Greenbuild 2024 | Saving the Old to Teach the Young at Penn
This Greenbuild, bookend your week with a tour on Monday and a discussion on Friday of one of the University of Pennsylvania’s most successful recent projects and Atelier Ten’s most notable adaptive reuse projects: the Ronald O. Perelman Center for Political Science and Economics! Combining the adaptive reuse of an existing building with a new addition, the project exemplifies the climate-driven message that the best building is the one you don’t have to build.
Tour: Historic Preservation and Adaptive Reuse in Higher ED | Monday November 11th, 1:00-4:30pm
On Monday, November 11th from 1:00-4:30, join New York Director, Jessica Zofchak, and KPMB at The University of Pennsylvania for the “Historic Preservation and Adaptive Reuse in Higher Education” tour. Attendees will visit the Perelman Center and the Richards Medical Lab, two exemplary projects at the Penn that, in preserving history and adapting to the modern world, offer great environmental benefits.
The Ronald O. Perelman Center, an adaptive reuse of the historic West Philadelphia Title and Trust Company Building built in 1925, overcame the existing building’s severe spatial and structural limitations to create functional and dynamic interior spaces and engaging exterior facades. Attendees will discover how the team’s analysis of the existing structure – carried out in part using laser scanning techniques – led to programmatic modifications that saved most of the existing building, reducing the project’s embodied carbon, shortening construction time, and eliminating much of the planned demolition and disruption. The team’s unflagging focus on sustainability revealed opportunities to exceed the university’s standards for indoor comfort, environmental quality, and emissions reduction.
Saving the Old to Teach the Young at Penn | Friday, November 15, 2024 10:15 AM to 11:15 AM
On Friday November 15th from 10:15-11:15am, Jessica will join Steven Casey from KPMB Architects, Mark Kocent from the University of Pennsylvania, and Allison Lukachik from Keast + Hood Structural Engineers to share the variety of challenges and opportunities of working with historic buildings and evolving them to adapt to 21st-century academic needs.
The constraints of the existing building inherited by the design team encouraged a high degree of creativity and collaboration. During the session, the team will dive into the analysis – including 3D laser analysis – used to determine the most appropriate strategies to avoid demolition and reduce embodied carbon: preserving the historic building envelope, balancing thermal comfort, and increasing access to natural light, and careful program placement to avoid structural reinforcements.
The overall discussion will answer the following questions:
- How do you create a seamless interior experience that reduces embodied carbon and optimizes energy performance, visual comfort, and thermal comfort despite designing for two distinct exterior conditions?
- How do you determine appropriate strategies to exceed a client’s initial LEED mandate and minimize the project’s embodied carbon in a new building and existing building?
- How do you determine the impact of building envelope and systems upgrades on thermal-comfort and energy performance?
- How do you integrate circularity strategies that enable materials to be reused at the end of life of the building?