What’s the quickest way to light up a dark classroom? Usually, the answer is turning on the fluorescent lights, but University professor G. Z. “Charlie” Brown champions a different option: Build a better room.
A professor of architecture and director and founder of the University’s sustainable building workshop, Brown was honored nationally earlier this month for his work.
Brown received the U.S. Green Building Council’s Leadership Award at the organization’s national conference in Atlanta for his work with sustainable building design studies and “daylighting,” the strategic use of architecture to minimize energy use by maximizing the use of sunlight.
Brown can pare down the concept of daylighting to the level of a simple question.
“Why design a building that you need electric lights on if you’ve got enough light outside to light the building?” Brown said.
The solution is almost as simple.
“Just because you have windows doesn’t mean you have daylighting, because you have to turn off the electric lights.”
Brown incorporated the technique into the design of the Lillis Business Complex on campus, which opened in October 2003.
Chris Murray, associate dean of external relations for the Lundquist College of Business, has an office in Lillis and said working in the “greenest business school in the country” has been a pleasure.
“The daylighting systems are very cutting edge,” he said. “You walk through this building and the use of light in this building is fabulous.”
Professor of Sports Marketing Lynn Kahle, who worked on the building’s planning process, said using sustainable architecture does not mean making sacrifices.
He found some of the technology in his office, such as lights that turn off automatically if there is no motion in the room, required little adaptation but made a big difference.
“It actually requires less work (than the old building). Previously, if I had left the lights on they would have probably been on all night long,” Kahle said. “In the classrooms the rooms detect the right light levels. It’s very efficient in terms of creating an atmosphere where you want to teach.”
Windows in Lillis are strategically placed to bring the most light into rooms, sloped ceilings are used to direct reflected sunlight and technology adjusts electric lights to appropriate levels so energy isn’t wasted, Murray said.
By using sustainable technology, Lillis Business Complex is 45 percent more efficient than required by building codes, but buildings can easily be designed to be even more efficient, Brown said.
“Some of the classroom stuff we just did is 70 percent better than code, at a lower cost,” he said.
Brown has provided energy design management and daylighting consulting services on projects throughout Washington and Oregon, and architects who have used Brown have found they can save as much as 60 percent on electricity costs for lighting in their buildings, according to a University press release.
Brown became interested in sustainable architecture during graduate school, when he worked with a professor interested in using solar energy in buildings, he said.
“That was also during the first oil crisis (and) between those two things, I decided it was important,” he said. “I had a lot of interest in the environment, and I saw that we were in the process of destroying it, and why we were destroying it – energy production being the primary reason – so I tried to do something about it.”
Brown joined the University’s School of Architecture and Allied Arts faculty in 1977 and founded the Energy Studies in Buildings Laboratory (ESBL), which focuses on understanding how buildings and related transportation and land-use systems determine energy and resource use, in 1985.
The labs in Portland and Eugene also develop new materials, components, assemblies, whole buildings and communities with improved performance, according to the lab’s Web site.
Currently on the drawing board is a set of blinds that stores the energy used when they are closed to re-open the blinds automatically hours later. The prototypes are intended to keep people from forgetting to use the available daylight.
There has recently been a growing interest in sustainable and energy-efficient architecture, Brown said, but that doesn’t mean sustainable architecture is ready for long-term, mainstream acceptance.
“I’ve also seen this before; just because there’s interest today doesn’t mean there’ll be interest tomorrow,” he said.
Brown said he was grateful for the acknowledgment of his work by peers, but said ultimately what matters is constructing better buildings.
“People talking about the value of sustainability is, of course, important. Doing something about it is different,” he said.
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