Project Plan - Bullitt Center - B4

     For the term project for this class, I would like to examine green architecture in office buildings, and how they can improve with more “intelligent” features in the next few years.  The office building I would like to examine for the current state of the art building is the Bullitt Center, located in Seattle, WA.  This building is considered to be at the very forefront of green building, eschewing LEED certification in favor of “Living Building” certification, which is much harder and more demanding.  The building is designed to be energy neutral, using geothermal heat sinks and computer controlled windows for HVAC, solar panels for electricity, composting toilets, and a large 56,000 gallon cistern for all of its water usage.  Also, the building was designed with an expected life of 250 years, much longer than a typical office building.  This means that potentially, this building could last long enough that I may not be able to foresee what type of intelligent features will be incorporated over its life, so I will probably stick to the next 50 years or so, but I will also talk about how future office buildings may incorporate the ideas found in this building and improve upon them.

     After I have talked a bit about what went into the design of the Bullitt Center, I would like to talk about the origins of the movement to build greener buildings, and how they have become more intelligent over the years.  In order to do this, I will try to examine the technology that allows green buildings to be green, and try to figure out how these specific technologies started and how they have progressed up to the point where they were included in the Bullitt Center.  I would like to briefly talk about each of the main points of the Bullitt Center and see what the current state of the art is and where experts in the field see it continuing over the next few decades.  Hopefully I can find out some information about the first green buildings and talk about how we have improved upon them, which will give insight into how we can improve them even more as we move forward.

Comments:

Robotics in Construction Group - I think that this is a very interesting topic and is something that will eventually be very useful, even if the technology hasn't come into its own yet.  I'd be especially interested in hearing about any research which had been done comparing any 3D-printed concrete with the standard steel reinforced concrete which is currently used for commercial construction projects.

ICA, Boston Group - I think you have a very interesting building to model, and you certainly seem to know exactly what you need to do in order to have everything done in time.  It would be interesting to see how the model turns out.