Natural Sciences Building, SUNY Old Westbury

For this addition and rehabilitation, Atelier Ten is supporting the project’s ambition to meet and exceed the State University’s stringent energy and carbon use reduction goals. The gut renovation project includes teaching and research wet labs, a vivarium, a greenhouse, offices, conference spaces, classrooms, and other support spaces.

SUNY requires that all deep energy retrofit buildings meet the program-specific energy use intensity (EUI) target (calculated as 97 kBtu/ft2/yr for this project).

In order to assist the Natural Science Building meet the State University Construction Fund Directive 1B-2 requirements, Atelier Ten performed a whole building energy analysis to benchmark the Basis of Design against the SUCF EUI goals and to identify several energy efficiency measures such as high-performance envelope design, high-performance heat recovery in labs and vivarium, wrap around coils, adiabatic humidification and optimized geothermal well field. Cumulatively, these measures help the project achieve a 17% energy reduction with an EUI of 84 KBTU/ft2/yr and a life cycle payback of 6 years compared to the first cost of the Basis of Design.