Deep-Energy Renovations of Significant Historic Buildings: Electrification and Envelopes

In this session we will examine deep energy renovations of four buildings, representing four distinct periods:
- 1912 neo-classical municipal office building
- 1917 Italian renaissance revival church converted into a community center and affordable housing
- 1970 brutalist office building transformed into a hotel
- 1982 postmodern office building

The session will discuss the new embodied carbon goals of the LEED v5 BD+C New Construction and Major Renovation certification, and will focus on the practical challenges of electrifying all building systems in historic structures and retrofitting them with super airtight, highly-insulated exterior envelope systems. We will show how these design goals are essential to create Zero Emission Buildings, and how designing for zero emissions now avoids having to do costly and carbon-intensive future renovations. These projects will show exterior envelope sections, address energy recovery ventilation, airtightness, and blower door testing. We will discuss opportunities and challenges specific to each of these projects.

The buildings include Hotel Marcel, a LEED Platinum hotel originally designed by Marcel Breuer; The Portland Building, a LEED Platinum office building originally designed by Michael Graves; 26 Court Street, a LEED Platinum-target City of Boston office building originally built in 1912; and The Blessed Sacrament Church, originally built in 1917.

As embodied carbon goals and energy codes increase, and as we move towards designing Zero Emission Buildings and carbon-sequestering construction, an increasing number of new projects will seek to renovate existing structures. Case studies will highlight how these strategies are replicable for other abandoned and underused buildings.

We will also discuss ways attendees can advocate for updates to Federal Interior Department historic building standards to accommodate modern energy codes. We want to maximize the reuse of buildings which hold significant community value even as we improve their efficiency to meet today’s energy-efficiency targets.