Integrated design and delivery enabled the Rocky Mountain Institute (RMI) to push the boundaries of green with their Innovation Center in Basalt, Colorado. This project is striving to become one of the most energy-efficient buildings in the US and to invent completely new green building strategies in the process. Integrated design and delivery is helping RMI do that by building trust within the project team and opening opportunities to talk constructively about risk.

The innovation center is expected to achieve an energy use intensity of just 16 kBtu per square foot, partly due to a completely passive heating and cooling strategy—the only mechanical systems are for ventilation and localized backup heating. That’s only possible in the coldest climate in the lower-48 states of the US by designing to “adaptive comfort” thresholds, which identify an expanded range of temperature set points for human comfort that takes into account all six factors that make humans feel hot or cold (air speed, air temperature, humidity, activity level, clothing level, and radiant surface temperature). Designing for a space that can fluctuate between 18 and 28 degrees Celsius, instead of 21 and 24 degrees Celsius, offers more possibilities for how a space can be built and enables the team to significantly downsize (or eliminate) mechanical systems, according to RMI’s Chris McClurg, “but there is always the fear of what if it doesn’t work?” Given that the space needed to work for the organization’s growing numbers and the project team’s profits were dependent on the final outcome of the whole project—not just on delivering their scope—the team “had to find a way to talk openly about that risk.”

RMI hired a consultant to facilitate the workshop for negotiating the IPD contract and make sure everything was clearly presented. Then they put strict processes in place to make sure the goals were clear and decisions would be communicated. The team set up a modified pull planning system for the design phase: setting up weekly consultant meetings to solve issues that arose. The design team was split geographically between Portland, Oregon, and Colorado, and looking back, without the constraints of that dual location, they might sometimes have fallen back to a more conventional way of working, says Kathy Berg, of ZGF Architects. But the group continued to have more conversations about how they wanted to engage differently and “‘let’s be more IPD’ became a kind of code phrase for acting more collaboratively,” says Cara Carmichael, the project manager at RMI.

TWith an effective process in place, the team developed the trust necessary to handle the risks that accompany innovation. The team completely rethought past heating and cooling strategies, according to John Breshears, president of Architectural Applications. Instead of worrying about the whole space, the team focused on passively heating and cooling just the most highly occupied zones; each person will have their own Hyperchair, a desk chair that provides heating and cooling directly to its occupant.

Another design decision that the team attributed to their integrated process is the use of cross-laminated timber (CLT). The project had constraints balancing the budget versus the building height and CLT helped keep a high floor-to-floor height for maximizing daylighting while allowing for distributed mechanical systems. “Having the contractor there helped us understand how CLT could help shorten our scheduling, since much of the material is prefabricated,” says Breshears. And, using this material, the design team determined that they could use straight stairs without landings, saving valuable floor space.

In addition to all the tangible outcomes from pursuing an integrated process, the collaborative work environment affected the project team on a personal level, too. “In a very good way, this has been one of the most frustrating projects I have ever worked on,” says Berg. “We constantly had to ask ourselves ‘Are we trying hard enough?’”

“We built such open relationships,” says McClurg. “I wish we could do it all again. How many people can say that about a project they’ve worked on?”