Back and Moving Forward
Postoccupancy evaluations offer a systematic process for assessing completed projects, pointing the way to better-performing buildings.
After finalizing the protocol last year, the BPE team now hopes to develop a cumulative index that would allow this comparison of buildings, says Rosamund Hyde, a Stantec senior research engineer and manager of the Ecosmart BPE project. The advantage of such a standardized evaluation process is that it would allow the benchmarking of one building against others using the same protocol, she points out.
Stantec will soon wrap up the evaluation of one of its own projects, a 40,000-square-foot learning center at the Vancouver Aquarium designed in collaboration with local architect Clive Grout and completed in late 2006. The building, known as Aquaquest, includes laboratory space for school children, a gallery, a theater, and administrative offices. The project deploys a number of sustainable strategies, such as thermal mass for heating and cooling, collection of rainwater to flush toilets, and a 500-square-foot vertical garden covering one of its exterior walls. It is targeting a Gold rating under the Canadian LEED system.
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The full BPE of Aquaquest, including the Web-based survey, the energy- and water-use analysis, and the physical diagnostics, will cost Stantec about C$25,000, according to Richter, who in addition to helping implement the project’s evaluation, was also a member of the design team. But Stantec anticipates that the value of the information will be enormous. “This evaluation [process] provides feedback that most building owners and design teams can only guess at,” says Richter. “Not doing postoccupancy building evaluation is like flying blind.”
