July 8, 2009

Green Building

LEED developer makes switch to engineer’s world

Ian Theaker brings Canadian Green Building Council experience to Halsall Associates

PETER KENTER

correspondent

The Toronto offices of engineering consultant Halsall Associates Ltd. are located on the 23rd floor of a mid-town Toronto office building, and that suits Ian Theaker just fine.

“When you look at the city from this height, the buildings start to merge with the trees,” he says.

Theaker has spent the past five years working with the Canada Green Building Council, serving as the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) Technical Manager in Vancouver. What brings him more than 3,000 kilometres east from a not-for-profit setting to one of the country’s top engineering firms?

“I work on five-year plans,” says Theaker. “I’d worked with the Green Building Council to help introduce LEED rating systems and their associated policies and programs into Canada, and have just completed work on LEED Canada for Existing Buildings: Operations and Maintenance, and LEED Canada for Homes, and I felt it was time to try something different.”

Theaker says he was attracted to Halsall because the company offered him a unique opportunity to combine work on extensive real-world green projects with a creative team-based approach. The company is currently helping to develop green standards for developments in Regent Park in downtown Toronto, Waterfront Toronto, and for the communities of Pickering and Caledon, for example. “I don’t just want to think conceptually about these things, but return to getting my hands dirty in real-life projects,” says Theaker.

“Halsall is really doing it, and I’m a go-to-guy for its green building projects and initiatives. I’m impressed with Halsall’s engineers, architects and technicians in their twenties and thirties who are coming to me with projects that automatically consider factors such as the microclimate of the setting as part of the basics of design. We even have a gender-balanced green team, something you don’t see everywhere.”

While some groups are pushing hard for seismic shifts in environmental regulations and Canadian culture, Theaker takes a longer view. “It took 40 to 50 years for people to go from throwing everything into the garbage to widespread recycling,” he says. “You can’t push people any faster unless you’re running a serious dictatorship. Better to point out the economics that ensure that those who do good do well.”

Theaker notes that green building is still in its infancy. While a few owners, builders and designers have a well-developed understanding of the concepts involved, others are still stretching their minds around new ideas.

“Take passive heating,” says Theaker. “The sun offers plenty of energy to that can be used to heat buildings and provide hot water, but some people are fixed on symbolic nods to green building, like a photovoltaic panel that will convert solar energy to electricity—which will then be converted to electricity to heat buildings with a significant loss of energy. The ideas are getting through, but the knowledge on how to leverage those ideas isn’t well-distributed yet. People are still designing key building elements such as form and elevation, then telling the engineers: ‘Now make it green.’”

Theaker says the country still has a long way to go in such basics as providing effective insulation for buildings and understanding the heat flow of structures in the Canadian climate.

“We still have a lot of low-hanging fruit to pick,” he says. “Insulation is invisible and just isn’t as sexy as a wind turbine or a photovoltaic panel, but we haven’t come close to realizing all of the savings there, particularly as energy prices rise and the cost of carbon is built into energy use.”

Theaker says it’s inevitable that “green building” will someday become just plain “building,” because today’s novel design and construction techniques will have been absorbed into the mainstream. “That could be 10 to 25 years from now,” he says.

But, just as the steam engine helped to accelerate the Industrial Revolution, Theaker warns that some building industry players could be left behind if they don’t consider the ramifications of the environmental revolution unfolding in front of them. “The guys who were building the steam engines were at the top of their game at one point,” he says. “The companies who kept building them are gone.”

When green building becomes de rigueur, what will keep the Ian Theakers of the 22nd century busy? “Society will have developed a whole new set of problems that will affect design and construction,” he says. “It ain’t going to be the same set of problems we’re squaring off against today, but engineers will still be there to help solve them.”

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