Speaker Series: High Performance & Resilient Precast Educational Facilities

High Performance & Resilient Precast Educational Facilities

The evolving construction industry, recent code changes, increasing sustainability requirements and challenging economy are just some of the factors increasing demand for safe, healthy, high performance educational facilities. Today’s schools are more than just buildings; they are interactive learning environments. They are gathering places. They are safe havens for the community. This presentation will discuss recommendations on how to design and build high performance, sustainable and resilient schools, with reduced life-cycle costs. The benefits of prefabrication and off-site construction will be identified in the context of precast/prestressed concrete architectural and structural building solutions. And case studies will highlight high performance attributes - including optimization of numerous versatile, efficient and resilient building applications.

Learning Objectives:

1. Define high performance structures and identify key attributes and benefits of high performance, resilient and sustainable learning environments for educational facilities.

2. Learn how prefabricated, integrated architectural and structural precast concrete design solutions contribute to life safety features including: fire safety, storm resistance, acoustics and indoor air quality.

3. Share how off-site construction and prefabricated manufacturing with natural, low-embodied energy materials contribute to life cycle design, accelerate construction, reduce site disturbance and waste, reduce transportation of materials and provide easier coordination of trades.

4. Explore aesthetic options including embedded thin brick applications for scale and performance in insulated sandwich wall panel rain barrier systems.