I chaired the 2002 Olympic Sustainable Facilities Committee. When GSBS pursued the Speedskating Oval for the Olympics, we brought in ARUP from their New York and London offices. They were doing a lot of sustainable work. The day we interviewed for that project, Kevin Miller and I walked in and said, “We’re going to design the world’s fastest sheet of ice.” It was an interview like every other interview, and everybody on the other side of the table was going, “I can’t wait to hear THIS story.” By the time we’d finished, we talked about the environmental aspects of the project and how we would be able to control temperature, humidity and ice temperature. I think we enticed them. They thought there might be a chance to create the world’s fastest sheet of ice. Wouldn’t that be something to offer in the 2002 Olympics? We were awarded that project, and we did create the world’s fastest sheet of ice. The Oval was one of the first pilot LEED-certified buildings in the world, and 20+ years later, it’s still the world’s fastest sheet of ice. Talk about the structural system; that was a huge part of doing it right. Sometimes it’s recognizing other people’s great ideas. We initially designed a building that had the skin on the outside of the building. It enclosed a huge quantity of space. We were meeting one day and evaluating structural systems. This was a really great moment! One of the structural designs we were looking at was the cable system, where the structure was on the outside of the building. It was the most expensive structure; it was the most expressive structure. We were thinking, “We’ll never get this; we will never achieve this.” Our mechanical engineer from ARUP was paying really close attention and doing calculations of the volume of the space. He said, “If we put the skin on the inside of the structure, we reduce the volume of this building by about 50%. The mechanical system gets smaller, the electrical system gets smaller and the amount of energy to run the building is a lot less. I think will even out.” When we value-engineered that idea, we ended up with a lower-cost building with a more expressive structure that was able to achieve the world’s fastest ice. Share some of your favorite projects. To date, GSBS has completed nearly 40 LEED-certified buildings. Another really great project is the Salt Lake Public Safety Building. We had plenty of sustainability credentials to pursue that building. We also had really good law enforcement and public safety credentials, and that came together for us. That building is a LEED Platinum building. It is a net zero building. The community loves it, as well as the police and fire who are its occupants. Sometimes the stars align and everything comes together. I’m especially proud of putting together the team for the Museum of Natural History. Mike Stransky, through his involvement as an AIA Regional Director and national board member, was key. He knew many great architects in the country. He met Joe Fleisher, an architect from James Stewart Polshek’s office. We became great friends as firms. Joe did a peer review of our firm and made some important observations that helped us correct our course in a number of ways. I toured the Rose Center for Earth and Space at the American Natural History Museum in South Central Park, which was Polshek designed. When the museum came along, I knew exactly who to call. We put together a great team and pursued and won that project. We’re still working on the museum. We’re working on a plan right now to electrify the museum, taking all the carbon-based fuels out of the museum and anticipating it will be net zero. How has architecture evolved since your early days? When I was in architecture school, everything we did was by hand. There was an inkling of computers. The beginnings of computerized graphics happened at the University of Utah. When I was in electrical engineering at the University of Utah, I ran into people like Evans and Sutherland. I credit Abe Gillies for seeing early on that there were ways to automate processes. We were an early adopter of pin bar drafting (which was really the beginning of computerized drafting) even though we were still drawing with pencils and pens on mylar at the time. We would draw in layers: the footing and foundation is a layer, the floorplan is a layer and the ceiling plan is a layer. Then, we would put all those layers together and run sets of blueprints from those layers. It’s exactly what we do on a computer today; it’s just automated. All the layers are there; Salt Lake City Public Safety Building 10 REFLEXION
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MTg3NDExNQ==