Sorry Compositepro, no offense is intended to you, but I found the lecturer to be a pompous condescending ass selling a load of malarkey that I don't buy, or want to be forced to buy, in any case. I was only able to last ten minutes into his lecture, and that while I was doing some other stuff, but from that I got the impression that he thinks he's smarter than everyone else and, by his own admission, is making money "fixing" the problems he, in his brilliance, is able to identify.
But, it has always been thus with Chicken Little's. If I can convince you that the sky is falling and I -- and only I -- am able to prevent it from falling, well, there's money to be made there, to say nothing of the ego-stroking I get by convincing myself and others how much smarter I am than they.
This very type of thing is part of what steered me into structural engineering. Gravity is utterly unforgiving and tolerateth not such bullspit. This discipline is largely (though certainly not completely) free of such snake oil salesmen.
Sorry to respond in such a manner but I believe my thoughts on the topic as are as worth as hearing as his. Further, I resent the direction that people such as he are taking our industry and I, peon though I am, try to push back a tad on occasion.
If the rest of his lecture was different from the first ten minutes then I will apologize and retract my statements but absent that I will stand by them.
And by the way, I don't *want* a completely airtight building - it sounds unhealthy and unpleasant to me.
Alright, I'll eat humble pie here. I've now watched most of the rest of it and had to say it was not at all what I expected from the first 10 minutes. I'll try to remember to give something a fair shake in the future before criticizing. It was very interesting and thought-provoking and he seems to have plenty of real-world examples to back up his claims. My initial impressions were wrong.
"Gravity is utterly unforgiving and tolerateth not such bullspit"
Sounds to me like you didn't really listen, or perhaps did not understand.
What does limiting the thermal shorts and air leaks in a building have to do with gravity? What does making intelligent decisions regarding the mechanical technology inside the building, to actually control the air exchange (instead of letting it happen "naturally" through stupid holes left in the skin) have to do with making it unhealthy or unpleasant?
The guy was pretty much on the mark - nothing about LEED or ASHRAE standards really control how energy efficient a building design will be.
Building Science Corp puts out really good info - but I agree with Archie's initial impression as far as personality. lstiburek is generally condescending in both his writing and lectures. Unfortunately he reinforces the stereotype of engineers lacking social skills. His repeated suggestions that architects are stupid probably doesn't help in getting his points across. How about the point in the lecture where he randomly points out that a guy in the audience is bald? I'm sure that guy is happy he came to this lecture.
I think our posts overlapped by about 10 or 15 minutes. Sorry, Mr. Archie. But you started it
I really liked some of his closing comments in the Q&A segment at the end - that if we started holding public/commercial building designers accountable for the BTU/sq ft/year numbers, i.e. made the utility bills public, we could see improvements in energy efficiency grow by orders of magnitude, in much the same way as we have seen such growth in residential buildings.
I took most of his remarks as being light-hearted jabs at an academic community, most of the people he was jibing with seemed to be old friends and colleagues.
