Sewickley Tavern Attains World's First Accolade

Studio St.Germain is proud to announce that its latest project, Sewickley Tavern, has officially been awarded RESET Air certification, achieving the highest internationally-accepted standard for indoor air quality. It is the first restaurant in the world to achieve the designation which was created specifically to target human health. Sewickley Tavern is located in the Borough of Sewickley, northwest of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

The RESET Standard is a sensor-based and performance-driven data standard and certification program for the built environment. It uses technology to assess the performance of buildings and interior spaces during their operational phase, with a focus on optimizing human health and sustainability.

“In a post-COVID environment, this system ensures that staff and customers are benefitting from the best possible indoor air management technologies available. It demonstrates that the owners are doing everything possible to minimize or prevent any exposure to undesirable indoor pollutants, toxins or pathogens,” explains Nathan St.Germain, Principal and Founder of Studio St.Germain. Air quality in all areas of the restaurant, including the kitchen, is continually monitored and actively managed in real-time to ensure that the indoor air is safe and healthy for both employees and diners.

To achieve the RESET standard, St.Germain specified six indoor and outdoor monitors which were installed in HVAC components and occupied spaces. These monitors collect air quality metrics in real-time and transmit them to a cloud-based analytics and management platform. A three-month data collection audit was required to demonstrate that RESET threshold levels were being met consistently. Sewickley Tavern has received both of the two air quality building certifications offered: Commercial Interior, and Core & Shell.

As the first building of its typology to achieve the standard, Sewickley Tavern is providing critical data that will help build out future guidelines for indoor air quality in restaurants and other consumer-occupied spaces. "RESET was created to improve the health of everday people by using technology to make indoor spaces healthier for occupants. By implementing RESET in a restaurant for the first time, Studio St.Germain is leading the way and showing that the standard is accessible and practical for even small, independent businesses,“ said Anjanette Green, Director of Standards Development for the RESET organization, and co-author of the RESET Standard.

Studio St.Germain specializes in high-performance building. Along with the air quality system, the firm designed sustainability features at Sewickley Tavern that includes a photovoltaic system, acoustical plaster ceilings, noise-measuring sensors, and smart building infrastructure to monitor and manage building operations.

A Creative Stimulus for Restaurants

I have a soft spot for restaurants. Working in restaurants took me from my first job as a teenager to buying my first car and paying for college. Now, as an architect, restaurants are a source of business and one of my favorite industry groups to work with. So, when I talk about restaurants, it’s personal.

It’s been heartbreaking to see an industry I care so much about being hammered by the COVID-19 crisis. “Building to give back” is my business motto, and this industry is one that I particularly want to give back to. So this summer, my team and I decided to create an Outdoor Design Strategies plan for the Village of Sewickley. It was one small step I could take to help the restaurants in our local community.

Looking to the future, I realize that our plan is only going to help for as long as the weather holds. In the same way, this year’s economic stimulus packages and SBA loans offer time-limited effectiveness, leading industry pundits to predict doom and gloom. However, there are good reasons to be hopeful, and they come in the form of creative pivots. These unconventional responses to challenging circumstances can make all the difference to sustaining a restaurant business.

Where Do We Go from Here?

The unexpected reality check of the last 6 months has revealed that the old model of the restaurant business cannot work in a pandemic. And - if it is true that our habits will be forever changed by what we are going through now - it may not work again, ever. As many restaurants have discovered, a payroll loan covering a few weeks or months cannot offset long-term lost revenue, worsened labor shortages, and a disappearing market. Even restaurants that have survived are facing lowered capacity and a nail-bitingly uncertain future.

Still, there are a few restaurants who are thriving right now. They are the restaurants that have chosen to see opportunity in drastic change and have creatively adjusted their business strategies to make those changes work. It can take different forms: whether it’s a popular regional Pittsburgh sandwich shop like Primanti’s, using well-timed email promotions to capitalize on cook-at-home fatigue, or chef Daniel Humm of Eleven Madison Park, who adopted artist Willem de Kooning’s mantra, “I have to change to stay the same,” and shuttered his fine dining establishment to feed front-line workers in New York City by partnering with corporate donors and nonprofits.

Two weeks ago, The New York Times published this article featuring a variety of ways to re-think the economic and business model of restaurants, with an emphasis on shared responsibility and a worker-centered approach. But what if we looked beyond economics and food, to the bigger role that restaurants could play in supporting and sustaining human health for every individual who spends time in their restaurant environment? This means reinventing the entire cooking-dining-visiting experience to one that actively considers and promotes holistic human health from an environmental standpoint.

This is a category of creative pivot that offers real hope for a very different future. It starts with something now familiar, food-focused sustainability, and takes it further to encompass the restaurant’s entire indoor environment and its impact on human health and well-being. It goes far beyond sustainable food practices.

In today’s world, we spend 90% of our time indoors. The combination of light, air, temperature, humidity, and sound in which we envelop our bodies creates a cumulative effect on our physical and mental health. Taken together, nothing impacts our health more.

As an architect, I spend a lot of time thinking about buildings, and our concept of buildings as shelter. The more I learn and practice high-performance building design, the more I realize that we as a society are missing one of the most important technological capabilities that is right in front of us. With the advent of building science, sophisticated sensors, and cloud-based analytics, our buildings now have the capability to take care of us. We no longer need to look at building maintenance as an operational cost center. Now we can see it, use it, and leverage ROI on it, as an asset.

The Business Case for High-Performing Restaurants

Restaurant owners may initially be resistant to what they perceive as the prohibitive costs of new technology required to make a building “high performing.” While it is true that some of the technology involves additional expense, the expense is incremental. The foundational systems are already built in to every restaurant project budget. Upgraded ventilation, filtration, sensors and monitoring technology can be added with only fractional cost increases while maximizing building performance gains. And the increased public attention to air quality and restaurant spaces may open up channels of funding that have not existed before, whether through government, NGO’s, or even engaged customers.

Decades of data have proven that human performance, health, and perceived sense of wellbeing all increase with better-ventilated indoor spaces. Poor ventilation has been associated with increased absences and higher instances of asthmas and respiratory infection, as well as fatigue, irritation, and headache.[i] In the food service sector, indoor pollutants from cooking on commercial stoves (PM, VOC’s, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons) have been linked to kidney inflammation.[ii]

Compounding air quality factors, restaurants face noise as a critical environmental factor. Excessive noise has repeatedly been cited as the top complaint in restaurants[iii], and something known as the Lombard Effect explains why: people unconsciously raise their voices to be heard in loud surroundings, which compounds the noise already affecting a crowded space. Research shows that loud, chaotic environments decrease people’s ability to taste and enjoy their food.

Loud dining environments can actually depress a person’s ability to taste salt and sweetness, and lessen sensitivity and perception of crunchiness.[iv] Overall, people’s reactions to background noise parallel their reactions to food: if they dislike the background noise, they tend to dislike the food, and vice versa. Taken together, environmental factors like air quality, noise, temperature, and light are the most common reasons that customers choose never to return to a restaurant.[v]

The bottom line is that any investment a restaurant makes to improve indoor environmental factors like temperature, air quality, and acoustics will reap a research-backed return on that investment in the form of better customer opinions, repeat business, and healthier and safer employees.

What the Future Could Look Like

Already, some of the world’s most forward-thinking organizations like the International Well Building Institute and RESET are now piloting restaurant-specific programs to expand the reach of their standards beyond the traditional early-adopter building types such as office buildings and schools.  

Just last month, our Sewickley Tavern project officially became the world’s first RESET-certified restaurant, achieving the highest international standard for indoor air quality. Why is it the first? We were able to achieve this milestone because the right combination of elements came together: a sustainability-minded owner who prioritized human health and well-being combined with the firm’s High Performance Program which made the technology decisions simple. Together, we are showing the world how very attainable a high-performing restaurant building can be. All it took was commitment, information, and action. Now, the Tavern provides the best air-quality any restaurant can offer, along with an energy-efficient, comfortable, and acoustically-sensitive environment. They have created a unique competitive advantage for a post-pandemic market.

As a high-performance building, Sewickley Tavern supports its employees - who spend the most time in the restaurant - with improved concentration and focus, lower blood pressure, and improved respiratory health.[vi] In turn, those healthier employees deliver increased productivity, lowered absenteeism, and better service, which improves the customer experience and increases likelihood to return. Most transformative of all, the Tavern helps the whole community by providing a quiet, toxin-free, restorative environment that benefits all who work, visit, and dine there.

Any forward-thinking restaurant would do well to explore similar strategies to position their business for success in the future. Even after the pandemic ends, concerns about air-quality will run high. Restaurant workers and immuno-compromised individuals will always be at increased risk for respiratory problems. Diners will be more aware and informed about the air they breathe and the aerosols it contains.

Someday in the not-too-distant future, the technology that measures and ranks air quality and other environmental data points will be need-to-have, not just nice-to-have, for every business. Awareness is growing and it is just matter of time until the surge of demand hits. And then, healthy indoor environments will be a baseline expectation of every customer who walks in the door.

The restaurants which embrace the creative pivot and start now, even in small ways, will be the ones positioned for success when that day comes. They can get themselves smart with resources like the High Performance Program. They can consider applying for loan or grant money to start making improvements to their environmental systems. They can engage their customers in the conversation. Most importantly, they can use drastic change as a catalyst for dramatic growth.

And Henry Hitchings writes in The Economist’s recent essay on why people go to restaurants, “The restaurant remains a symbol of freedom. It enshrines the idea of choice – the existence of choice, that is, and our capacity to make choices.”  For restaurant owners, making the choice to build a business that sustains human health and wellness is not just the right thing to do, it is a competitive advantage, a talent attractor, and a smart investment in the future health of their own business.

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[i] World Health Organization 2009; and  Allen, Joseph G., Piers MacNaughton, Usha Satish, Suresh Santanam, Jose Vallarino, and John D. Spengler. “Associations of Cognitive Function Scores with Carbon Dioxide, Ventilation, and Volatile Organic Compound Exposures in Office Workers: A Controlled Exposure Study of Green and Conventional Office Environments.” Environ Health Perspect 124, no. 6 (2015).

[ii] Singh, Amarnath, Ritul Kamal, Mohana Krishna Reddy Mudiam, Manoj Kumar Gupta, Gubbala Naga Venkata Satyanarayana, Vipin Bihari, Nishi Shukla, Altaf Hussain Khan, and Chandrasekharan Nair Kesavachandran. “Heat and PAHs Emissions in Indoor Kitchen Air and Its Impact on Kidney Dysfunctions Among Kitchen Workers in Lucknow, North India.” Edited by Zhanjun Jia. PLOS ONE 11, no. 2 (February 12, 2016): e0148641. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0148641.

[iii] Consumer Reports, “Top Restaurant Complaints and Worst Offenders,” https://www.consumerreports.org/restaurants/top-restaurant-complaints-and-worst-offenders/ September 20, 2016. Zagat, “2018 Dining Trends Survey: Highest Tippers, Social Media Habits and More,” https://www.zagat.com/b/2018-dining-trends-survey-highest-tippers-social-media-habits-and-more.

[iv] A.T. Woods, E. Poliakoff, D.M. Lloyd, J. Kuenzel, R. Hodson, H. Gonda, J. Batchelor, G.B. Dijksterhuis, A. Thomas, “Effect of background noise on food perception,” Food Quality and Preference, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.foodqual.2010.07.003.

[v] “A Look at the Relationship between Service Failures, Guest Satisfaction, and Repeat-Patronage Intentions of Casual Dining Guests”, Alex Susskind and Anthony Viccari, Cornell Hospitality Quarterly 52(4) 438–444.

[vi]  Allen, J., MacNaughton, P., Laurent, J. G. C., Flanigan, S. S., Eitland, E. S., & Spengler, J. D. (2015). Green Buildings and Health. Current Environmental Health Reports, 2(3), 250-258. doi: 10.1007/s40572-015-0063-y and Daisey, J. M., W. J. Angell, and M. G. Apte. “Indoor Air Quality, Ventilation and Health Symptoms in Schools: An Analysis of Existing Information.” Indoor Air 13, no. 1 (March 2003): 53–64. doi:10.1034/j.1600-0668.2003.00153.x.

School Yourself on Indoor Air Quality As Students Return

Schools across America have been scrambling this month to make decisions about whether to bring students back to the classroom for the fall. Instructional models range from full-time in-person instruction to hybrid in-person/online to online only.

If you are an administrator, educator, school board member, teacher, or parent, you’ve been talking (and hearing) a lot about risk mitigation options that include social distancing, mask wearing, lower density spaces, plexiglass partitions, and deep cleaning.

But there’s one highly effective mitigation factor – indoor air quality – that often is missed or minimized in these conversations. Why? Maybe because it’s invisible.

The risk factors we see are the obvious ones – door handles, keyboards, desks, smartphones, other people. Every time we leave our homes, we make decisions about what to touch (or not), or how close to stand to each person we see. We tend to forget the risk factors we don’t see, like the air around us.

But neglecting indoor air quality, especially in schools, is a potentially fatal mistake.

Indoor air quality influences the health, comfort, and productivity of every individual in a school building. It is one of the most important and often-overlooked factors in mitigating COVID-19 risk. And it also happens to be extensively researched and linked to lowered risk levels for disease transmission and improved health, wellness, and cognitive performance. Consider:

• Lower ventilation rates have been linked to more missed school days caused by respiratory infections.[i]

• Students’ attention processes are significantly slower in classrooms with high CO2 levels and low ventilation rates. Researchers observed a 5% decrement in “power of attention” in poorly ventilated classrooms. Students have been observed to experience greater fatigue, impaired attention span, and loss of concentration.[ii]

• In a study of 100 U.S. elementary classrooms, positive associations were observed between ventilation rates and performance on standardized tests in math and reading, with researchers estimating that for each single unit increase in ventilation rate (1-L/s/p) student scores rose an average of 2.9% and 2.7% in math and reading, respectively.[iii]

By the time a student graduates from high school, she or he has spent 15,600 hours inside a school, an amount of time second only to that spent at home.[iv] Yet many schools are under ventilated, and more than 25 million children – nearly 50% of America’s students – attend schools that have not yet adopted an Internal Environmental Quality (IEQ) management plan, a strategy used to identify and remediate poor air quality in schools.[v]

It’s time for schools and communities to get smart on the issue of indoor air quality in schools, to seek out the invisible and see that any re-opening plan must include the answers to the following questions.

1. How well is our school’s ventilation system currently performing and what is the level of indoor air quality (IAQ) now?

Like any public building, schools are required by law to bring in fresh air from the outside. This performance standard is set by The American Society of Heating, Refrigerating and Air-Conditioning Engineers (ASHRAE).

The ASHRAE minimum requirement is 15 cfm (cubic feet per minute) per person and .12 cfm per square foot. If you don’t know whether your school is meeting these requirements, you should request that your HVAC system be retro-commissioned. Retro-commissioning is a process that evaluates your building’s HVAC system to see if it is operating correctly and to the specifications of its original design. This will tell you how your system is performing currently and if not, how to address it by adjusting parameters such as ventilation rates, temperature and humidity set points, and training staff on major systems and procedures. Check with your building facility manager about contacting a retro-commissioning agent or a mechanical contractor to have this work performed.

Even if your building meets the ASHRAE standard for ventilation, keep in mind that these levels are a minimum and were developed for non-pandemic conditions. To mitigate risk during a pandemic, you want to decrease airborne pollutants and pathogens, so it is necessary to go above and beyond these standards and bring in more fresh air while improving air filtration. There are several techniques that can be used, many of which are simple and inexpensive. A helpful summary can be found at Harvard’s Schools for Health.

Bottom line: You can’t improve what you don’t measure. Measuring the performance of the system will identify areas that need improvement.

2. How will indoor air quality (IAQ) be monitored and managed going forward?

Once the building’s HVAC performance is tested and steps taken to improve ventilation and filtration, it’s critical to monitor indoor air quality. Sudden spikes in carbon dioxide, temperature and humidity or volatile organic compounds can happen without warning but can be easy to remedy when caught early. Technology has come a long way and there are affordable cloud-based systems that allow schools to maintain a real-time awareness and hands-on management of their indoor air quality. From simple, low-cost single-room monitors and sensors to an accredited air quality program such as RESET, monitoring can and should be a part of every back-to-school plan.

The sobering reality is that 90% of schools are underventilated and do not meet minimum acceptable standards.[vi] By implementing even a simple system, teachers, administration and facilities managers can be empowered to actively manage and improve their HVAC system by making their own onsite adjustments or reaching out to mechanical contractors to remediate more complex issues.

Bottom line:  Real time monitoring is critical to ensuring good indoor air quality in the short - and long-term. For more information, see the EPA’s Indoor Air Quality Tools for Schools Reference Guide

3. What does frequent “deep cleaning” mean for IAQ and health?

Deep cleaning of public and shared spaces has garnered a lot of attention and shockingly few questions. Caustic cleaning chemicals can irritate and even harm sensitive lungs, which is of special concern for children (and teachers) who suffer from asthma or allergies. Schools need to be careful that they are not solving one problem (killing viruses and germs) only to create another (chemical exposure). Well-intentioned leadership may not realize that by ramping up cleaning frequency they can introduce significant additional toxic loads to the indoor air. This means that they cannot continue to ventilate their buildings the ‘old way’ or they risk significantly worsening indoor air quality. In spaces that are being frequently cleaned with chemical substances, it’s absolutely essential to monitor total volatile organic compounds (TVOC) to ensure good indoor air quality is maintained between deep cleanings. Additionally, schools should not shut off their HVAC system during non-operating hours if they want to manage indoor air pollution that can be created by cleaning products. Otherwise, asthma attacks and lung irritation will increase susceptibility to respiratory infections, along with longer-term toxic exposure concerns.

What should you look for? Chemicals of concern for respiratory effects are corrosive chemicals such as strong acids and bases (including ammonia and hypochlorite) and quaternary ammonium compounds (QACs).

In the United States there are more than 80,000 chemicals used in commerce. Only 300 have been evaluated for health and safety. Since 1976, the EPA has banned 4 new toxic chemicals out of a total of more than 80,000. It is unknown how many more have serious and significant effects on health.[vii]

Bottom line:  Because your school is planning to increase cleanings and add or change chemical cleaners, do your due diligence and increase air ventilation and filtration – along with real time monitoring – to be sure to offset any negative impact on air quality.

4. How can monitoring indoor air quality become an experiential, meaningful learning opportunity for students?

Here’s the good news. Rarely has there ever been such a ready-made, real-life opportunity to teach and engage students about environmental science, chemistry, and biology as it relates to air quality, health, and wellness.

Using age-appropriate levels and curricula, students could be involved in the process of choosing, installing, monitoring, and analyzing sensor and system data for their schools. With in-classroom monitors, they would see in real-time, every day, the indoor air quality they are personally experiencing and the specific metrics that inform it. They could learn about what factors go into the air quality rating - outdoor air with its own varying quality mixed with indoor air and its unique hazards. Classroom discussions inspired by these readings could cover a broad range of STEM and social science fields and could be tailored to almost any subject area, including chemistry, physics, coding, health science, and more.

By coordinating curricula with necessary physical plant activities, educators have a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to bring the subject alive for students in a real and personal way. The horizon-broadening opportunities persist even beyond the limits of the current pandemic.

Bottom line: Your school can advocate for indoor air quality improvement measures by simultaneously making them tools for learning. The initiative becomes a win-win investment that pays off in both health and wellness and improved learning and student engagement on timely environmental science issues. While the pandemic is the current focus and reasoning for the investment, it catalyzes a timely and necessary focus with tremendous value beyond the current situation.

5. Are there funds available to help improve indoor air quality in schools?

Funding is an area that is ripe for research and advocacy. The case for improving indoor air quality in schools is compelling. Not only does it mitigate risk in a time of pandemic, but it improves the physical health and cognitive function of every student and adult in the school building. School administrators and boards could make a compelling case for NGO and/or government funding via grants, loans, or legislation. The solid foundation of research linking indoor air quality’s impact on disease transmission, cognitive performance, and overall health -- can validate the investment for funders.

Consider looking for funding:

• Regionally, from foundations such as the Heinz Endowments or the Mellon Foundation, whose compatible programs might fund indoor air quality improvements for Schools.

• From universities, which could administer and conduct ongoing research with the data.

• From groups of Building Scientists, Engineers, Architects, Industrial Hygienists, and other professional disciplines, who could come together to publish and share data with health implications

• From City and Municipal governments with sustainability programs, which would be a natural fit to set baselines for public policy.

• For professional development for teachers, such as micro-credentials in creating and implementing curricula related to air quality.

Bottom line: The case for improving indoor air quality in schools is so compelling that funds should be earmarked for investment and infrastructure. Do you know of any current funding sources already? Or do you want to start a movement?

Conclusion

Many school students (and most American adults) spend 90% of their time indoors. Nothing impacts their bodies and minds more than the built environments in which they spend most of their time. The “health” of our indoor spaces is proven to have as much or more impact on our own health and wellness as diet, exercise, or sleep.

We live in an era of Fitbit-driven, 24/7 awareness of our own bodies’ health metrics. Today’s technology can give us that same level of access, awareness, and control over the environment in which we put our bodies - inside buildings.

If we think monitoring our own health is important enough to wear a Fitbit, shouldn’t we start monitoring the environments that have such significant impact on our children’s health?

As a parent who has the privilege and responsibility of caring for my children, I know I have the opportunity -and the obligation - to do what I can to ensure that my community’s school buildings are taking care of children, too. Addressing and improving indoor air quality in schools means all children (and the adults teaching them) will be safer, healthier, and perform better. I hope these questions will inspire discussion and further research in your own communities. Comment or contact me to continue the conversation.

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[i] Toyinbo, O., Shaughnessy, R., Turunen, M., Putus, T., Metsämuuronen, J., Kurnitski, J., & Haverinen-Shaughnessy, U. (2016b). Building characteristics, indoor environmental quality, and mathematics achievement in Finnish elementary schools. Building and Environment.

[ii]Coley, D. A., Greeves, R., & Saxby, B. K. (2007). The effect of low ventilation rates on the cognitive function of a primary school class. International Journal of Ventilation, 6(2), 107-112.

[iii]Haverinen-Shaughnessy, U., Moschandreas, D. J., & Shaughnessy, R. J. (2011). Association between substandard classroom ventilation rates and students’ academic achievement. Indoor Air, 21(2), 121-131

[iv] Schools for Health Foundations for Student Success at https://schools.forhealth.org/

[v] U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA, 2014). “EPA Releases Guidance to Improve Schools’ Air Quality and Energy Efficiency”. Press Release. October 17, 2014. Accessed 4 April 2016 . https://yosemite.epa.gov/opa/admpress.nsf/6424ac1caa800aab85257359003f5337/f53011817db9d82a85257d74005fd3a4!OpenDocument

[vi] https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674237971 Healthy Buildings: How Indoor Spaces Driver Performance and Productivity Chapter 4, Putting the Building to Work for You, page 62.

[vii] https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674237971 Healthy Buildings: How Indoor Spaces Driver Performance and Productivity Chapter 7, Our Global Chemical Experiment, page 123.

The Future of Sewickley: Outdoor Design Strategies

There are many great things about living in Sewickley: the wonderful schools, a vibrant small village atmosphere, amenities like the YMCA, Public Library, and Sweetwater Center for the Arts to name a few.  However, we have all continued to live among unprecedented times that have left us and our community facing the challenges COVID-19 has presented.

We believe in ‘building to give back’, the purpose beyond the occupation and commitment to community. This is what motivates us and drives our work. So, we decided to take these challenges head on and start asking questions, hoping to find thoughtful solutions.

• How can we (our firm, our borough, our citizens) help sustain our local businesses?

• How can we expand the footprint of the Sewickley Village businesses to help increase their potential revenue given the current occupancy restrictions?

• How can these concepts be mutually beneficial, fostering collaboration between the businesses, Borough Council, Planning Commission and the community?

After we posed these questions, we generated conceptual ideas and created visualizations to support our thoughts for Sewickley Village Outdoor Design Strategies.

Open Streets Concept

• The open streets concept is conceived as a pedestrian only zone that would include Beaver, Broad and Walnut streets.

• This concept is meant to provide the village businesses an opportunity expand their current footprint while giving the community a place to enjoy a meal or shop outdoors.

• It is imagined to occur on weekends periodically throughout the summer and fall seasons.

Occupied Parking Concept

• The occupied parking concept will offer restaurants and retail establishments the option to occupy parking spaces adjacent to their businesses.

• This concept is expected to increase occupancy for outdoor seating and retail sales.

• It is envisioned to occur on both weekdays and weekends. It’s intent is to generate revenue for the businesses and the borough through a split incentive program. The borough can negotiate fees for the parking spaces while the business benefit from additional space to operate.

Occupied Public Space Concept

• The occupied public space concept is intended to offer additional seating and services to existing underutilized public spaces throughout the village.

• This concept is proposed to encourage the community to spend time outdoors.

• It is projected to occur on both weekdays and weekends. It’s intent is to provide additional space for citizens and businesses to socialize and enjoy the outdoors. This concept is meant to change the paradigm from social distancing to physical distancing.

Why Is Sewickley Tavern the World’s First RESET Restaurant?

As you may have seen in recent articles from the Sewickley Herald and NEXT Pittsburgh, the new Sewickley Tavern is expected to be the first restaurant in the world to achieve the international RESET air quality standard. It will also be the first restaurant to pursue both RESET certifications offered: Commercial Interiors and Core & Shell.

When the restaurant opens, a vast array of sensors and monitors will measure comfort and wellness factors in the building’s indoor environment, from the decibel level of ambient noise to the air’s amount of carbon dioxide, particulate matter, volatile organic compounds, temperature, and relative humidity. This information will be streamed to the cloud and displayed in integrated dashboards that assess conditions in real time, allowing the owners to make adjustments as needed. Sophisticated air filtration and ventilation systems will work in harmony to optimize the environment for the health and comfort of staff and diners.

It’s a prime example of how building science and technology now allow us to create buildings that, for the first time, can actively improve our health and lower our risks.

Our mandate from the client going into the redesign was to consider sustainability in the renovation of the historic building. What came out of the process was an ultra-high-performance renovation positioned to achieve a prestigious world’s-first accolade.

So why is Sewickley Tavern the first restaurant in the world to do this?

Good question. It’s the one that I am asked most frequently by the media and by members of our community.

To answer it, it’s helpful first to answer the inverse question, why isn’t this being done everywhere? There are some significant reasons for that. Here’s how I see them breaking down:

1. The RESET standard is new, and it is highly technical.

This standard is one of the first to look holistically at the connection between buildings and health. As described on the RESET website, the certification program was launched in 2013 and “focuses on the health of people and their environment. It is the world’s first standard to be sensor-based, tracking performance and generating healthy building analytics in real-time. Certification is awarded when measured IAQ results meet or exceed international standards for health.”

Bottom line: RESET is a leader in technology-driven innovations for sustainable building.

2. Sustainable building is a confusing morass of buzzwords, acronyms and programs.

LEED, green building, smart building…buzzwords galore! Many people have heard of some of them. But few people understand the full range of approaches that exist, how they differ, and why the differences matter. The building design and construction industry has not done a good job of communicating to owners and to the broader market in general how to measure the respective values and ROI. The result is superficial awareness, at best, or polarizing prejudice, at worst.

Bottom line: Building professionals have failed to offer clarity in a maze of confusing options.

3. Until now, restaurants have focused on the food side of sustainability.

Early interest in sustainability among restaurant owners and chefs has focused, understandably, on food. Also, not all restaurants own the buildings in which they operate, so they may not see renovations as an option. Those who do own their buildings may not be aware of how high-performance building or renovations can complement their greater sustainability goals. So while restaurants are at the forefront of the sustainable food movement, most are not yet involved in the healthy building movement. Because Studio St.Germain is committed to using high-performance buildings to improve health and well-being in the community, we suggest that healthy buildings are the next logical step for sustainability-minded restaurants.

Bottom line: Sustainability-minded restaurants are just learning about healthy buildings.

4. Many people assume sustainable building is expensive and unattainable.

Sustainable building is poorly understood. “High-performance building” is virtually unheard of. “Ultra-high performance building” is the domain of building science nerds (That’s me). Most professionals in building design and construction don’t even know what the latest innovations are yet. Until now, the business case for investing in sustainable building options has been weak, though there is growing evidence that sustainability investments offer measurable value. Because it is perceived as new and expensive, sustainability can be dismissed as “nice to have” but impractical and unrealistic.

Bottom line: Owners are put off by perceived complexity and costs.

Conclusion

As an architect dedicated to transforming the way people think about building design, I work hard every day to give my clients accessible sustainability options. I developed the High Performance Program to meet owners where they are in terms of their sustainability knowledge and goals, and to match them up with the powerful and cost-effective options they can afford.  This helps to make highly technical programs understandable to both clients and contractors.

Today we have the knowledge and power to overcome the obstacles of technical complexity, confusion, and ignorance. Thanks to newly integrated standards like RESET, we can make technology-driven solutions affordable even for small businesses, and start collecting comprehensive data that can establish industry baselines. And with groundbreaking platforms to compare business models with actual data, metrics now drive real ROI analyses, demonstrating beyond any doubt that investing in sustainable building pays.

In the Sewickley Tavern, the right-place-right-time combination of sustainability-minded clients and the studio’s High Performance Program made the technology decisions simple; that’s why this is the first RESET restaurant in the world. With its opening, we are showing the world how very affordable a high-performing restaurant building can be.

Finally, why did all this happen here in Pittsburgh? It happened here for the same reason positive change happens anywhere: a small group of committed individuals with a common goal decided to take action. With its long history of innovation, current expertise in technology, and industrial heritage and accompanying air quality issues, Pittsburgh is actually the most natural place on earth for this first.

The Power of Existing Buildings

Our colleagues Craig Stevenson and Beth Eckenrode's book, The Power of Existing Buildings is hot off the press! If you are interested in understanding how to improve the energy efficiency, health and wellness, and indoor air quality of an existing building, look no further.

On the Boards: Sewickley Tavern

We are delighted to unveil our design for the Sewickley Tavern, set to open in late fall 2019. The design takes its cues from the menu concept of a modern take on a traditional tavern. The complete renovation will feature a new storefront, a custom designed kitchen and traditional wood-paneled bar, a microperforated tin ceiling to provide a classic tavern look while improving acoustics, and a new outdoor bar.

2019 NAPHN Conference - Build the World We Want

We are excited to be presenting at the 2019 North American Passive House Network Conference in New York City on June 28th. This conference is the largest gathering of professionals working with Passive House technology in the U.S. and around the world. This premier event is centered on passive house design, high performance building and energy efficiency.

Our presentation will be followed by a panel discussion titled Production Builders and Passive House: Another Market Transformation. For more information on the NAPHN Conference and to register please click on the image above . We hope to see you there!

On the Boards: 400 Beaver Street

We are excited to unveil the "before and after" renderings of our design for a new mixed-use development at the corner of Beaver and Walnut Streets in Sewickley, Pennsylvania. This extensive addition/renovation will feature a chef-driven fast-casual restaurant on the ground level, with two condominium units and a private roof deck on the upper levels.

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Studio St.Germain Interviewed by ​RESET™

We are delighted to be interviewed by RESET this month in their Becoming a RESET AP Series. RESET Air targets the environmental health of occupants, starting with people and indoor air quality. This building standard and certification aligns with our firm’s High Performance Program, which focuses on the many facets of high performance building design - one of which is indoor air quality.

In this new series of articles, ‘Becoming a RESET AP’, RESET introduces pioneers from across the globe who have taken up the mission of creating healthier buildings. These individuals have not just decided to become AP’s (or Accredited Professionals) themselves, but have also extended the certification to their employees, clients and partners, but also integrated it in their business offerings.

Here’s what Nathan St.Germain, Principal, Studio St.Germain, has to say.

What made you decide to pursue becoming a RESET Air Accredited Professional?

I decided to pursue becoming a RESET Air Accredited Professional because we spend 95% of our time indoors and indoor air quality impacts our health, comfort and productivity. I also wanted to be involved with the world’s first sensor-based and performance-driven indoor air quality building standard and certification program. This certification also aligns with our firm’s High Performance Program, which focuses on the many facets of high performance building design – one of which is indoor air quality.

What makes the RESET Air Standard different?

RESET Air differentiates itself from other building performance standards through its continuous monitoring requirement for PM2.5, TVOC, CO2, CO, Temperature and Humidity within a building.  In addition, the indoor air quality data that is monitored is required to be communicated to the building occupants to maintain certification.

The required reporting of the indoor air quality data back to the building occupants is a game changer. It fosters public awareness and education in a way that no other performance standard and certification has. It also provides the opportunity for the design professionals to visually represent the indoor air quality data in an artistic, interactive and compelling way.

Studio St.Germain is now ​RESET™Certified

We are proud to announce that Studio St.Germain principal Nathan St.Germain is now a ​RESET™ Accredited Professional. ​RESET™ Air targets the environmental health of occupants, starting with people and indoor air quality. It is the world’s first sensor-based and performance-driven indoor air quality building standard and certification program. This certification aligns with our firm’s High Performance Program, which focuses on the many facets of high performance building design - one of which is indoor air quality.

Why is a buildings indoor air quality so important? We spend 95% of our time time indoors, and indoor air quality impacts our health, comfort and productivity. One example is a 2016 study conducted at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health found that poor indoor air quality accounts for a 13% - 20% decrease in productivity. For more information about the High Performance Program please click here.

Studio St.Germain Announces The High Performance Program

Studio St.Germain, a Sewickley-based architectural firm specializing in ultra-low energy building design, has announced the launch of a new owner-facing initiative designed to improve clients’ understanding of the many options in high-performance building design and technology.

The studio’s High Performance Program is an initiative that assesses building owners’ knowledge, readiness, and orientation to the multitude of sustainability programs available today, and then presents them with a personalized plan of action.

“Most people, when they hear the word ‘sustainability’, think of things like LEED, or expensive certification programs,” says Principal Nathan St.Germain. “It’s so much more varied and nuanced than that. There are many ways to accomplish sustainability goals, often much more affordably than people realize. It doesn’t have to be about checking boxes on a list or obtaining an expensive certificate. Sometimes it’s just a matter of better design.”

The Studio specializes in a particular sustainability program known as Passive House, named for the Passivhaus criteria developed in Darmstadt, Germany in the early ‘90’s and later adopted by the international building community. Boasting the strictest technical standards for building sustainability relating to energy use and air quality, Passive House relies on building science principles for solar design, continuous insulation, airtight construction, and continuous ventilation to lower energy use and create indoor environments with superior indoor air quality and comfort.

Although the program uses the word “house”, Passive House is not exclusive to residences and is frequently used in commercial buildings and institutional settings such as schools and offices.  Passive House is relatively new to the United States, gaining traction only in the last 10 years, making Studio St.Germain’s expertise relatively unique in Western Pennsylvania.

Passive House is just one of ten formal sustainability programs that building owners can choose from. “Most of our clients aren’t aware how many options there are, or that sometimes the best choice is not a formal certification program at all, but rather a set of design principles and building technology that results in the closest match to their goals,” added St.Germain.

The High Performance program features a brief intake process that allows the Studio’s principals to quickly and seamlessly assess which programs or building science techniques match up best with a client’s profile, after which personalized recommendations are presented.

“We are finding tremendous interest in the program and even a sense of relief from clients,” said St.Germain. “We’re very proud to be part of the movement to take the mystery out of sustainability and make it more accessible to everyone.”

More information about the program and an explanatory video are available at: studiostgermain.com/high-performance.

Midtown Passive House Presentation at NAPHN Conference

We are giving a presentation on Colorado's first Certified Passive House at the North American Passive House Network (NAPHN) Conference on Friday, October 19th. We hope to see you there! For more information about the NAPHN Conference and to register please click on the image above.

Studio St.Germain Project Featured in The American Organist Magazine

We are pleased to see that our firm's project at Sewickley Presbyterian Church is the cover story for the August issue of The American Organist Magazine. Click here to view a digital version of the issue.

Getting to Zero National Forum

We are very excited to be hosting, on behalf of Passive House Western PA (PHWPA), a dinner at Poros Restaurant as part of The Getting to Zero National Forum on April 18th at 7:00 pm. The 2018 Getting to Zero National Forum is being held on April 17-19th in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. It is the premier global event dedicated to defining the future of the built environment. For more information on the forum and our hosted dinner event please click on the image above.