Final presentation

The final review is held in the transit department's public meeting room downtown, because Amir Sadeghi wants the department's staff to see what the city is building. Five teams present in one long afternoon. The panel sits at a horseshoe of tables: the three clients, Sadeghi, Dr. Courchesne and Beatrice Lafontaine; Priya Natarajan for city facilities; Marta Szymańska, Kofi Mensah, Priyanka Sethi and Mei Takahashi for the engineering and performance reviews; Professor Ruth Abernathy from the school; and Tomas Okonkwo, the critic who has reviewed the students since first year. Solberg and Qureshi sit at the side. Each team has forty minutes: twenty-five to present, fifteen for questions. Ingrid's team presents third.

Presenting as a team

An integrated team presents as it worked: together. Solberg's rule for the final review is that every member of the team must present the part of the building they were accountable for, and that no one may present a system as if it were theirs alone. The architect frames the presentation, opening with the building as a place and closing with the record of how it changed, but the engineers present their systems themselves. 'The panel should leave knowing that the structure, the services and the building are one design,' Solberg says, 'and the best way to show that is to let them hear it from five people who agree.'

The team plans the presentation as a story with evidence, and lays it out on five boards and a short slide sequence. The first board shows the building as a place: a long section through the bus stop, the hall, the clinic and the tower, and a view of the corner at six on a January evening, with the hall lit and people waiting inside. The second shows the plans and elevations. The third shows the integration: the aligned grid, the two cores, the stacks dropping straight through the clinic, the section through each type of floor. The fourth shows the evidence for the targets: energy, carbon, cost, homes, accessibility and outage resilience. The fifth shows the decision log, the clash burndown and the open questions.

The presentation

Ingrid opens with the corner. She describes arriving at the stop at seven in the morning in February, with the north-west wind coming along the avenue, and finding a deep canopy, a lit hall and a door that opens into a vestibule rather than straight into the wind. She shows the long section and explains the concept: a quiet tower on a busy base, with the clinic as the calm middle, and one grid and two cores from the ground to the roof. She shows the homes, with light from two sides in all but four of them, and the clinic's entrance on Marlow Street, out of the crowd.

Tomasz presents the structure, beginning with the decision that shaped it: carrying the tower's grid down through the clinic, so that only one transfer girder, over the loading bay, was needed. He shows the encapsulated mass timber tower on its concrete cores and podium, the girder, the piles, and the wind check. He describes Szymańska's peer review and the detail at the cores that allows the timber columns to shorten. Adaeze presents the systems and the energy model: the shared heat pumps and the heat recovery chiller, the stacks aligned through the clinic, the ceiling zones, and the result, an energy use intensity about 10% below the target. Rafael presents the electrical service, the battery and solar panels, the outage rooms and the protected supply for the clinic's medication refrigerators. Hamid presents the site, the stormwater storage under the forecourt, the curb at the stop, and the clash burndown.

Ingrid closes with the evidence and the record of change. The integration scorecard, shown on the fourth board, sets out each target, the result and the margin. The script below reproduces it.

# Integration scorecard for the final presentation: targets, results and margin
rows = [  # (target, goal, result, higher is better)
    ("EUI, kWh/m2", 90, 81, False),
    ("cost, dollars per m2", 6200, 6193, False),
    ("homes", 96, 96, True),
    ("below-market homes", 32, 32, True),
    ("upfront carbon, kg per m2", 350, 330, False),
    ("open clashes at final review", 0, 7, False),
    ("decisions reopened", 4, 3, False),
]
met = 0
for name, goal, res, hi in rows:
    ok = res >= goal if hi else res <= goal
    met += ok
    margin = (res - goal) / goal if goal else 0
    print(f"{name:<32} goal {goal:>7,} result {res:>7,}  {'met' if ok else 'missed'}" + (f" ({margin:+.0%})" if goal else ""))
print(f"{met} of {len(rows)} targets met")

EUI, kWh/m2                      goal      90 result      81  met (-10%)
cost, dollars per m2             goal   6,200 result   6,193  met (-0%)
homes                            goal      96 result      96  met (+0%)
below-market homes               goal      32 result      32  met (+0%)
upfront carbon, kg per m2        goal     350 result     330  met (-6%)
open clashes at final review     goal       0 result       7  missed
decisions reopened               goal       4 result       3  met (-25%)
6 of 7 targets met

The building meets six of its seven targets. The energy use intensity is about 10% below the target, and the cost is just inside it after the target value design moves. The upfront carbon of the structure and envelope, at about 330 kg per m², is about 6% below the target, largely because the tower is timber. The one target missed is the team's own: no open clashes at the final review. Seven remain, mostly clearance and sequence questions that need the builder's trades, and Ingrid lists them with the date each must be closed in the construction documents. Solberg had told the teams that a scorecard with every target met would make the panel suspicious. Ingrid's team shows what it missed and why.

The panel's questions

Courchesne asks the first question: what happens to the clinic when the transit hall is crowded and noisy at the evening peak? Ingrid shows the separations, the clinic's entrance on the side street and its own elevator lobby, and Adaeze shows that the clinic's air is drawn from Marlow Street, not from the hall. Courchesne is satisfied, but asks for the clinic's waiting room to be moved a few metres away from the hall's roof terrace door, which the team accepts on the spot.

Lafontaine asks about the cost of owning the building. Okafor's estimate covers construction, she says, but Greenway Homes will pay to run its part for sixty years. Adaeze answers with the energy model's result for the homes alone, and Rafael with the separate metering. Lafontaine asks for a life-cycle cost estimate of the homes' part in the construction documents, comparing the chosen systems with the baseline. Natarajan adds that the city would like the same for the transit hall.

Szymańska asks Tomasz what he would do differently. He answers that he would have pushed for the aligned grid a week earlier; the team spent a week developing a transfer option it was never going to choose. Mensah asks Adaeze whether the heat recovery chiller will really run as modelled, given that the clinic's hours and the homes' hot water use do not overlap perfectly. Adaeze shows the hot water storage that bridges the gap and admits that the first year of metered data will be the real test. Sethi asks the team to publish the predicted and actual energy use after the first year, so that the next team designing a building like this can learn from it. Takahashi asks about the embodied carbon of the systems and the interiors, which the target did not cover; the team admits it has not estimated them, and adds it to the open questions.

Okonkwo asks the question he asks every team: what is the building's idea? Ingrid answers that it is the corner itself: the place where the city's new bus line meets the neighbourhood the students have been designing for four years, now with a clinic and ninety-six homes above it. Okonkwo says the answer is good but that the tower does not yet say it; it is a well-made tower that could be anywhere. He asks Ingrid to look again at the top of the tower and the corner of the podium, where the building meets the sky and the street. She writes it down.

What integration changed

After the review, Solberg asks each team to write a page on what working as an integrated team changed. Ingrid's team's page lists the decisions that would have been different in a sequential process. The grid would have been the clinic's, and the tower would have needed a transfer floor costing about 140 dollars per m² of the whole building. The stacks would have been offset through the clinic. The clinic's air handling unit would have been on the roof, far from the clinic, with a long shaft through the homes. The window types would have been eleven. The heat recovery chiller would not have existed, because no one discipline owns both the clinic's cooling and the homes' hot water. And the insurer's question about the timber in construction would have arrived after the tender, not during design development.

The page also lists what integration cost. The team spent more time in meetings in the first five weeks than any of them had spent in a studio before. Some decisions took longer to make because five people had to agree. And the architecture took longer to find its form, because the first weeks were spent on grids and cores rather than on the image of the building, which may be why Okonkwo found the tower's top unresolved. Solberg says the last point is the most honest thing on any team's page. Integration does not design a building; people do. What integration does is give the people designing it the information they need while it can still make a difference.

Qureshi ends the studio with a word to the engineering students. Most of them, she says, will spend their careers receiving designs from architects. A few will be asked to join a team at the start. When they are, they should remember this term: that their best contribution may be a question no one else at the table would think to ask, and that the time to ask it is the first week.

Exercise 12: the final presentation

• Plan a presentation in which every team member presents the part they were accountable for, framed by the architect.
• Prepare boards that show the place, the building, the integration, the evidence and the record of change.
• Present an integration scorecard with each target, the result and the margin, including the targets you missed and why.
• Write one page on what integrated design changed in your building, and what it cost.

Self-check

• Could the panel tell from your presentation that the structure, services and building are one design?
• Have you shown what you missed as clearly as what you met?
• Can you say what your building's idea is in one sentence?

After the review

The studio does not end at the review. In the last week, each team revises its design in response to the panel's comments, updates its decision log and writes a hand-over note for an imagined team that will take the building into construction documents. Ingrid's team's note lists the open questions with their deadlines, the agreements reached with each client, the assumptions in the energy model and the cost plan that the next team must check, and the reviewers who should see the documents again. It also records the panel's request for life-cycle costs and the published first-year performance, so that they do not depend on anyone's memory. Solberg reads every note and returns them with one question written at the top: would you be able to continue this project from this page alone?