The 2020 Metal Architecture Design Awards had more than 170 entries, and among all of them the judges selected the Kendeda Building for Innovative Sustainable Design at Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, as the Grand Award winner. In the natural tension between high-concept design and sophisticated sustainable technologies, the Kendeda Building pushes sustainable to high concept.
Rethinking conventional design elements to maximize sustainability puts the Kendeda Building in the vanguard and earns it the Grand Award
Photo: Jonathan Hillyer
“It’s beautiful and sustainable,” says judge Rick Harlan Schneider, AIA, APA, LEED AP, ISTUDIO Architects, Washington, D.C. “Your first impression of this building is this light, airy structure that you could only build with steel. You could only do that in metal. Otherwise it gets chunky and clunky.”
Keeping the Pipeline Full
The Kendeda Building is first and foremost a center of education. “Georgia Tech gets a stream of students,” says Brian Court, AIA, partner at Miller Hull Partnership, Seattle, “and it has access to the pipeline of talent. All the future mechanical engineers, structural engineers, architects that are moving through that curriculum are going to have exposure to this building, and the idea and kinds of conversations it’s trying to facilitate. It will do a lot to prime and educate the next generation of people who will be making these decisions. Georgia Tech refers to it as a living laboratory, so we put as many of the systems on display so they could point at them talk about them and see them and track them through the building.”
The school received a grant from the Atlanta-based The Kendeda Fund, which empowers communities across the U.S. and around the globe to develop solutions that increase equity, vibrancy, resourcefulness and resilience, to design and build a Living Building on campus that inspires the next generation of sustainable design leaders. The school held a design competition leading to the fully integrated collaboration between The Miller Hull Partnership, Seattle, and Lord Aeck Sargent, Atlanta.
The building comprises approximately 47,000 square feet of programmable space, of which 37,000 square feet is enclosed and conditioned. There is a public outdoor learning space that includes a 2,618-square-foot outdoor porch area, and a 1,000-square-foot accessible roof deck. There is also a private, 4,347-square-foot rooftop garden with a honeybee apiary, pollinator garden and blueberry orchard. The remaining 1,905 square feet of space is for loading and bike storage.
The project was completed in 2019, and is aiming for LEED Platinum certification, as well as being LBC certified from the International Living Future Institute. Set up for education, research and outreach opportunities, the building features two, 64-person classrooms, two, 24-person class labs, two, 16-person class labs, a 16-person conference room, maker space, a 176-person auditorium, and office space for co-located programs.
The focus on education permeated the material selection as well. “We wanted to let the material shine,” says Court. “With the material expressions—wood, concrete, metal—we can really express their material qualities to the highest levels.”
Judge David Dowell, AIA, el dorado Inc., Kansas City, Mo., adds, “I found the materials are really beautiful.”
Among the materials selected for the project were aluminum panels in three profiles from Morin Corp., a Kingspan Group company, Bristol, Conn., and served as cladding for portions of the exterior. The panels, including a perforated one, were installed by MillerClapperton, Austell, Ga., and had a mill finish to remove chemical paints from the building, which also encourages natural patina formation over time.
Traditional Design Reimagined
The material expression concept was most completely achieved in the defining element of the building—the solar array canopy. “Those tensile, tall slender columns of steel hold a very lightweight canopy,” says Schneider, “that’s even stepped to let in light but holds up this array of photovoltaics. The other thing I love about it is how the canopy creates public space.”
The front porch is ubiquitous throughout the Southeast and the public space created by the solar array provides a place for people to congregate while protected from the heat and humidity of Atlanta. “This porch marks the entries to the building and serves as the primary gathering space for students and faculty,” says Court.
“Photovoltaics are not something you want to hide,” adds Court. “They can be a real architectural benefit to a building. Instead of just cantilevering the photovoltaic array off the building, we were able to bring the columns down and have an interface with the ground so it becomes the porch. It’s an outdoor classroom for the university. A lot of the active learning spaces are associated with the porch.”
It is this idea, that sustainable attributes of a building can now become architectural attributes and no longer hidden, that differentiates the Kendeda Building from so many highly sustainable projects. Artfully expressed photovoltaics are a design element and not just a mechanical device to be hidden. That is a sea change from architecture driving sustainability attributes to sustainability attributes driving architectural design.
“In architectural history class, we learn about these cycles of styles,” says Court. “It happens in art, fashion and music. Buildings have so much real work to do, providing conditioned, dry spaces for people to do the things they need to do. Art and fashion have a lot more flexibility and less expectation.”
Without that easy flexibility, architectural style becomes less mutable. “Architecture isn’t an arbitrary, academic discussion about what it should look like,” says Court. “We have a clear mandate now that these buildings need to perform differently. What is the architectural implication of that? What are these buildings going to look like if it creates all the energy it needs and processes all the waste material, and if it’s gathering rainwater to create drinking water? We found that you have to set aside everything that you had been taught in school as an architect. It was re-writing the rules for architecture.”
Make the New Rules Work
Because of its position in the campus, the building is laid out on a north/south axis, so common shading and daylighting techniques didn’t apply. The canopy serves those purposes and shades most of the building throughout the course of the day, significantly reducing the building’s cooling loads. The roof’s photovoltaic panels produce 120% of the energy the building requires. The 330 kW solar array is made up of 917 panels covering 16,109 square feet, and will generate 455,000 kWh annually. The projected energy use intensity (EUI) for the building is 30 kBTU/SF/YR, which is 72% more efficient than the average building of the same size and occupancy. Designed to generate 42 EUI, the solar array will offset the buildings EUI, generating a netpositive energy facility.
The roof canopy also has gutters that collect all of the rainwater that falls on the photovoltaic panels and brings it back to a 50,000-gallon cistern in the basement, where it provides all of the water the building needs.
In addition to the solar array, the project incorporates salvaged materials. It also includes on-site energy storage and composting toilets and urban agriculture. The building will use the campus chilled water loop as its heat source in the winter via a heat recovery chiller, and will have radiant flooring to distribute the heating and cooling efficiently. Additionally, air curtains at the doorways act as a barrier to outside air coming in.
“You’re trying to be aware of all the impacts this building is going to have,” says Court. “It forces you to think like nature does. Buildings need to be designed in the way organisms evolve. All the systems in an organism are constantly trying to balance and optimize themselves so that organisms need as little energy as possible to sustain themselves. That’s what design is to me.”