Nelson Street Passive House

Our façade engineering services provide a distinctly advanced and more detailed level of design for the building façade and complements our typical building enclosure engineering scope of services.

Our façade engineering skills are utilized on projects where advanced, custom, or completely new building enclosure systems are being considered. Our role is to pro-actively lead the design and prepare drawings and specifications for these systems so that they are sufficient for the work to be tendered. We consider performance issues beyond heat, air, and moisture such as acoustics, structure, cost, impact of construction schedule, global procurement, risk mitigation, and availability of materials. We work closely with manufacturers and have people available to assist with quality control for offshore systems. Our façade engineering team has always been successful at reducing project costs.

Often the best value that our Façade Structures team can contribute to a project is during the early stage of design. We help our clients explore conceptual design opportunities and support the design team by answering questions such as “Can we actually do this?” “What will this cost?” and “How can we optimize our systems?” Our team is able to assess the interaction between the building enclosure design, energy performance, and ventilation strategies to support the development of advanced and unique building façades. Once we have defined these elements of the project, we are able to better focus our services during the subsequent stages of work.

Measurement and verification (M&V) is the process of quantifying savings delivered by energy conservation measures. We complete M&V studies for a variety of project types, including verifying whole building savings for new buildings, and verifying system-level savings as part of utility demand side management projects or to test new products.

One of the main goals of our energy performance services is to inform the design in terms of energy efficiency and sustainability aspects. This can include providing early stage concept design input, completing model iterations to assess the impact of potential design strategies, comparing energy savings against costs, and modeling potential cost savings measures to optimize the design while ensuring performance requirements are met.

We use whole building energy modeling to ensure code requirements are met, in addition to advising design teams on requirements. This could be for a variety of code requirements, eg. BCBC, VBBL, OBC SB-10, BC Energy Step Code, Toronto Green Standard, etc.