Building Enclosure Consulting

Question I hear quite often: What kind of architecture do you do?  Building enclosures are fairly similar in all buildings, so my response often confuses and disappoints an interviewer, who expects an answer running along the divisions of residential, public, commercial, healthcare, etc.

However, upon reflection, building enclosures are not really similar in all buildings. Take airports for example; there are some challenges that are unique to airports. Large glazing ratios? Nope. They are common in other buildings as well, and not as spectacularly in defiance of the function of a building, as for example in a museum. Leaky roofs? Nope. They are also common to all projects in the U.S. except for the very few well designed roofs.  So, what is unique to airports? Here are two unique aspects:

1) Air tightness.

Can you recognize the sweet odor of  jet exhaust fumes? Suffocating, isn’t it? Air tightness is a common challenge at airports. Airports resemble Swiss cheese. The building is just a package for installations. The largest, most important, and awkward installation at any airport is luggage conveyors. Remember the time you were in such a hurry, that you checked your luggage at the curbside? It was sucked by the luggage conveyor into the building’s intestines together with exhaust fumes of your cab that was idling nearby, while the driver counted the change. Their serpentines penetrate the exterior building enclosure and interior mechanical zones with very large openings, which let air in and out, leading to energy losses and sucking contaminants and bugs in.

Another challenging area is the gates. Remember the feeling when you were late at the gate, and sadly looked at that closed door to the jet way? This door was the only door that was closed, and was only designed to stop passengers, not air. Regardless how the jet ways are configured, they all share one common characteristic: they are conveniently left open to the exterior by their designers and staff, even in defiance of security requirements. Remember when you were waiting in the long line in the jet way, and looked outside at the exterior stairs leading to the ramp open, where bunch of people in bright safety vest were struggling carrying strollers and gate-checked bags when overhead bins were full? Were you looking through an open side door? Well, this door was kept open by a door chock, which was placed there illegally by the ramp personnel, wasn’t it?

I will tell you a secret: next time you are looking for receptacle to plug your chargers in, just look behind the gate kiosk and sit down on the carpet nearby. Few people have a nerve to plug their laptop in the territory of the gate agent. However, the feeling you may notice instead of the adrenaline shot is the thermal discomfort. This is why the gate agent has her shawl and gloves handy, not just because she ventures through the jet way every once in a while. You may have enough time to look at the gate portal closely: can you see the moisture stains or a fresh paint? Align your eye along some straight line: do you see bowing? These are signs of moisture damage.

The reason is the interior door and the surrounding interior portal are, well, interior. They are not designed as exterior doors and portals should be. However, the average jet way is seldom the same mechanical zone as the building to which it is connected. It may be open to the exterior, air conditioned, or only heated. Often it’s left open to the exterior as described above, and therefore the interior gate portals become de facto exterior envelope. Which is why they sometimes show moisture damage caused by elevated humidity levels and condensation attacking the partition separating two different mechanical zones.

What gets tested gets done. Airports are seldom checked for air leakage, because they are typically interconnected with bridges, underpasses, and overpasses to other buildings, which would need to be plugged by temporary walls. Also, unless their own mechanical fans could be used for pressure testing, their volume exceeds the capacity of even the largest door blowers. Besides, by the time a contractor is done with the building enclosure, the airport is already long in operation.  Getting to the airside is a pain, due to security concerns, and coordinating aerial access even a larger challenge, so it’s only accessed once something conspicuously fails and needs to be fixed right away. After the cleanup, contractors collected their paychecks, management transition has already occurred, no one would endeavor to interrupt operations to conduct air testing. No one would even stick their nose outside. Which is why years later I would still discover unsealed joints and other construction defects, together with plywood sheets and buckets patiently waiting for a wind gust strong enough to be blown away and hit some aircraft or a ramp worker.

Add the inherent challenges of managing air changes at ports of entry due to the door traffic, and you can imagine how high the energy bills run. Imagine yourself getting a monthly utility bill much higher than your neighbor, whose house is smaller, older, and built with less insulation and less efficient HVAC system. You would probably investigate the reason, wouldn’t you?  It seldom happens in case of large buildings.  I often go to investigate such buildings and interview occupants, who are oblivious to spectacular water leaks, in spite of having worked there for years. No, they were not legally blind, only disinterested. Large buildings are often populated by disinterested occupants who feel disenfranchised from any ownership, and this attitude may be found surprisingly high in their management hierarchy.  Energy bills can be eventually passed onto and covered by somebody else, e.g. airlines and taxpayers, which is why nobody really cares.

2)  Noise Resistance.

Remember the last time you couldn’t figure out the gate change announcement? What is the new gate number? It was drowned in noise, wasn’t it? Were you able to finish a conversation, until this freaking airplane turned its engines off?  Insufficient noise resistance is a common challenge at airports, and is associated with high exterior noise levels generated by aircraft. My cheap aviation headset gives me 40dB noise attenuation, and this is more than the newly designed U.S. airport skin offers to its workers and passengers.

The typical airport is over glazed; glazing is expensive to begin with, and even more expensive to make soundproof. Perversely, this is good news, because it receives enough attention to be actually engineered and sometimes even tested. On the other side, all opaque walls are much cheaper and easier to make soundproof, and in most cases they would just need to be made heavy enough.  The old trick used by facade engineers in Europe is to add layers of cement board. That seldom happens in the U.S. Why? I get a blank look in response, when I flag it in the design stage. Architects in the U.S. for the last ten or so years finally learned how to tell heat bridging; however, they yet have to catch up with the rest of the world on the noise bridging and other aspects of building performance. It’s not something they are taught at college here.

Have you ever tried yodeling in an airport? Try it, when you are left in an empty airport after hours, like I sometimes am. The interiors spaces are huge and their significant volume exacerbates reverberation times. They could be designed for sound attenuation by choice of interior materials, but again they seldom are. The choice is typically left between materials within reach that are easy to maintain (hard, smooth surfaces almost invariably characterized by poor acoustic performance), and a painted gypsum board everywhere else. Have you noticed there is a carpet everywhere at many airports in the U.S.? You can test it with a cup of a decaf coffee, which is dyed with strong dark paint to resemble the actual coffee. Many carpets won’t survive such a test. Why would airports install something that is such a pain to maintain? And why airports abroad are not so often carpeted, with flooring surfaces ranging from stone to wood? I can only think of three reasons. Carpets become necessary, because of the poorer overall acoustical building performance, and because checked luggage allowance in the U.S. is so large that it’s typically rolled on a floor as opposed to carried in hand or over the shoulder like everywhere else. Rolling casters are noisy on hard surfaces, while rolling them on a carpet only causes fatigue. Also, have you ever slipped and fell on the hard surfaced floor? (The opening scene of my slip and fall in our commercial was filmed at the airport in Tampa after hours. And yes, I do all my stunts.). America is a highly litigious environment, which may explain the added cost of maintenance.

So, how do I respond to the question posed at the beginning ? My most typical response is that I only do high-rises, which is not true, but works well to fend off any looming requests to diagnose a pool or roof leak in a residential house of the asker.

It’s  very rare to find accurate information on Internet, so I am very happy to announce my recent  finding of this article about thermal resistance: it’s titled “K-Value, U-Value, R-Value, C-Value, Understanding the Value in All These Values,”and written by Gordon H. Hart P.E. 

Those of you who attended my Thermal Engineering Seminar may remember how much fuss I make about getting it right.

This morning I received an email from Amazon, officially informing me that a $0.99 payment  was posted to our account. That’s not much money, because Amazon does not allow a seller of a video to set its price (I am not kidding, I discovered it only after we set it up).

However, this email reminded me about our DVDs on Amazon.com. We were never able to set up a working Video on Demand (VOD) system, and I never had the time to pull these videos from Amazon after I discovered how they screw up a seller.

Therefore, going to Amazon.com  is your best bet if you want to see videos online, and the deal Amazon offers to viewers is hard to beat.

We still sell DVDs directly, if you can wait couple of days for a physical delivery.

Duration: 1/2 hour, although your results may vary.  The educational seminar runs for approx. 1/2 hour running time plus introductions and presentations. The original source seminar consisted of 90 slides.

Comments: Greening Building Envelopes discusses sustainability of building envelopes the way nobody has yet examined the subject before. This is as different from the average bromidic sustainability seminar, as it gets. Kaz will focus on the most overlooked scientific aspects of energy improvements, and show lessons learned pertinent to the hot and humid climate.
Today, the real-estate and construction industry focuses on two new buzzwords: “Green” and “Building Envelope.” The industry also looks for savings, and what can be more economical and greener than prolonging the technical life of the existing structures? We will present several case examples of troubleshooting and preserving value of building envelopes of large buildings, which, often built wrong from the start, are typically the most expensive and most maintenance-demanding part of a building. We will show successes and lessons learned in reducing energy use and addressing persistent failures. We will also address relevant energy regulations pertaining to the existing buildings in Florida.

Audience: Physical plant managers, engineers, perhaps even architects. Hot and humid climate only.

Learning objectives: 1. Often Overlooked Secondary Consequences of Energy Upgrades . 2. Combining Energy Upgrades with Renovations.3. Diagnosis of Building Enclosures: 4. Tools of the Trade. (MacGyverizm).

Table of contents

Trailer. We never produced a trailer for this DVD.

Self Reporting Form: Never produced. This seminar was never intended for architects.  Learning units may be arranged on individual basis for an additional fee, and would require a competency component (filling an email questionnaire after you watched the video).

GENERAL DESCRIPTION: The seminars focus on areas typically overlooked by architects and engineers in process of building envelope design. The topics are chosen on basis of observations derived from both forensic investigations of failed assemblies and peer reviews of architectural documentation.

The  seminar captures the draft slideshow version  from spring 2012, and includes only Kaz’s part. It does not include the Reid’s part, which contained 5 slides. The greening seminar was probably the most changed seminar, and the latest version barely resembled this video. Going forward, we may digitize this seminar as well.

Version.  It’s  one of the early versions from year 2012, which was prepared by Kaz for coordination with Reid. We never had the time to update this DVD later.

Packaging:  May vary. We will probably switch to cardboard sleeves soon.

How Can I get it? We  sell them directly, as well as they will be available through third-party re-sellers soon. They are currently available for download.

Price:  We also encourage a purchase of several DVDs at a discount.If you plan to purchase, please approve the applicable terms and conditions. When you press the “Buy Now” button, you will be taken to the checkout webpage.

UPDATE: As of 6/15/2017 we are out of stock, and we are currently too busy to burn more. Send us an email and we will add you to the waiting list. Do NOT buy it – your order will be cancelled. Sorry.

If you are like me, with the end of the year approaching, you probably think about meeting your continuing education requirements.

It’s been a while since I posted the information about my seminars, and available educational DVDs.   Here is the update.

The following “canned” seminars are available both in person and on DVDs:

1) Principles of Facade Design

2) Curtain Walls

3)Aspects of Building Enclosure Design in Hurricane Country: Hot and Humid Climate

4)Thermal Engineering in Building Envelope Design – Canned Seminar on DVD

5)3D Analysis of Cold Bridging in Curtain Wall Design

How Can I get them? We  sell them directly, as well as they will be available through third-party re-sellers soon.

Price for the package of five DVDs. You can also purchase individual DVDs following their individual links above.

If you plan to purchase, please approve the applicable terms and conditions. When you press the “Buy Now” button, you will be taken to the checkout webpage.

Here are two more bulk  purchase options:

1) pick your choice of any three DVDs EXCEPT FOR THE THERMAL SEMINAR and pay only $50. You need to write their names or numbers in the message window, otherwise we won’t know what to ship…

2) pick  your choice of any three DVDs including the thermal seminar and pay only $85.You need to write their names or numbers in the message window, otherwise we won’t know what to ship…

Seminars coming soon on DVDs:

6) Greening Building Envelopes

7) Façade Engineering With Glass

8) Curtain Wall Detail Digest

9) Storefronts, doors, and other operable glazed partitions.

These seminars are almost ready, with enough materials just waiting to be edited. If you are interested in any particular seminar, please let me know! I need an encouragement to put aside enough time to make those DVDs. Otherwise, they are just pushed down in priority on my to-do list, as they did for the last several years.

We can probably arrange  learning units for organized groups which would include a competency component (a test). Please reach out to us with your specific circumstances, so we can find out.

Customers generally prefer having Kaz in person, due to the different dynamics, better understanding, and interaction with the speaker. English isn’t his first language, so it’d  take some time to adjust your ears, which is easier when you see him talking and can stop him to ask clarifying questions. Also,  live seminars are continually developed and updated as the author remains active in the field and adds new stories or replace the old ones in constant pursuit to better clarify the subject, while fossilized DVDs captured early versions of his seminars.  Contact us  to schedule a live seminar.

Here is a fragment of Kaz’s seminar recorded in Chicago, where he talked about noise resistance: https://youtu.be/PFswqfpZIME

And a fragment of Kaz’s seminar recorded in Chicago, where he talked about flood resistance: https://youtu.be/gObhaTfBD6U

And a fragment of Kaz’s seminar recorded in Atlanta, where he talked about design delegation: https://youtu.be/J6-CerehQFc

I will speak this Thursday 4/24/2014 at the BEC Fenestration Symposium in Raleigh, NC.

All those who plan to come, please read this article about fenestration. It’s my old article about Glass Coolness published in The Construction Specifier in April 2013. We will talk about this stuff!

See you there!

Literature pertinent to the topics:

JANUARY. Kaz will probably begin the year 2014 by speaking at the Facade Tectonics Conference in Los Angeles on January 11th. He will reveal how to save money on 3D thermal simulations, by specifiying them right and making early improvements. Not smart for someone who makes a living on 3D thermal insulations! If you are a curtain wall specifier or provider, this seminar may save you a lot of trouble and money. Kaz gained a reputation of addressing the most-frequently-forgotten areas avoided by other speakers, so it’s going to be interesting!

APRIL. BEC at the Research Triangle invited Kaz to speak about fenestration. Someone heard him speaking about skylights at the BEST Conference two years ago, and wanted to have him address architects in North Carolina. We get it a lot.

SUMMER. Kaz will speak in Poland – the details to be determined.

Please contact us if you would like to have him speak at your event! We are developing the 2014 schedule now. Since early 2013, he severely limited his speaking engagements, and the same reasons will prevent him from planning more than few events in 2014. It”s first-come first-serve! You stand a better chance, if you need him somewhere where he is planning to be anyway.

I am currently in process of setting up the online video-on-demand system, which would make the facade engineering university videos available for an immediate download. It will require a paid site membership in order to view the videos.

The idea is to replace the current system of producing physical DVD discs, which are still available via our DVD website, and hopefully would speed up the process. The videos would be much shorter and focusing on one subject at the time. Both video resolutions are 640 x 480, which limited their sizes to the manageable size ~100MBs.  DVDs were  720 x 480 (NTSC), while the original size I use in my seminar slideshows is 1440 x 900.

I placed two videos for free download: two case studies, which are the part of the thermal engineering seminar; please kindly let us know how it worked out for you! They were recorded two years ago for the Thermal Engineering DVD, which I never had the time to finalize and publish. Since then, I refreshed the seminar, so the only part left is the case studies.

I also look forward to your suggestions regarding the pricing structure and the effective  means of protection against piracy. (The way we tackled this issue with DVDs was displaying the purchaser’s name and email address on the screen; however, it required burning them individually, elevating their cost.)

Another benefit that would accrue to all of us, is the existing DVD owners would get the membership to their DVDs free of charge, which would allow them the access to the updated versions, which are guaranteed to them free of charge for two years, and it would save me the trouble of sending them the updated DVDs.

Case Study 2 – 2D Thermal Analysis of a Mullion (length 11 minutes) It contains 29 slides, which constitutes roughly 8% of the entire Thermal Engineering Seminar.

This video describes the process of improvement of a horizontal mullion of a curtain wall, which was found substandard at the submittal stage. It shows a number of variations and their effects on the thermal performance.

Case Study 1 – 3D Thermal Analysis of a Curtain Wall Bay (length 7 minutes)  It contains 21 slides, which constitutes roughly 3% of the entire Thermal Engineering Seminar.

This famous case of a structural curtain wall was also described in my article published in JBED  in 2010.  Please fill the form below to receive this free PDF (It contains 4 pages,  size 0.5 MB).

[email-download download_id=”7″ contact_form_id=”501″]

Update on 10/10/2013: To all of you who asked about the promised videos, we are still busily trying to find a working software to make it work, as you could see by recent testing messages inadvertently posted on our Facebook site. We already tried  two WP plugins (Wishlist Member plugin and WP Secure Player plugin, and spent days with their customer support, to no avail. Any suggestions as to the PPV VOD solution would be welcome.

I am getting many speaker invitations in spite of doubling my speaker’s fee this year (I already thanked the excellent Buckley School, for making me a more expressive speaker). However, the time is tight, so I may not be able to speak at more than two events this year.

This is why I need to poll you to find out where you want me to come: please kindly speak up.

The preference will be given to the places either 1) I have not been yet or 2) where I am going to be anyway or 3) the places I like.

This year according to my rough estimate, I will be: 1)in Ohio some time soon, 2) in India in March, 3) in New York City in April, 4)in Poland in June/July and 5)in South America in August, 6) in Colorado in September, 7) in Bahamas almost every week.

Please kindly indicate: 1) the location, and 2) the subject. Please kindly either pick the subject from the topics  listed in our Facade Engineering University or indicate a new one.

Shoot me an email at info@b-e-c(dot) info or post a comment below.

I promise I will carefully review the propositions and get back to you.

Curtain wall supports are important to understand because they have a large impact on crucial architectural dimensions and perimeter transitions. (Read the rest of this entry…)

The dew point meter in the exploratory opening and in the exterior wall affected by high humidity damage to interior millwork

It’s not always rain leakage, we find in our investigations as facade doctors. We sometimes find no traces of water intrusion, as opposed to water condensing inside, where it can damage moisture-sensitive materials, and contribute to microbial growth i.e. mold and mildew. In such a case, (Read the rest of this entry…)

Freeze-thaw failure of decorative rod connections on a brand new aluminum curtainwall facade.  The  defect affected approximately 10,000 connections.

One of the chief reasons of weatherproofing failures of facades is the thermal stresses and associated movements in excess of  seals’ elastic capacity. This is particularly true for metal curtain walls, because of (Read the rest of this entry…)

My visitors are always surprised by tons of books and folders on my bookshelves.  It took me many years to collect my library of facade engineering books and publications, and since I consider it an indispensable tool, I would like to share some of it here, for your benefit.

Glass and Glazing

Glass Construction Manual ISBN 3764360771 (Birkhauser, 1999); by Christian Schittich,Gerald Staib, Dieter Balkow,Matthias Schuler, Werner Sobek (Read the rest of this entry…)