In a ceremony on August 6th at AIA Portland’s Center for Architecture, builder Hammer & Hand unveiled the three winners of the perFORM 2015 Building Design Competition:
- Winning Entry ($3000 prize): Jon Lund, Narek Mirzaei, and Luis Sabater Musa, University of Cincinnati. See their project boards here.
- Runner-Up ($1500 prize): Sang-Oh Jo, JungA Hong, and Do Yoon Kim, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. See their project boards here.
- Runner-Up ($1500 prize): Eduardo Gandara, California State Polytechnic University Pomona. See his project boards here.
The perFORM competition, now in its second year, encourages architecture students and interns to explore the nexus between high performance building and high design. As a builder that partners with architecture firms on every project it builds, we launched the competition to help advance the energy performance training of emerging design professionals and to demonstrate that performance and design are inherently complementary.
This year’s competition challenged students and interns to design a net zero energy, mixed use building for a site in the heart of Portland’s Eastside. Entrants and jurors evaluated the energy performance of design concepts using perFORM’s energy verification spreadsheet to determine if a given design’s energy generation from onsite renewables like solar PV panels would exceed its energy consumption on an annual basis: net zero energy building. With this energy performance prerequisite determined, the jury then judged entries based on the criteria of resourcefulness, replicability, and beauty.
“It’s exciting to see the competition pick up momentum quickly,” said Hammer & Hand’s Zack Semke, coordinator of perFORM. “With fifty entries this year, participation in the competition doubled compared to last year. Two dozen academic institutions from across North America were represented, plus as many private architecture firms.”
The winning entry by Jon Lund, Narek Mirzaei, and Luis Sabater Musa, the “3 Green Bars Building,” impressed the perFORM 2015 jury with its strong urban and environmental response, well considered proportions and design restraint, and emphasis on building energy performance as the path to Net Zero Energy building.
“This team took the time to really understand the biggest sources of energy consumption in buildings of this scale and then focused on reducing those loads with passive and creative programmatic solutions first, before adding big solar arrays to the roof,” said perFORM juror Gladys Ly-Au Young, principal at Seattle-based Sundberg Kennedy Ly-Au Young Architects. “They did all this while also respecting the site and using simple, elegant proportions on the buildings.”
The perFORM 2015 jury included:
- Randy Gragg, Director, John Yeon Center
- Jim Graham, Principal, Graham Baba Architects
- Sam Hagerman, Owner, Hammer & Hand
- Cory Hawbecker, Associate and Sustainability Coordinator, Holst Architecture
- Gladys Ly-Au Young, Principal, Sundberg Kennedy Ly-Au Young Architects
- Judson Moore, Project Architect, Works Partnership Architecture
Peter Keyes, Associate Professor, Department of Architecture, University of Oregon served as this year’s perFORM advisor.
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