Reworking Wenatchee: High Performance in a New & Existing Building

Abstract

Building operations consume almost half of all the energy produced in the United States each year. Construction and materials, alone, consume approximately six percent of the total energy use of the United States. As the issues of climate change have become more important, there is an imperative for architects to look for new solutions. New high performance design strategies have set goals for lowering buildings impacts but these design strategies have predominantly focused on operations, in the future, a more holistic approach to design for carbon reductions is needed. This new method could be considered a total carbon design approach. Building reuse in combination with high performance design strategies can greatly lower, both the short term and long term carbon impacts of a building. This thesis is an exploration of total carbon design which examines the initial carbon impacts of construction through life cycle assessments along with operational impacts through the use of EUI and operational carbon emissions. This thesis explores these issues through the design of an adaptive reuse project along with a new high performance addition were the advantages and disadvantages of these distinct kinds of projects can be fully realized and explored through a combination of architectural solutions as well as data driven design.