Proceedings of: Workshop on Improving Building Design for Persons with Low Vision

Introductory comments based on a Recent Article on Daylighting in Architectural Record (2009)

The subject matter for our panel is natural lighting. I’m not an expert – I am an architect – but I did do a little reading. There was an interesting article in the Architectural Record in 2009 on daylighting. It was weighted toward energy conservation, energy savings, but also there are a lot of issues in that daylighting article that I think are very pertinent to our topics for the workshop.

I want to make a couple of quotes from it and then sort of go through some of the things that the article brings out, because I think I can do that very quickly if it kind of piques your interest, and point out some of the things that architects [try to] mitigate – problems for [design solutions].

And first of all I would say that none of us can do without sunlight. Sunlight is an essential part of human life. You know, doctors recommend at least 10 minutes of exposure to natural sunlight a day so that you can produce enough Vitamin D in your body to keep your bones strong.

So we’re not hermits. We don’t live in caves. We do have to expose ourselves to some sun. The question is, how do we control it an indoor environment so that it doesn’t become [ a hindrance] in what we do, especially if we’re sitting in front of computer screens in federal agencies or private sector offices, whatever [we do in buildings] today.

(Tom will provide copy of article or a complete reference to it.)

Two interesting quotations at beginning of the article: 

The article has an interesting quote at the beginning of the article that I wanted to share. “A central challenge of effective daylighting design is allowing natural light to penetrate deep into the interior spaces while eliminating glare and heat gain or loss.”

“One of the most common failures today in daylighting strategies is glare control. Large window areas provide generous amounts of daylight to task areas, but if daylight is not properly regulated, glare results, particularly in today’s computer environment.”

Solar Gain and Glare are Major Issues for Energy Control

So that’s a big issue, solar gain and glare. For those of you that are dealing with energy control in buildings, that’s a major issue. It’s a major issue in our federal buildings, which have large glass exposures and often because of design policies that were originated with Design Excellence – enormous glass atriums, which are, in and of themselves, very problematic for energy mandates now coming out of the White House and so forth.

Architectural Control Techniques for Daylighting

So what are the techniques that are used to control daylighting that architects can take advantage of? Well, this whole myriad of starting with the exterior of the building wall. There are various things now that automate louver systems that have controllers – computeroperated controllers that are geared to the action of the sun, prevailing cloud cover, et cetera, and how the louver systems on the exterior of a building will control the daylight entering it.

This also can apply to interior blind systems. There actually are automated blind systems that have been developed that allow blinds to raise and lower and to adjust the angle of the louvers in the blinds so that they can compensate for the angle of the sun coming into a building, and reduce glare. So the blinds can be lowered so that you don’t get glare into a work area at the times of day when the sun is penetrating, and raise it at other times of the day.

Building Orientation and Areas of Glazing

Of course, we all know the basics of architectural design is your north and south exposures of a building are the ones that are least – that are most uniform in terms of light. They’re the ones that are the easiest to control. It’s those east and west orientations where we tend to get the most glare penetration into a building because of the severe angles of sun -- sunlight, sunset, time of day, et cetera, to deal with.

Exterior Louvers and Light Shelves

So starting with the exterior, there are louver systems. There are what are called light shelves, which are horizontal elements that can be built into the building façade that will bounce light to the ceiling on the interior space and allow it to penetrate deeply into the space and reflect light downward into space, but will not allow it to penetrate directly into the space.

Those are good in certain environments, not all environments. What you would do in Texas or Arizona would not be the same thing you would do if you were living in New England or in the South or in the Pacific Northwest. There are all kinds of variables.

Then we go from those systems, which can be eliminated and sometimes are. Some of our GSA buildings have automated systems of this type and use light shelves and some of these elements.

Glazing Systems

The next line of defense is the glazing system. And shading can occur both inside and outside. So you have a choice of different kinds of shading. Some light shades are actually built in the envelope. If you have a double-glazing system, they’re actually located in the envelope inside the two layers of glass – can be automated, can produce great energy savings as well as providing the shade for the light, controlling the glare.

The probably least effective and most commonly used exterior controls on windows, which are louver systems of all kinds and whatever, you get solar gain though glass that way. You don’t control that, so your heat load inside the space is going to tend to be the highest level of heat load because you’re controlling it from the inside rather than from the outside.

On the exterior of the glass, the glazing systems, there are several ways of dealing with that. Glass today can have a tint built into it. It can receive various kinds of coatings. There are double-glazing systems, triple-glazing systems. It can have interior coatings as well. Some of the most recent coatings are very, very effective at reducing solar energy in interior spaces as well as controlling the level of light that you get.

Interior Blind Systems

[Automated blind systems have been developed that allow blinds to raise and lower and to adjust the angle of the louvers in the blinds so that they can compensate for the angle of the sun coming into a building, and reduce glare.] [Editor’s note: this statement was previously made by Tom, and added here for consistency]

Energy Implications

So, there are a lot of different techniques that can be used in designing buildings to control sunlight that comes in and achieve some of the results that we need to control solar glare for those with low vision. That’s kind of an area of design that is a specialty area. There are many, many companies that specialize in one component or the other of this. It’s the architect’s job to look at the whole global picture of what’s available on a palette, on a design palette, to deal with all of these issues of sunlight control in the building space.

And I don’t want to say a lot more than that. The article is very interesting and the record is – it has a lot of different solutions that have been developed. Some issues about glass I didn’t know. There’s this new kind of coated glass called sputter-coated glass, which actually uses a thin layer of silver that can be applied to the glass. This is one of the best, probably the most recent light coating out there. It really has a huge ability to control solar gain.

And that plays into all the issues about energy mandates and controlling how much heat [transfer that occurs] in the building, et cetera, and heat loss as well because these reflectivity possibilities with glass can apply either to preventing sun from coming in and heat gain, or they can also work the opposite to keep you from losing heat in cold environments. So there are just multiple issues out there and many, many ways of handing it.

I’ve said enough. The panel here today is comprised of folks you’ve already – I think with the exception of Mark. Mark, were you on a panel –

Introduction

My presentation is coming at it from a different angle, different direction (slide 1). I don’t design buildings anymore because I like being self-employed without employees. And what I find that I do best is defining what is required for accessibility, particularly with the ADA or the Fair Housing Act, or even the Architectural Barriers Act.

Quality Assurance

Daylighting and Architectural Photography

Some Design Guidance for Daylighting

Some of the things that I learned 30 years ago in school are:

1. Don’t bring daylight in on one wall; try and bring it in from more than one direction. It takes advantage of the fact that the sun is doing different things outside, and it balances out the one-source issue of bringing it through one wall. It may be more difficult in office buildings, particularly when you have a 10-foot floor-to-floor height in Washington, D.C. But you get the interplay with the colors.

2. You have to still deal with glare by diffusing the light when it comes in. Things work out better that way.

3. Shadows are not a bad thing. Shadows are very good for a lot of aspects of things. And yesterday, listening to stuff, I got the sense that shadows were being considered a bad idea. But you don’t see corners if you don’t have shadows. As an example, in this dark corner over here [pointing in the room], you can tell you have a corner there because one side is almost in full shadow, even though you have ambient light hitting it. That’s how we know there’s a line there that points in a direction.

   Another example would be what I commented yesterday, that I did not see the curve in the one slide that Fred showed. It’s a good idea. It helps create vocabulary, that when you see that stripe of darker tile, of darker brick, that there’s going to be a stepdown at that point. But visually, the photo cuts off the ends of it where you can see the actual step down. And depending on the clarity of the photo, you can’t really see that, because there isn’t a shadow line showing the top edge, the visual cue that’s used by quite a few people.

   Now, granted, if I was talking to somebody, out of the corner of my eye I would assume there’s a step there because of the darkness. And when you start creating the vocabulary of using a dark strip against a light strip as a step, it’s something you have to be mindful of other areas, too, where you’re just doing some landscaping details and you want to either accentuate the entrance to a building, not using a step of any kind because of dark versus light. You may start creating images. If the vocabulary becomes too strong and too consistent everywhere, it can create that image that you’ve got a step there, and you don’t.

   This is something that I see. It gets confusing when people are trying to do things to denote certain areas, but then all of a sudden you start seeing steps. The classic example, where Bob mentioned about the carpet runner upstairs stopping before the end of the step, is something that should be just a visual faux pas for any architect or any designer that they shouldn’t do, because they know that’s a natural tendency [stepping] point.

4. The shape of the ceilings can make a big difference as well, how you bring the light in, how you treat the lights so that you have ambient light throughout the room. Fred’s example of Metro: there’s a perfect one showing how you’re never going to be able to solve the problem down there because of the coffered ceilings. How much light would you have to bring in to make that happen? This is a little off the topic.

Measurability is a Major Issue

The other thing of dealing with measurability is, if you’re dealing with light levels in a room, you try and measure the lumens or the foot-candles on the surface of your desk. That can be done. You know, when you’re bringing daylight and stuff, you can bring the light levels up high enough at that point.

But I’m unaware of a way that you can actually measure the light in such a way that you take care of glare issues or some other measurement that can be used and incorporated into the energy guidelines to get at the issues of dealing with glare as Tom pointed out. It’s a big issue. I mean, you can get the 50 foot-candles on the desktop, but you don’t necessarily get at glare in a useful fashion. Thank you.

Comment by Tom Williams: When we’re talking about the 50 foot-candles in office space, some information is out there about the amount of foot-candles that are produced outside. The sun provides about 7 (thousand) to 10,000 foot-candles. So you’re really damping down when you talk about task lighting and working inside a closed environment. There’s a huge difference. The light is free outside. Trying to channel that light so that it allows us to work comfortably inside, that’s a huge challenge.

Introduction

I will [restate] a little bit on what I started to talk about yesterday and talk a little bit more about buildings rather than just residences.

The Circadian System (slide 2)

We talked about the circadian system yesterday. All the rhythms in our body [run on] approximately 24 hour light-dark cycles. We have a circadian system that runs with timing slightly greater than 24 hours. We need morning light so that every day is synchronized. And we set our internal clock so that it runs with 24 – rather than 24.2 hours on average.

New Paradigm for Light (slide 3)

Melatonin Suppression

Again, this is to achieve – what we call achieve 50-percent melatonin suppression. Melatonin is a hormone we produce at night under conditions of darkness, and it’s been associated with a series of things, including sleeping.

The only thing melatonin really does: it’s a signal. It tells your body it’s nighttime. Since you’re a diurnal species, you’re going to go to sleep at night. Mice, which is a nocturnal species, are going to be active at night with high melatonin levels. And so, really, melatonin is a timing signal, okay? And, if you get enough light in the middle of the night, you’re going to cease melatonin production, suppress melatonin. We now know that that’s not something you want to do. You do not want to suppress melatonin at night, and you want to be able not to have any melatonin early in the morning when you first get up. You naturally don’t produce it during the day.

Research Projects

Light has been shown to impact all of these different groups of people (slide 7).

I’m just going to briefly talk about a couple of projects we did.

There were studies done in California a few years ago saying that daylight in schools impacts test scores and that daylight impacts performance. There was a publication out of the National Academy that criticized the results, basically saying that it was a ménage of studies and that obviously when you collect a large amount of data you are bound to get some statistical significance. So there was some controversy about it.

The approach we took was: Well, if light really impacts performance in kids or in offices, it may be through its impact on maintaining that synchrony with the solar day. It may be that in the wintertime you go to work in the dark, you come back in the dark, and you may not get, in your cubicle, enough light to synchronize your circadian system.

Daylight in Schools

So, in a middle school in North Carolina (slide 8), which has beautiful daylighting design, we collected dim-light melatonin onset data from students, which is really the timing which the melatonin starts rising in the evening. That is associated with your bedtime. You would typically go to bed about a couple of hours after your, what we call DLMO, or dim-light melatonin onset. So the later your melatonin starts rising, the later the bedtime.

Kids have a fixed time to wake up to get the school bus. So we measured their dim-light melatonin onset prior to the intervention, and then we gave them those really goofy orange glasses (slide 9). They used [the glasses] for a week in school. It was really cool to see them wearing these things.

But what these glasses do – if you look at the upper graph [in slide 9] - is basically cut your blue light. So you can see that you don’t have the circadian stimulation. So it’s like being in biological darkness, for the circadian system.

And what we saw, which is the graph in the bottom [of slide 9], is a delay in the dim-light melatonin onset from Monday to Friday by about a half-hour. So, only with five days of the intervention, not getting the morning light through the school, it delayed their bedtimes and it delayed the amount of time they slept.

So if you consider that throughout the whole winter, it may be chronic sleep deprivation that the kids might be exposed to. And it may explain why they may not perform better -- especially in the first part of the morning, which is what typically they have trouble with.

Windows in Office Spaces

The other study, conducted in 2002, was a little bit disappointing. We looked at spaces that had windows and non-windows. It was a matched population of a group of software designers that all had the same tasks. They were two-people offices. Half of the offices had daylight; the other half didn’t.

And we looked at the amount of time they were spending doing computer work, paperwork, talking, and so on [slide 10]. And what we saw was, in terms of occupancy, whether [the space] had a window or not didn’t make any difference in the wintertime. It was the amount of time you were in your office. Nobody was in their office more than half of the time.

But we did see an increase in times that people spent on the computer. That was a significant increase, suggesting that yes, in the wintertime, if they had a window in their offices, they did have an increase in productivity.

However, as with every research we do, you always have to be cautioned about your results. If we are not able to replicate our results. We went back to this place, and we were not able to replicate those results. It could be that when we went back there was a lot of changes in the organization; it was a much smaller group. For whatever reason, we never replicated those studies.

So, can I tell you that daylighting may impact productivity in offices? To me it’s still up in the air, and I don’t think I have enough data to support a statement like that.

Summary (slide 11)

I think more research is needed in terms of how daylighting may impact performance productivity in the workplace. And, if it does, it may be through maintaining synchronization with the circadian system.

So, even though we’re not ready for giving recommendations in terms of the non-visual effect of light, we have to remember that whatever recommendations we give may impact the other side of light [i.e., the circadian system].

Those with low vision may actually suffer from circadian disruption more than those without vision problems.

Daylighting does deliver the right amount of spectral timing and duration of light to positively impact the circadian system.

Daylighting in a space needs to be quantified. Just having a small window doesn’t mean you have [effective] daylighting in a space. Or having too much daylight where you have to control it because it’s glaring and uncomfortable also doesn’t mean you have [effective] daylighting in a space. So, it is important to define [effective] daylighting in a space, before we can make any statement on that.

Discussion

Performance and Productivity

Comment by Tom Williams: It’s interesting to me that there doesn’t seem to be any more research out there on the connection of daylight to productivity. That’s almost amazing, that scientifically there isn’t any kind of support for that.

Response by Mariana Figueiro: Measuring productivity is really hard.

Comment by Jeanne Halloin: The Heschong-Mahone Group out of California has other daylighting research on productivity, both in schools, and then they also did one in Wal-Mart where in the daylit areas, no matter what was being sold there, they sold like 50 percent more in the stores. So I think there are two other studies that -- if we want to start talking about daylight -- that we could look at.

Response by Mariana Figueiro: Actually, that study was the one with the schools that the National Academy questioned. So there’s still some debate about the Heschong study. Some people agree with it; other people still have some questions about the data, how the variance explains the data and so on. In [the Heschong study] with performance in offices, they weren’t able to replicate with daylight. Measuring productivity is really hard, especially measuring productivity in the field.

Introduction

I remember when I was a student. The first year I had to purchase a book called “Sun, Wind and Light.” It’s a popular educational book. It taught us that the world around us has resources -- sun – sunlight – that it’s harvestable, that is usable; that ancient societies, even leading up to only a hundred years ago, actually harvested it as a resource. And harvest is not just simply to let it in, but it’s actually to manage, manipulate and control and make use of that resource.

Benefits and Challenges of Daylighting (slides 2 – 4)

Problems with Daylighting (slides 5 and 6)

Designing for Persons with Low Vision (slides 7-12)

If we’re designing for people with limited vision, let’s just give ourselves some reminders (slide 7). It’s not designing for the blind. We’re not designing just to be dull. You know, we’re not saying take all the art out of it; we’re saying put a little bit more sophistication in the approach. We’re designing to control light, not just to give it up, not to turn it on full blast, but to actually to manage and control it.

We’re designing to let the daylighting become part of a high-definition environment. And that’s really what we need to do for our group – a high-definition environment so that people can see as their vision is degrading. We’re raising the bar and we’re endeavoring to create new high-definition architecture.

Summary: The Way Forward (slide 13)

So, the way forward is to understand the parameters of our problems, understand our population, understand how to manage daylighting and what daylighting brings in positive ways and what it brings to projects that need to be managed. We need to educate designers. And we were talking about this at the outset.

We need to establish guidelines that appropriately guide the designers and guide the people who are reviewing the designers’ work so we can be good customers as well.

Promote creative solutions. So, those guidelines shouldn’t tie the hands, but they should actually facilitate creativity.

Advance the technical tools that help us, both in the construction world but also in the designer world. Model things – and we’re going to talk a little bit about some more sophisticated tools both for designers and for engineers – and promote successful technologies so the government has to get behind some of those the way they’re doing with the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA); actually get behind it and promote smart technologies to groups like this.

And then leverage the government and other big industry as their buying power, meaning – we’re here with several agencies and we’ve talked about ways that we can transform the built environment. Well, put some money behind it and say: I’m going to seed this project and this is the actual – this is the actual requirement I’m going to put behind that seed money. I don’t have to wait for a guideline. I’m going to actually seed a project that I require this, this and this. This is the purpose of the project.

Introduction

I’m going to take a little different approach and look at [natural lighting] from an engineer’s perspective. I’ve been hearing a lot of architectural perspectives around the table. So this may be somewhat different, but I do want to get this point brought forward.

Comment by Tom Williams: Can I make a comment first? We’re not ignoring engineers’ lighting in buildings at all. And there is an interface between nature and harvesting daylight, as Greg was talking.

Response by Jim Woods: That requires an engineering [i.e., quantitative] solution.

Comment by Tom Williams: And then the engineering solution for the interior space where daylight can[not penetrate], which we’re not ignoring that, and that’s part of the equation.

Response by Jim Woods: We’ve got an [engineering approach for] the envelope, too.

Primary Design Issues (slides 2 and 3)

Glare Criteria (slide 4)

All of the measures, with which I’m familiar in environmental control, are based on psychophysiology. If we look at thermal conditions, we consider operative temperatures, which is a function of the perceived dry-bulb and mean-radiant temperatures. If we talk about sound, we consider decibels related to the sound pressure of the ear. If we look at some of the work that has been done on air quality, we consider decipols, which are perceived units of odor. These parameters are all based on perception.

We don’t have very much in lighting, but we do have some. As shown in slide 4, I found at least three references and I think we’ll find a whole lot more when we look at that. You’ve got the references in your handout (Appendix D) of what is called the glare sensation vote.

The other factor is the Daylight Glare Index (DGI). The work that came out of the British Research Establishment in the ‘50s and ‘60s resulted in the Hopkinson Glare Index, which is basically part of that equation (slide 4). Cornell University expanded that to include a daylight component. Although the equation does give quantitative information, there’s a problem with this definition because of terms in the definition must be resolved.

Now, Bob Massof mentioned yesterday three kinds of contrast ratios, he used the Weber equation and the Michelson equation. This brings up a big issue. When we start dealing with psychophysiological relationships and the glare index, look at the equation just generally. The numerator is the luminous level from the source. The denominator primarily is the luminous level from the background. So that is like a contrast ratio. It’s not like the Weber equation. It’s not like the Michelson equation. We need to be consistent in our terminology.

The other thing is the little term “omega” in the equation. It’s almost mythical from the standpoint that it is the solid angle between the eye and each source of light divided by a position index. And, according to the references, you can approximate the position index with the inverse square law: the area of the source divided by the square of the distance to the eye. But it is the solid angle, which is measured in steradians. The denominator is the steradian. It’s not the tangent function that Dennis was dealing with; it’s the solid angle.

Comment by Bob Massof: I don’t understand how you’re summing logs.

Response by Jim Woods: Well, there’s summing across the sources.

Comment by Bob Massof: There’s summing across sources, then taking the log with that?

Response by Jim Woods: Yes. Right.

Comment by Bob Massof: But what’s the 1.6?

Response by Jim Woods: Fudge factor.

Comment by [Participant]: Fudge factor, yeah. They’re playing around with these terms. They’re empirical. They’re not all first principles.

Comment by [Participant]: So is that [exponent] 1.6 supposed to be a brightness representation?

Response by Jim Woods: Yeah, right, exactly.

The point I want to make here is that in some of the references, a correlation has been [reported] between the [glare sensation vote] and the [glare index]. So you can calculate these indices, and you get up to a number like 24, which is a threshold of discomfort, or 28, which is the threshold of disability glare. Yesterday, Dennis was talking about the ratio of the light that’s being received in the cones divided by the total amount received by the rods and cones.

So physiologically, I think there’s a relationship. That’s a research gap that needs to be worked on. But we can begin right now by saying we have some understanding, and in Europe and in Great Britain, they’re actually using this procedure for design.

Now, with our computer power, we could take this on a point-by-point analysis, and we can spread that across the space and do the analysis to understand what kind of glare we would anticipate in a given room.

The CAD models and the Radiance models apparently are informed by this equation, and EnergyPlus and a couple of the other energy programs apparently do have this equation incorporated into them.

So, from an objective standpoint, if we want to get repeatable, reliable, valid data, we can do it. It’s going to take some research, but on a guideline basis, I think we’ve got enough information right now to say we can get started. And you can look at the criteria that are established by the CIE in Europe.

Examples of Occupant Responses from Post Occupancy Evaluations (slide 5)

The last slide I want to show you is a composite of some data that we took during four PostOccupancy Evaluations. In these POEs, we conducted surveys of the occupants and then we walked through the spaces. We tried to understand how the systems were actually performing. These are the four different buildings. Some of the factors that we looked at were overall satisfaction, daylighting, artificial lighting, accessibility, view, aesthetics, acoustics, security and temperature.

The goal is have a minimum of 80 percent of the people in the space find the environment “acceptable,” which gives us a 20 percent area to play with. But if you look at the numbers, the only factor that came through at 80 percent for all four buildings was security. People felt very secure in the buildings.

Comment by Marsha Mazz: Just a point of clarification. You said the only one that came in at 80 percent was security. Did the others come in above or below?

Response by Jim Woods: They’re [mostly] below.

Now, we’re badmouthing daylighting and artificial lighting and stuff like that in this workshop. Put in perspective, we’re supposed to know what we’re doing with the thermal environment. Look at that last column, last set of data.

Comment by Marsha Mazz: For those of us who can’t see the last column, please describe it.

We’re running somewhere between 30 and 70 percent for thermal acceptability in those four buildings. The daylighting is running somewhere around 60 to over 80 percent. Artificial lighting is running somewhere around 60 to 90 percent. So people are not thrilled. We’ve got room for improvement in all of these factors.

The other point I want to make here is we can only get that information in Post-Occupancy Evaluations. And partly, the architects don’t like us because we go back. I was interviewed one time for a professorship at a famous university that shall remain nameless. We got into one huge argument about the concept of design: “where does design end?” My point was design is not complete until you’ve done a Post-Occupancy Evaluation, until you get feedback to know what you did is right. Grand Rounds, right?

Comment by Dennis Siemsen: Yeah. In medicine, we do what we call M&M’s, mortality and morbidity conferences. You know: What’s your outcome? What did you achieve and what you wanted to? If something didn’t work, why didn’t it work and how are you going to fix it next time?

Comment by [Participant]: And we [designers] don’t. We go onto the next project and ‘know’ that what we did was good.

Comment by [Participant]: It’s a major problem at GSA– I don’t want to be quoted on this – but the leadership on excellence and that part of our organization is more concerned with appearance and with awards than it is with whether buildings work. The bottom line is, a lot of our buildings don’t work. And the way you can find out if they work is by doing POEs.

Comment by [Participant]: So therefore, the way you suppress that, so that you don’t know whether the building’s a success or not, is simply not do one, or you commission one to be done, then you take the results of that POE and you put it on a shelf or lock it in a closet and you forget it was ever done.

Comment by [Participant]: And I’ve seen that -- I saw that happen at GSA because of the attitude of the leadership. The POEs were commissioned -- and Vijay’s very much aware of this. The bottom line is, POEs are supposed to generate lessons learned. You’re supposed to take what you learned about your mistakes in design, apply those to the next building you design, so that you have some markers there of things you don’t want to do and repeat again.

Comment by [Participant]: In the central government, we tend to repeat the same mistakes over and over again because we don’t learn from our mistakes and grow from them.

Comment by [Participant]: But that also works into the way you actually produce buildings. I mean, you have a funding cycle, which may start seven years before you start laying bricks. Decisions are made there. And then by the time you actually want to apply lessons learned, you’re so deep into the committed process that there’s no way -- the government doesn’t allow itself to stop.

Comment by [Participant]: OBO ran into the same thing with the standard embassy design, things like the giant atrium that they had between the two big building bars. And we told them – they did about 50 of these things when we were telling them in value engineering workshops this thing is more of a liability from a space use and energy and other things than it is a benefit. And it took them about 50 of them to finally cycle through and say we’re going to take that out, we’re going to make a gallery and take out the atrium because it’s not very useful to us.

Let me mention one other thing that is really bad, and this is the misrepresentation of data. What I’m showing you here are real data from real buildings. What we’re seeing is a preponderance of right now -- primarily, I think, the GSA work, but a lot now is coming out of FEMP in the Department of Energy – they’re normalizing the results from specific buildings and comparing them to normalized national averages. Therefore, you have no clue on a building-by-building basis what’s happened. So there’s no lessons learned. What it does is, it justifies what they wanted to hear.

Comment by [Participant]: Well, it’s even worse than that. They compare it to a database called CBECS, which represents everybody’s buildings. Private sector includes old buildings, new buildings. And, of course, energy performance [i.e., consumption] in that [database] is much higher. What they don’t do because the four agencies –the great thing about four agencies is they all have criteria. They’re not commercial buildings that just depend on the building codes and the design team to develop whatever the performance requirements are. [The agencies] have criteria that you have to meet, and they can move that performance up or down, depending on what the necessity is.

If you compare these new gold and platinum [LEED™ certified] buildings to other GSA buildings, there’s no increased value.

But if you compare energy consumption data from GSA buildings to CBECS data, there’s dramatically increased value. But GSA has been doing good buildings, energy-wise, for many years because they had good criteria. If you follow their criteria, you’re going to end up with good buildings. It’s where the criteria are void that you have issues.