Publications

The UW IDL 2017-2018 Annual Report highlights the lab’s recent research, technical assistance, and education work with the Northwest Energy Efficiency Alliance (NEEA), design firms, utilities, research groups, and nonprofit and professional organizations across the Pacific Northwest building industry and beyond. Read full report here

Hospitals can reduce energy use with the aim of achieving net-zero energy (NZE). Insights from hospitals that are on the path to NZE and other buildings that have realized this goal help identify barriers and help identify next steps for the healthcare sector to design-toward and achieve NZE. This paper contextualizes hospital energy use in…

The Bullitt Center: A Comparative Analysis Between Simulated and Operational Performance assesses a slice of Bullitt Center building performance data collected over a three-year period in order to explore the building’s simulated night-flush ventilation strategy compared to its operational performance. Access the full publication here

As building owners, designers, and operators aim to achieve significant reductions in overall energy consumption, understanding and evaluating the probable impacts of occupant behavior becomes a critical component of a holistic energy conservation strategy. This paper describes a methodology of building occupant behavior modeling using simulation methods developed by the Building Energy Research Center (BERC) at…

   The Campus Illumination roadmap establishes a guiding vision for exterior lighting on the University of Washington Seattle Campus (UW). The roadmap approach envisions a dramatic decrease in outdoor lighting energy consumption on campus while supporting a comprehensive understanding of sustainability that encompasses the human experience, ecological impact, maintainability and energy efficiency. The document works…

The UW IDL 2016-2017 Annual Report highlights the lab’s recent research, technical assistance, and education work with the Northwest Energy Efficiency Alliance (NEEA), design firms, utilities, research groups, and nonprofit and professional organizations across the Pacific Northwest building industry and beyond. Read the full publication

Net-positive-energy buildings achieve performance goals through multiple integrated strategies incorporating technologies, systems, and human behavior. This paper examines the energy performance of the Bullitt Center in Seattle, WA and in particular looks at energy use that is influenced by occupant decisions. Specifically, how daily decisions around energy conserving actions—in this case the use of the…

The Metered Energy Efficiency Transaction Structure (MEETS) is an unprecedented approach designed to achieve deep energy efficiency improvements in commercial buildings. Seattle City Light piloted MEETS in Seattle’s Bullitt Center, yielding extraordinary energy savings to date. This paper explains how the program operates, how the baseline for a new building was modeled, and how the…

This paper describes the Building User Audit Procedure (BUAP), an analysis tool developed by the University of Washington to understand how people impact energy use patterns in campus buildings. Tools like the BUAP are important because they can better capture cultural and behavioral factors that influence pro-environmental behavior such as users’ values, beliefs and attitudes;…

The Bullitt Center’s lighting system was designed to consume 67% less energy than current similar‐sized code‐compliant Seattle office buildings. To measure lighting performance, the IDL monitors and evaluates daylighting, electric lighting, and lighting controls system performance data. Findings are presented in this paper. Meek C, Gilbride M, Ojaama H, Norwood W. (2016) The Bullitt Center…

This publication uses the Bullitt Center – the world’s greenest commercial building – as a pilot project to develop and implement methodologies for collecting data on buildings and building occupants related to health impacts at the building scale. These data include testing how the building impacts 1) physical activity 2) indoor environmental quality, and 3)…

This article provides an inside look into the Bullitt Center more than two years into its operation, as it achieves positive energy use, challenges regulatory hurdles in pursuit of using harvested rainwater as its water source, and raisesthe sustainability bar as it seeks to live up to its moniker as “The Greenest Office Building in the World.”…

In Living Proof: The Bullitt Center Robert B. Peña chronicles the Bullitt Center’s transition from one man’s vision to six-story living exemplar of urban sustainability. Through this high performance building case study, Peña describes the project’s origins, the integrated design approach, building and project performance, and lessons learnt from the design and construction process. Produced…

The built environment impacts health in multiple dimensions, from large infrastructure to the microscopic molecules and organisms that are not seen or perceived in daily life. In light of the complex interaction between various health-related impacts of the built environment, this publication has taken a multi-disciplinary approach using the Bullitt Center as a pilot project to…

“…if you’re interested in putting poetry back into daylighting.” Read the full book review by Fred Oberkircher

This article is excerpted from Daylighting Design in the Pacific Northwest (2012). The projects featured in the book represent what the IDL thinks are the best daylighting efforts in the current wave of sustainable design practice in the Pacific Northwest. They were selected because each presents new knowledge about synthesizing the light of place with the…

In addition to conserving energy, the use of daylight in architecture can be a powerful aesthetic tool. The effective employment of natural lighting is an important component of sustainable design, and some of the best work in this area comes from the Northwest. This practice-based book focuses on fourteen projects ranging from schools to community…

This article provides an overview on a free web-based design resource for the implementation of proven daylighting design strategies in commercial buildings. The Daylighting Pattern Guide (http://patternguide.advancedbuildings.net/) provides building designers, owners and students a platform to explore the relationships between sky, site, building aperture and space planning. This interactive resource uses a combination of real-world built…

This research, Targeting 100!, provides a conceptual framework and decision-making structure at a schematic design level of precision for hospital owners, architects and engineers to radically reduce energy use in hospitals. Following the goals of Architecture 2030 and The 2030 Challenge, it offers access to design strategies and the cost implications of those strategies for…