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So we are all very excited around here about one of our upcoming projects. In fact, I feel a little guilty being the first to get to post about it! For now we’re calling it our Discovery Center but a few other names are bouncing around that might be more fitting. The Discovery Center is going to be built in West Sacramento to serve a variety of functions. We plan to use it as a sales center (aka, “Gallery”), but more than that, as an opportunity to educate the community on the history of this neighborhood, the future plans for the area, and the green features and building concepts that we intend to use as well as bathroom and kitchen options and all that fun. To make it a more approachable space and something that is going to have multiple functions for the community, we are trying to work out the logistics of putting a café in there too. Fun. Our heads are buzzing with ideas we’d love to see incorporated into this space.

One of the things we are most excited about with this building is the chance to go all out with our green aspirations. Our progress with green building will be incrementally better with each project; there are so many innovative green technologies and products that we will not be able, for one reason or another, to incorporate into some of our housing projects, so this is a really exciting exercise in seeing just how far we can go.

Renner Johnston at MNA is working on this building for us and sent me the concept sketch above for our mechanical engineer’s investigation. The features shown here are as follows:

• Chilled Beams w/Ground Water
• Radiant Floor w/Solar Hot Water
• Photo Voltaic System
• Cooling Pond
• Night Ventilation
• Solar Chimney

This solar chimney idea is a very simple, but very effective way to exhaust hot air out of the building by using the sun to heat the top of this “chimney” causing it to pull the hot air through.
Chilled beams are a cooling system that are used widely in the UK but are still lagging here in the US. Chilled beams typically operate using finned elements through which water is passed to cool the surrounding air- the air is supplied to the room using diffusers.

So, this is what we’ve got so far, but we’ve only been thinking mechanical and passive solar so far, next will be building type (wood, steel, green sandwich board…), then we’ll get into the materials and systems and finishes! How fun is this!? We’re chuffed!

Vanessa