Upon entering the building, you come into a 2-story lobby, with single skin facade and internal metal blinds, both of which allow more heat or cold to enter into the lobby space than could have been designed for. To compensate for this they designed for perimeter heating at the base of the glass and cooling from the holes that run vertically pointing at the glass, as shown in the 8th picture. There are no operable windows in the lobby space which allows for increase security. As it is, there have still been security breaches with environmental demonstration from Green Peace. The lobby does have a large amount of thermal mass, with the majority of the construction being concrete and granite, and was cool to touch at 9:45 AM. We found out that the air is conditioned throughout the year into the lobby space, so that people enter into a comfortable space. There is question as to the performance of this space with regards to conditioning large amounts of thermal mass throughout the year.
After our visit in the lobby, we were brought to the conference room at the top floor of the building. This space has glass around the perimeter that does not allow air to pass from the room to the perimeter hallway. This space is also conditioned throughout the year, with air intakes through the carpet on the floor in the center of the room as you can see in the 4th picture. The room is conditioned through a cool ceiling in addition to the conditioned ventilated air. A nice design feature in the conference room is the ceiling shading device for a circular skylight, as you can see in the 6th picture.
For the typical offices allow for a large amount of floor space per person, since the majority of the employees in this building are the executives of the company, which keeps the cooling loads per floor area low. Each room has manually operable windows that open into the double skin facade space, allowing naturally ventilated air to enter the office. All of the windows are closed for the night, as they do not do nighttime cooling to alleviate extra cooling loads. Each office can also be adjusted by 3 Celsius for the room temperature. It was noted that the users have been very happy with their spaces.
I observed that the building had some very nice design features, but that they have not reached their goal of being an ecological high-rise building.
