Atriums: Asset or Liability to High Performance Laboratories?

Laurie Canup, AIA, NCARB, LEED AP BD+C, THA Architecture

As designers and owners strive to meet energy efficiency goals, atrium spaces are emerging as a common component within high performance buildings. Atrium spaces provide daylight, views to the outside, pathways for natural ventilation, and create thermal buffers. They also create a communal connective space in a building that can be a desirable design element.

As passive solutions become more critical, it has become commonplace in Europe for smoke control systems within atrium spaces to be naturally ventilated. If stack effect can provide environmental natural ventilation, it also has the potential to solve smoke control. More importantly, laboratory buildings require careful pressurization controls to be in place to ensure hazardous exhaust doesn't cause harm to building occupants, even when the building goes into emergency. Passive smoke control does not compete with the negative pressures required in laboratory spaces. In the U.S., however, most jurisdictions prefer the prescriptive code path of a mechanical smoke exhaust system. Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) modeling can provide the necessary information about smoke behavior to help understand whether passive solutions will be effective. The dilemma is that CFD modeling has shown that within certain geometries, prescriptive smoke control systems don't always perform as intended - leaving a smoke layer that does not allow safe egress.

Early in the design of University of Oregon's Lewis Integrative Science Building, an atrium was proposed which reduced building energy loads by creating a primary circulation zone that acts as a thermal buffer, does not require conditioning, provides daylighting, and a pathway for night flush which is enhanced by the thermal mass provided by the structure. It was also an elegant solution that encourages the scientists to interact and puts science on display – both being primary goals of the project. A passive smoke control system was proposed to the local jurisdiction to save maintenance costs and to avoid locating the negative pressure of the atrium adjacent to negative pressure lab spaces. The fire marshal agreed that if CFD modeling could demonstrate that natural ventilation was safe and effective, it would be accepted.

The surprising result of this process is that if the project had forged ahead implementing the prescriptive code path without the detailed exploration of CFD modeling, the design may not have functioned safely in the event of a fire. Ultimately, a performance based design solution for the smoke control system was required. This session will explore the benefits offered by atrium spaces and share lessons learned at the Lewis Integrative Science Building.

Biography:

For the past 15 years, Laurie has dedicated her career providing service to public clients. Typically Laurie provides technical leadership on laboratory projects with a focus on building performance and system integration where she works closely with the design team and owner to guide the project's sustainable design initiatives. Laurie's passion for sustainable design led her to THA Architecture where she has developed expertise integrating high performance solutions for her clients. She believes working in integrated team environments brings dynamic opportunities for innovation and implementation of effective and maintainable long term solutions. Laurie is one of THA Architecture's Integrated Design Leaders where she provides in-house expertise serving a variety of projects. She was the lead Project Architect on the University of Oregon's new Lewis Integrated Science Building which on track to achieve LEED Platinum and exceed baseline building energy code performance by nearly 60%.

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