Utah Construction and Design announced their selections for this year’s Most Outstanding Projects. The 2021 winners include three Architectural Nexus designs.

The category of Community Impact goes to Salt Lake County Kearns Library.

The Arch Nexus SLC office takes the Green/Sustainable category.

The Laboratory/Research most outstanding project is ARUP Phase 4, submitted by Okland Construction.

Stay tuned for more images and a recap of each of the award-winning projects in the December issue of UC&D.

Architectural Nexus would like to thank the organizations that provide the opportunity to work on these projects and more. Arch Nexus would also like to express gratitude to everyone who took part in bringing these projects to life.

Arch Nexus is honored to be recognized as the Architectural Designer in several project awards from ENR Mountain States. The 2021 Best Projects competition encompasses a seven-state region with a panel of 10 judges from all areas of the industry.

Taking home the award for Best Small Project (Under $10M) is the Architectural Nexus Office Remodel in Salt Lake City, with General Contractor, Jacobsen Construction Co.

In the Health Care category, the Huntsman Cancer Institute Proton Therapy Center in Salt Lake City received the Merit Award also with Jacobsen Construction Co.

The winner of Renovation/Restoration award is United States Cold Storage Warehouse, in Syracuse, Utah with General Contractor Big-D Construction Corp.

When presented with the best small project award, Senior Principal Architect and Director of Design, Robb Harrop, stated “We set a high expectation for ourselves to do something better than ‘less bad’. We are thankful for the partners who helped us achieve that vision.”

Hexcel Corporation has broken ground on a new, 100,000-square-foot facility that will be home to a state-of-the-art laboratory in West Valley City, Utah. Once completed in late 2022, scientists and researchers will collaborate with customers on the latest composite technology developments for aerospace, space and defense, and industrial applications. It will be the company’s largest center for innovation and product development in North America.

The new site is also designed to serve as a customer care center, allowing groups to gather in the lobby and conferencing areas, then proceed along a looping path through the laboratories to tour the processes in development at the Research and Technology center.

At the groundbreaking ceremony, Hexcel Chairman, CEO and President Nick Stanage said when the Center opens, “you will be surrounded by everything it means to be a leader in advanced composites technology. You will see high-tech labs and cutting-edge research and testing equipment.”

Architectural Nexus is pleased to provide the architectural design for this exciting addition to Utah’s business landscape.

Arch Nexus SLC received LBC Ready designation today; a first under version 4.0 of the Living Building Challenge. This designation is achieved through successful completion of an initial audit, a step in the certification process for projects pursuing Living certification. It’s based on performance predictions – with ongoing water and energy monitoring over a 12 month period. This means that Arch Nexus SLC is now in the final stretch to become a Certified Living Building!

AIA Central Valley is hosting its 10^th year of Experience Architecture. This annual public-outreach event is dedicated to facilitating greater transparency with the public in how architects create our built environment, how architecture impacts our daily lives and to highlight the region’s unique architectural identity.

This year, Arch Nexus and the City of Sacramento are collaborating for the Experience Architecture event: Celebrating Sacramento’s Living Certified Projects: Now & In the Future.

Did you know that Sacramento’s Arch Nexus office building is both the first Living Certified re-use project in the world, and the first Living Certified project in California? Attend this panel discussion to learn more about incredible groundbreaking projects in Sacramento and the aspirational Living Building Challenge, a program that sets bold, yet achievable, goals that provide impactful and much-needed outcomes for our environment and the climate.

Panelists from Arch Nexus include Patty Karapinar, AIA LEED-AP BD+C, WELL-AP and Brian Cassil LEED-AP BD+C. This free, virtual learning experience will be held October 7, from 12:00 to 1:30 PM Pacific time. Click here to register. To view all of the Experience Architecture events, visit www.aiacv.org/exparch.

Architectural Nexus is proud to announce that Kelly Holland has become our first Certified Passive House Consultant (CPHC). The PHIUS+ certification process is a quantifiable building performance standard. It uses specific climate data to optimize energy efficiency within an explicit occupant comfort level. Every project striving for PHIUS+ certification is required to have a CPHC.

As part of the design team, the CPHC guides a project towards certification with an understand the major building science principles of low-energy buildings, including:

• High levels of continuous insulation
• An extremely airtight envelope
• High-performance windows oriented and optimized for project-specific conditions
• Balanced ventilation
• Minimal space conditioning

According to PHIUS, “Passive building principals offer the best path to Net Zero and Net Positive buildings by minimizing the load that renewables are required to provide.” This connects to the Arch Nexus focus of Inspiration, Regeneration, and Stewardship, as passive buildings are incredibly resilient and require less operational costs than traditional, energy code minimum construction. The CPHC certification adds to the Architectural Science node as it is a critical piece of a low-energy net positive future.

Congratulations Kelly!

If you picked up the Labor Day issue of the Salt Lake Tribune, you may have found a comprehensive look into Utah’s greenest regenerative design. Arch Nexus SLC is the first commercial building in the Intermountain West aiming to achieve Living Building Certification. With the piece See inside Utah’s first ‘living building’ — Can this approach help save the world?, Tony Semerad paints an incredible overview of why this matters and how it can be achieved, offering a “beam of hope” amid the worsening climate crisis.

Ornately designed solar panels installed on the rooftop and parking lot gather all the energy that Arch Nexus office dwellers inside need — and more. The same goes for water, which is collected as rainfall then used, recycled and treated on-site with appealing indoor wetlands known as living walls. The building seems to breathe through open doors, windows and sumptuous courtyards, digitally adjusting to its surroundings and connecting inhabitants with natural daylight, fresh air, copious greenery and vibrant art.

More fundamentally, the 30,909-square-foot, two-story edifice, built as a warehouse in the 1950s, now functions completely free of carbon emissions, at a time when buildings represent roughly 45% of global greenhouse gases.

Learn more about the Living Building Challenge and Arch Nexus SLC, click here.

Commissioning on the Arch Nexus SLC Living Building Challenge pursuant project is complete and the first month of energy data shows the the project is off to a very good start. The predictions for energy usage and energy production are very close to the actual use and production. The predicted results for July 2021 were 34,672 kWh for energy production and 22,016 kWh for energy use. Actual results were 37,708 kWh for energy production and 21,068 kWh for energy use. A lot of hard work went into modeling energy behavior for the renovated office and it is rewarding to see that those efforts have created a reliable prediction for net positive energy use.

Architectural Nexus congratulates Cheryl McMurtry for her recent recognition by SMPS Sacramento. The goal of the committee is to connect the A/E/C industry to what is happening in their relevant client markets. Cheryl has served as the chair for SMPS Sacramento over the last year and just received a “President’s Award” based on her service.

Cheryl excelled in raising revenue through sponsorships, increasing participation and improving content; an especially difficult task during a time when nearly all events were suddenly virtual. At the SMPS Sacramento annual meeting, chapter president, Cameron D. Hagans, stated

There is one particular Chapter member that I would like to recognize with the President’s Award, which is chosen at the chapter president’s discretion. We get to choose a member who has provided the support, effort, expertise, energy and enthusiasm in service to the chapter.
As it says on the award “In recognition of your extraordinary service to the Sacramento SMPS Chapter and Members”. One of the long-standing goals for our Chapter was how to expand our membership to expand beyond transportation and public works services firms. How do we provide value and market insights for architecture, planning, environmental, and construction firms. The key ultimately depended on providing diverse industry programs to reach outside of our normal clients and panelists and broaden our perspective of the Sacramento regional market.

Arch Nexus President, Kenner Kingston, also understands the value that Cheryl brings to any team she’s a part of. Whether she is mentoring younger professionals to understand that marketing is a way for them to take control of their career, or developing long-term strategy within firm leadership, she is a trusted advisor by all. I am grateful for all she does for both our firm and for our professional community.

Arch Nexus is vying for a place in the SXSW Edu 2022 lineup, to share inside information on regenerative design principals, workplace applications and practical solutions for climate change. These ideas have been stress-tested in a post-pandemic hybrid office, located in a vulnerable climate. This presentation will take the form of a case study of that regenerated office environment.

PanelPicker voting is now live! This gives the online community an opportunity to vote (and comment) on the ideas they believe are the most creative, innovative, and relevant for the 2022 event. Promote regenerative design by upvoting POST-SUSTAINABILITY: THE REGENERATIVE WORKPLACE to be a session at SXSW 2022.

Voting closes August 26^th and selections will be announced mid October.