Have you seen Executive Dean Amy Hillman’s video tour of McCord Hall? This link takes you to a comprehensive tour, taped in December, where Dean Hillman explains how each area will be outfitted to serve the needs of graduate students, faculty, staff and recruiters. In-person tours are also beginning. Yesterday I tagged along on a tour Mike Nixon did for W. P. Carey MBA and Undergraduate staff — from the left in the photo below are: Shawnna Pomeroy, Brennan Forss, Melissa Stark, Lorraine Protocollo, Mary Latino, Kim Heffernan and Jennifer Wells. It turned out to be a good photo op, so I created an album of some of the things we saw. I always learn something new …

Access to the South Wing classrooms will be an outdoor walkway, one of my favorite features of McCord Hall.

The point of this tour was to show staff around the areas where they will be working. Mike Nixon answered a lot of questions about the MBA office quarters

The walls in McCord Hall will be light — the base color is Dunn Edwards’ Silver Bell. Throughout the building, however, you’ll see accent colors that will bring out the tones in the carpet and furniture. Here is the palate, highlighting the splayed windows in the office area. The colors are (from left) Dark Celery, Yellow Marigold, Flame, Grape Juice and Champion Cobalt …

The dominant architectural feature in the  conference room on the third floor is our tilted columns. Below left is the office next to that conference room, where the other treetop makes its appearance. Below right, a welder works on the steel supports for the shade screens on the northeast side of the South Wing.

Behind the group in this photo is the patio on the fourth floor of the South Wing. Check out the great views facing north!

Next we visited the North Wing, where we saw the team rooms and a large area dedicated to recruiting. This is the third floor corridor. Lots of good natural light in this building!

Here the welders are working on the staircase in the North Wing. Encased in glass, it will add to the open feel of the building. This photo doesn’t show much of the stairwell, but I love welder shots — the light is so fantastic.

How comfortable you feel in a building is to a large extent the result of the temperature of the air. If it’s too warm, you feel sluggish and sleepy: kids fall asleep in classrooms and staff gets less done. But air that’s too cold is also disruptive. Shivering is distracting and at some point it’s hard to type.

But temperature is only one aspect of the indoor environment. Air quality matters, too. McCord Hall is going to be a very comfortable and healthy building – based on air temperature and quality.

“McCord Hall will be probably the healthiest and most efficient building on campus,” said Mike Nixon, W. P. Carey’s director of facilities and space planning. “The indoor air quality will surpass any other building at ASU, and once we get used to it we won’t be happy anywhere else.”

McCord Hall has an under floor displaced air system. The floors are actually two feet above the slab. Running through that space, called the plenum, are cable trays and conduits for electricity – and fresh cooled air. Fans in each wing push air down from the air handlers on the roof to the plenums under the floors, and up through grates at our feet. Understandably, the plenums are sealed so that they are airtight.

Among the many advantages of the system is that more fresh air will circulate through McCord Hall than buildings cooled and heated by the older conventional systems. The building occupants should feel more alert, and since we will be breathing less recycled air, perhaps we’ll share fewer colds!

How it works

DPR’s Lew Laws explains that a conventional system distributes air cooled to 55 degrees through overhead ducts. At 55 degrees, he said, the air will fall to the floor – simple physics. The air will pick up heat from the load, which is defined as anything that generates heat in the space — including people and computers. Once warmed, the air will rise again, to the return ducts which move it back through the system to be re-cooled and re-circulated.

In McCord Hall, the air handlers — those large silver structures on the roof — will cool the air to 65 degrees. It doesn’t need to be 55 degrees because it will arrive at the room under the floor instead of overhead: it doesn’t need to be cold enough to fall. Propelled at a low velocity by the fans, air will travel up through diffusers in the floor, where it will encounter the load: us, and our computers. It picks up our heat, and – like conventional systems – it rises to the return ducts in the ceiling. Sensors will detect air temperature, and will adjust the diffusers in the floor to let in more or less air.

Lew says that McCord Hall was designed with an under floor displaced air system for three reasons: 1) air quality; 2) flexibility; and 3) aesthetics.

The benefits

McCord Hall’s under floor system circulates warmer air than the conventional systems to achieve the same comfort level for people. Because the air in the system starts at 65 degrees instead of 55, we can provide more fresh air for the same amount of energy used as a conventional system.

In Arizona, 10 percent of the air in most buildings is fresh from outdoors; in California the code requires 20 percent. McCord Hall will run at 20 – 30 percent, and in some seasons the indoor air will be 100 percent fresh. Lew said that the number of days we’ll be able to run on 100 percent outdoor air is greater because we have more 65 degree days in Arizona than 55. (On those few days when it’s very cold outside, heaters will warm the air in the system.)

As for aesthetics, the system reduces the need for overhead ducts, which means ceilings can be exposed, giving the architects more design freedom.

A chilling tale

The way ASU produces air conditioning is itself an interesting story.

In the heart of campus is the Central Plant, a large industrial-looking building between Murdoch Hall and Life Sciences. Lew explained this is where water is chilled to about 42 or 43 degrees, at night when institutional electricity rates are low. That’s important, because 90 percent of the funds spent on HVAC systems is for the operation of the chillers.

The chilled water is stored in six 1 million gallon tanks under the northwest corner of the SRC field. (Interesting point: a huge drainage pipe, laid just before we broke ground for McCord Hall, lies under the south end of the field. So, the fields are probably safe from development for a very long time!)

During the day, cold water is drawn from the tanks in response to demand from the cooling systems in our buildings. Chilled water is pumped from the tanks (which are literally next door) to the roof of McCord Hall, where the air handlers are located. The water flows through coils of pipes, and as air from the returns and from outside circulates around the coils it loses heat. Fans force the cooled air down into the building to the plenums, through the diffusers into the rooms and back to the return ducts which deliver the now warmer air to the air handler.

Bottom line

Everyone involved in the McCord Hall project expects the HVAC system to perform very well. According to Mike Nixon, “if it does what we believe it will, every new building on campus will be cooled this way.”

That was the headline on a Financial Times slideshow of bold new business school architecture. McCord Hall was one of 11 new business school developments featured by the leading worldwide business news source.“We needed functionality, but beyond this we wanted to make a statement,” said Dean Robert Mittelstaedt.

Winter break brings relative calm to campus – and opportunity to the W. P. Carey School’s construction projects.

It started today as DPR, the general contractor on the McCord Hall project, fenced off the corner of Normal and Lemon and started breaking up the pavement. Normal Street is open to the public only as far as the eastern permit entrance to the Apache Parking Structure, and Lemon is open only to the Visitor Lot entrance.

Basically, our “kiss and drop” zone has been taken out of play temporarily. The new drop off zone will be wider, allowing cars to pull off the street with room enough for the safe loading and unloading of passengers and deliveries. In fact, the new trees are already in place. The cross walk is being redesigned as well.

Say good bye to the mock ups at the base of the BAC stairwell. They puzzled us at first, until we learned they were built so that the contractor, architects and school officials could try out finishes and other details. They’ve served their purpose and will be broken up and sent off for recycling.

The fencing will extend west, encompassing the citrus trees on the south corner of BAC. Construction of the new patio means that those trees – sadly – will go. Fortunately we are getting news trees in their place – ash trees – as well as flowering ground cover. The bike racks were moved too – with bikes still attached! They are now located next to the Spirit sculpture.

Also during winter break, DPR will be removing concrete around the easternmost fountain on the Dean’s Patio. You may have noticed that the concrete in this area of the patio was plain gray, in contrast to the exposed aggregate finish on the rest of the Dean’s patio. That’s because it was temporary — the plans anticipated that there would be a fountain at the new building. When the Dean’s Patio was renovated a year ago, the pipes for the fountain were “stubbed out,” so that additional pipes could be laid someday. “Someday” turns out to be winter break! In the photo you can see the white lines, marking where the concrete will be cut.

By the time classes start on January 7 everything should be back to normal. Meantime, “calm” will not be the right word to describe the corner outside our building!

Remember the annual fall essay in grammar school? Teachers assigned us to write a page or two about our summer vacation. As I watch students arriving on campus I’ve been wondering what they think of McCord Hall. Clearly we were busy during our summer “vacation.” The new building looks very different than it did last spring when students were wrapping up classes and moving out for summer jobs or travel. When spring semester was ending, scaffolding still supported the floors of the South Wing and the tilted columns were obscured.

This is what students are seeing this week: the scaffolding is down, brick is going up on the east face and the form work is in place for the exterior stairway that will take you to the second floor.

Look deeper into the photo above and you can see the North Wing obscuring most of the Memorial Union. In April the North wing was barely “out of the ground,” as you can see in the photo below.

Back in April I climbed the stairs of the Computing Commons for a view of the North Wing from the third floor patio. This snapshot looks back at the same part of the building in the picture above.

I went back to the same spot the other day, and this is what I saw. The North Wing has risen to its full height and the bridges that connect it to the South Wing are coming together.

All along I’ve favored the view from the south; the quirky tilted columns are so eye-catching. But the east-facing side of the north wing is a powerful statement. The team calls it the prow, for good reason: it looks like the prow of a ship, inexplicably beached in the middle of the desert.

It will be another year before McCord Hall is completed, but every day it’s getting easier to imagine what it will be like when it’s open.

For a brief time we’ll be able to see and admire the full height of the tilted columns on the Lemon Street end of the South Wing. The scaffolding that had been supporting the weight of the building has been removed, so we can see the “trees” that are bearing the weight of the cantilever from ground to crown.

Beau Dromiack of RSP Architects, who supplied us with the photo, left, explained that the scaffolding supported the weight of the floors and roof of the cantilevered part of the building while the concrete slabs cured, and could not be removed until every slab was ready. If you recall from Beau’s article about post tensioned structural systems, the floors and roof of this building gain additional strength from the steel cables – called tendons – that run through the concrete. Once the concrete is 75 percent cured, the cables are tightened. “The tensioned tendons apply a compressive force across the slab which increases its strength without the use of more concrete,” Beau wrote.

Once the South Wing topped out and the tendons were tensioned, the clock started running. The scaffolding supporting the roof came down first, followed by that supporting the fourth floor and third floor. Finally, the scaffolding that rested on the ground was removed.

Now you can experience what the design architects at Kohn Pedersen Fox Associates intended: standing near the SRC, you have an unobstructed view under the cantilever, across what will be the patio and into the heart of ASU’s business district. (Lew Laws photo) Entering campus will be a pleasant walk.

The original design didn’t include the columns, but the structures that would have been required to enable the cantilever to “stand” unsupported were pretty costly. So, KPF added a whimsical design element: tilted columns. Soon the branches on the second, third and fourth floors will be blocked from clear view forever, by the studs, the Densglass drywall, some windows and eventually the brick that will form the building’s skin.

The upper parts of the columns will always be visible from inside the building, where they will be stunning architectural features in a conference room and an office. But now is your chance to see them as trees. Take a break and walk over for a look. It’s worth it.