John Pulley, P.E., LEED AP, joined HOK in San Francisco in 2009 as Vice President and Director of Engineering. John is responsible for the overall development of the MEP design team throughout all design phases for renovation and new construction projects.
How can you help organizations renew their existing buildings?
JP: We have a enormous opportunity to provide engineering services in the existing building market. So many commercial and institutional buildings are 30 to 50 years old, which is the typical life span of a mechanical-electrical system. All these building systems are coming to the end of their useful lives and will soon need to be replaced.
At the same time, clients are placing an increased emphasis on sustainability and are taking important steps to reduce energy consumption and to be more environmentally responsible.
Building owners that experience the failure of an HVAC system, for example, should not simply do a ‘like for like’ replacement. Before they replace the building system, we should take a fully integrated approach that looks at the building envelope and other building components to first reduce the building load and allow us to update it with a more high-performance system.
We can do things like change out glazing or other skin components, improve insulation, increase daylighting and reduce the lighting demand. Taking advantage of these improvements might reduce the HVAC system’s required capacity by 40 to 60 percent, which would enable a building owner to buy a smaller system. Though the initial overall project cost may be slightly higher, the life cycle cost will be much lower due to reduced annual energy and operating costs. The business case for this approach can be incredibly strong.
How do HOK’s engineers provide an integrated approach?
JP: HOK’s engineers work with our architects to provide a fully integrated building systems approach. Combining our engineers, architects, Advance Strategies consultants and sustainability experts under one HOK umbrella gives us a powerful array of tools that we use to help clients.
We are increasingly getting our engineers involved upfront in projects to create strategies for sustainable, high-performance engineering systems and to do energy analysis and building simulation models. That approach provides our designers and clients informed options to consider. After all of the options and strategies are analyzed, we can then design the MEP building systems to be optimized specifically for the project.
Too often in our profession, one team passes the baton to another and something is lost in translation. Being there from start to finish, and even beyond in post-occupancy, allows HOK to integrate the MEP engineering systems into the architecture. With our seamless process we can create well-designed, high-performance building improvements renewing the building for its next life cycle.
What is the impact on energy efficiency of a building’s operations?
JP: We can design the most efficient system in the world, but if it isn’t operated properly it won’t produce the desired energy efficiency result.
We want to involve the building operations staff and users upfront in the design process in order for us to understand their project expectations and for them to have “buy-in” and understand the design. After the project is delivered and occupied, we can then provide post occupancy services such as occupant environment assessment, system measurement and verification, and commissioning. Having that performance data creates an important feedback loop that we can use to enhance our simulation, modeling and design process for the next project.
Tags: HOK, John Pulley, MEP Enginering
