Winners of 2nd perFORM Building Design Competition

The winners of the perFORM 2015 Building Design Competition were announced by Hammer & Hand at a ceremony held at AIA Portland’s Center for Architecture.

• Winning Entry: Jon Lund, Narek Mirzaei, and Luis Sabater Musa, University of Cincinnati.
• Runner-Up: Sang-Oh Jo, JungA Hong, and Do Yoon Kim, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.
• Runner-Up: Eduardo Gandara, California State Polytechnic University Pomona.

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, Hammer & Hand 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.

Per Hammer & Hand’s Zack Semke, coordinator of perFORM,

It’s exciting to see the competition pick up momentum quickly. 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 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.

Per perFORM juror Gladys Ly-Au Young, principal at Seattle-based Sundberg Kennedy Ly-Au Young Architects,

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. 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

The perFORM 2015 Advisor:

• Peter Keyes, Associate Professor, Department of Architecture, University of Oregon

Hammer & Hand is a builder that partners with architects on commercial and residential projects in Portland and Seattle. The firm specializes in design-driven construction but has no designers on staff, so collaboration with architecture firms is written into its DNA. H&H is honored to work with the architectural community to help propel the evolution of building practice.