Engineering a Sustainable Library with the Next Generation of Insight

ANDREW LEAVITT: Hello and welcome to "Engineering, a Sustainable Library with the Next Generation of Insight." I am Andrew Leavitt, a digital practice manager at Victus Engineering. Victus Engineering is a small firm in Minneapolis, Minnesota. It was founded about six years ago by just the partners in a small workshare above a brewpub, and it has since expanded to a real office with 32 people. We also have some remote employees, and we do entity work in a wide variety of market sectors.

The learning objectives for today-- if you have signed up for this course, I'm assuming that all of these, so I'm not going to read them out loud to you. But we are going to take a look at the next generation of Insight. It's an exciting program that's part of Revit. And we're going to see how Victus Engineering used it to design a sustainable library building in Edina, Minnesota.

We are proud to be a part of the unofficial sustainability track at Autodesk University 2024. If you are watching this, there's a good chance that you'll be interested in some of these courses as well. I highly encourage you to check them out. You can search by class number. You can search by title.

All of these courses have to do with sustainability. A lot of them have to do with Insight. And so there's a lot of crossover and a lot of valuable information. So let's take a look at the Southdale Library and Edina Art Center.

It's a new library in Edina, Minnesota. The Hennepin County Southdale Library was first started in 1971. Their construction started in 1971. It opened in 1973.

It was the second library in the city of Edina. It's been a mainstay of the community for over 50 years now, and it's a building where I personally spent a lot of time, checked out a lot of books in high school and shortly after. And interestingly enough, when speaking with some of our other engineers here, I found out that just about everyone here has some personal connection to the building. So it's actually pretty cool to work on it.

It is getting a little bit old. It definitely looks like it was built in the '70s. It's a bit brutalist. There's a lot of concrete. And so it's time for a change.

And looking at it now, it doesn't quite look right. We're in Minnesota. So that's better. That's the Southdale Library I know and love, but let's look at Southdale Library in the future, 2027 and onward.

So the New South Hennepin County Southdale Library is going to extend the legacy of learning and educational exploration for new generations. It is positioned to be a sustainable building in addition to being just a library. And so it is going to be a restorative building that gives back to the landscape and improves the community around it.

The guiding principles include being reparative. It considers how the site was before construction of the original Southdale Library ever began. It will be educational. We will be learning through experience and providing that experience to members of the community.

It will be engaging. It will help to draw people to the library and make a community center for Hennepin County looking forward. And finally, it will be joyful. It will bring in people to delight and be playful in this space.

So these guiding principles are definitely something that is part of the project from the very beginning. They inform the project design and what the building is going to be.

Some of the objectives include enhancing accessibility. The current library is not as accessible as it probably should be. To foster a dynamic partnership through the library and art center that will share the building. I'm sorry, exceed the requirements of Minnesota B3. Minnesota B3 is a comprehensive set of benchmarks and standards that we will look at in a little bit. But we hope to exceed, and not just meet, the requirements of B3. And B3 includes SB 2030.

So for those of you with experience with SB 2030, it is a difficult goal to meet. And finally, to achieve a beautiful and durable building that will be maintainable for the future, will be part of the community and something that everyone can enjoy for 50 years or hopefully even more.

The library is going to be part of the landscape. So in addition to just being a building, it's not going to have the parking lots, the impermeable surfaces that the current library has. Parking will be moved underground, so the library will look more of a part of the natural landscape in that space in Edina. So let's take a look at some of the sustainability strategies.

How are we going to meet our three goals? The integrated sustainable design includes a wide variety of strategies, including healthy materials, spatial daylight autonomy with large windows and plenty of shading so that we light the space appropriately, passive design strategies to capture and redistribute some of the heat from that sunlight, low embodied carbon materials, which are a big part of B3. Materials considerations of the material lifespan from cradle to cradle considering the materials, use and reuse is going to be a part of the sustainable considerations for this project.

On site renewables-- so making use of renewable resources that are available on site. There will be a roof-mounted photovoltaic array and ground source heat pumps. So we hope to make the best use of site resources.

And finally, a high performance facade-- all of the heat that we capture in Minnesota, it's very important to hang on to it. And so we have a tight building envelope that will help us achieve our sustainability goals. In addition, we have site strategies-- the siting of the building impacts, the functionality, the aesthetics, the sustainability and the overall success. And so we hope, as I mentioned, to remove the above-ground parking and move it underground and turn this into, as mentioned before, a library as part of the landscape.

We're trying to reduce our overall carbon emissions by using that roof-mounted photovoltaic array, efficient building systems and geothermal heat pumps for energy or for heating and cooling, and then finally offsetting those energy loads. So passive design strategies to reduce those loads include maximizing that daylight autonomy using solar heat gain in the winter and shading in the south, east, and west to reduce excessive heat and sunlight in the summer.

Resource use is also a major consideration in this project and local resources are abundant. But we are actually seeking to make them part of this project. So in addition to the solar and ground heat or the solar power and the ground heat, we're also using local resources in our material.

There will be an exposed wood structure on the second floor to reduce the overall embodied carbon, and the material selection process was rigorously evaluated against B3 three criteria to make sure that all of these materials will be fully recyclable, reusable, and that there won't be any excessive environmental impacts. There won't be any embodied carbon impacts or operational carbon impacts that will be out of line with Minnesota B3. So let's take a look at Minnesota B3.

It's a set of requirements and reporting tools that many of you might not be familiar with. It is unique to projects in Minnesota. It provides guidelines, reporting tools, and a project database for Minnesota projects. Every state-sponsored project in the state of Minnesota needs to meet or exceed Minnesota B3 guidelines, and Minnesota B3 provides comprehensive sustainability goals not just for energy use, but also for site water use, the indoor environment, materials, and waste. So we want to reduce waste, reduce carbon usage, and maximize the energy efficiency of this building.

B3 includes online reporting tools. It has a case studies database, so every building that is part of B3 includes a comprehensive set-- a comprehensive set of reports and spreadsheets that are uploaded to the internet and made available to other firms that are working on B3 buildings so that we can provide an accurate comparison of similar building types and assess our buildings against other buildings in the state that have similar operations.

B3 is appropriate for new and existing buildings. It's not just for new construction. When there's a remodel that is receiving state-sponsored or state funds, we need to consider operations of the building, reducing energy use, perform a post-occupancy evaluation, and take a look at the design of the remodel or the design of the new building to make sure that they meet B3 goals.

B3 provides a progressive energy conservation standard based on SB 2030. If any of you are familiar with SB 2030 or architecture 2030, the same energy goals are part of B3, but those are only the energy goals for B3. So all of those other standards for B3-- site, water, indoor environment, et cetera-- are not from SB 2030, but are added on to the 2030 goals. So that progressive energy standard means that a building, a library constructed in 2027 will have very tight energy requirements.

We'll need to utilize a lot of those site strategies just to meet our energy goals. There is a scorecard for the SB 2030 compliance in the B3 database that accompanies the rest of the building reporting, so it's possible to assess the building against other buildings, not just in the state of Minnesota, but other buildings that meet architecture 2030 to make sure that our energy use is in line with other similar building types.

And B3, Minnesota B3, is a result of a collaboration between the University of Minnesota and local architecture and engineering firms. I actually was able to participate in the project a few years ago, so I can say firsthand that they really do dig into every little part of a building. They get extremely granular with their goals. It is a difficult goal to meet, a difficult standard to meet. But when we do meet it, it's always very exciting. So now that we've discussed the building and our sustainability goals, let's take a look at the next generation of Insight.

This is a carbon analysis tool for Revit. So Insight-- not next-generation Insight, but just Insight-- is a carbon analysis tool in Revit in which we create an Energy Analytical model based off of masses or building elements in a Revit model. We refine that Energy Analytical Model using energy settings. So we may start with just simple boxy masses, but then we can say there's 20% glazing on this surface with a 2 foot 6 shade and have appropriate factors applied to our model.

Once we have that Energy Analytical Model, we upload it to the cloud, to an Autodesk website where calculation takes place. So we create that model in Revit and then upload it, and all the complex calculation takes place on a PC that's remote. It means that your resources are freed up if you need to keep working. And so it's really nice to have this in the cloud.

It provides not just tools for assessing the energy cost of or the energy usage in your building, but also the potential for different options for your building, maybe changing the orientation or changing the glazing percentage. So it's a really cool tool to use. It allows you to explore a lot of different options very easily. It has been available in Revit since 2017.

It's not an add-in. It's not a third-party program. You don't need to download anything. It is just part of Revit. So if you have Revit, look in the Analyze tab, and you should see energy analysis tools using Insight.

So I hope you're already using Insight to work on some of your projects. If not, it's a really easy tool to come to grips with. I'd say start exploring it, open up the Analyze tab one day and just take a look.

So next-generation Insight-- how does that compare to Insight? It's new in Revit 2025. It's advertised as one of the big new features, but it's actually been applied to Revit 2024 and 2023 through patches. So hopefully, everyone here who is using Revit has access to it. It provides total carbon analysis for architects-- and that's how Autodesk pitches it-- but it's also for engineers.

Working for an MEP firm, I find that we are able to get a lot of use out of it for especially for early-stage energy modeling when we might not have a perfectly robust Revit model that we could use for full-featured energy modeling, but this allows us to apply rules of thumb and get a rough estimate of the UI very, very early in the project.

It's a powerful tool for modeling embodied carbon and operational carbon. And it does require that architectural model, even if it's just a mass model. So if you're working with an architect, especially very early in design that's making a lot of changes, it's a lot easier to keep up with the constant pace of those changes, the rapid changes than it is with exporting to a third-party program and then performing energy modeling there.

The energy modeling process within Revit is fundamentally the same. In next-generation Insight, you're still using masses or building elements and the energy settings to define what kind of Energy Analytical model you create in Revit. And then you use the same Energy Analytical model, but you upload it to a different place. You upload it with a different button in Revit, and from there, the next-generation Insight website is completely different from the current Insight web page.

So the Revit process is the same. You press a different button, takes you to a different website, and that's where the big differences show up. That's where you get to start to define your project a lot more than you can with the current version of Insight.

And it allows us to create these custom dashboards and metrics that give us the control over what we want to see, what we want to hide, the comparisons that we want to make. Whereas the previous version of Insight had everything predefined. This is much more user-defined and bespoke.

So we get to manage our own factors and metrics. We get to set up our own and maybe determine which are what units we're using, what order they're in, how they're displayed on a dashboard. In addition, we can apply our own benchmarks, and so we can say for this one, we want to meet SB 2030 for maybe a building built in 2024 or a building built in 2027. And we can ratchet down that benchmark as we want. Just we set the numbers. So that flexibility is in the hands of the user.

And finally, you get to create your dashboards. So you put all of these factors, metrics, and benchmarks on cards. You get to make displays with bar charts or pull downs or 3D views. And you can show everything arranged the way that you want.

So the comparison between next-generation Insight and current generation Insight, I think next-generation Insight blows the current generation out of the water. The customization, the ability to create our own factors and metrics are things that users have been asking for years, and now we finally have them in our hands.

So this is a look at the energy modeling process using Revit and a few third-party add-ins. As you can see, Insight is earlier in the process, in the very early stages, right at the intersection of planning and designing, when we are just starting to make our Revit model. So that's where Insight fits in.

After we have a rough idea of our energy use, our embodied carbon, we want to start working with Revit Systems Analysis and maybe external tools for carbon analysis-- so something like Tally or Tally CAT. Once we have a more robust building design, those tools are more appropriate. And then later on in the process, Takeoff Tandem. These can provide CA-phase carbon-analysis tools. So let's take a look at the process for creating an energy model.

This is an iterative or evolutionary process. It is constantly updating and using the results of the latest update to inform the next update.

So we start with a building model. We get the architectural model. And then we need to simplify it and create an appropriate building model that we can use for Energy Analytical modeling.

The first thing that we need to do is take a look at the primary design options. Insight is not really great with design options, and architects love to use design options, especially early in projects when they're exploring a lot of different configurations for their buildings and they haven't settled on what exactly the building is going to be.

So with these design options, I recommend just choosing the primary design option for each design option in the project. Confer with your architect. Make sure that you are making realistic choices. And then once you have those design options applied, remove the other design options.

You're also going to want to remove site context. So we take it from a building that might have topography and roads and trees included to just the building model, just the walls and surfaces that are going to be actually as part of the energy model. Insight likes to include shading surfaces, exterior surfaces, site context.

If it's visible in your 3D view, it is possible to exclude those things by turning off work sets and using the building elements function in Insight. But if you're using a less refined model and you're working with masses or spaces, Insight is going to find all of those elements and try to include them in your energy model. And so the easiest thing to do is to just delete them.

Finally, you're going to need to take a look at your space boundaries and make sure your spaces make sense. Sometimes, early in a project, your walls might not-- or your ceilings might not meet your walls, and the volume of a space might shoot up along the side with a one-inch wide sliver between the ceiling and the wall. Some of your space boundaries might be overlapping walls and presenting errors. There might be problems with your space boundaries, and so it's a good idea to go through the model room by room and make sure that every room is an enclosed volume.

Once we have a Revit model that we're ready to work with, we're going to need to take a look at our energy settings. These are settings in Revit that we can apply to our energy model-- or our Revit model to create the Energy Analytical model and determine how it is created. So we can increase or reduce the granularity, increase the amount of time that it takes to create the model, if we have a more fine model or if we have a coarser model, reduce the amount of time it takes, but also reduce the accuracy.

We can determine the ground plane. We can determine shading or glazing on masses. So there is a great deal that is available through energy settings.

And then finally, we combine all of that together to create our Energy Analytical model. And we can review this model in Revit. We can take a look at the analytical spaces and analytical surfaces.

So we can take a look at what Revit has created from the Revit model. It is a separate model that is within your Revit project, but it is not directly part of the Revit model. So it is Revit is basically copying your model or creating converting your model into these surfaces. So it makes a lot of sense to review the surfaces and make sure that conversion was accurate.

So once we have a model-- this is an iterative process-- we're going to evolve the model as the project progresses and as the design is refined. If you're working in the Autodesk Construction Cloud, you will find that there are constant updates. Every time the architect syncs their model, you are going to see changes in yours, and as soon as you reload your link, you will see the updates in your model.

So we have found that it benefits us to slow the pace of updates. In addition, this allows us to make modifications to the architectural model that the architect might not really be comfortable with, like removing those design options or removing that site context. So creating a milestone model and downloading it from the Autodesk Construction Cloud is a wonderful idea. I highly support it.

Once we do that, we want to minimize modifications on our end. We have to make the same modifications every update. If those modifications include removing site context and removing design options, you're going to need to do that every time you update your model. So there needs to be a balance between the pace of updates and the modifications that we need to make.

So I like to update our model about once a week. That allows us time to react, to create an energy model, and to refine that energy model and then to get meaningful results out of it. But it doesn't slow us down so much that the architect is unable to make changes and that we're working with an outdated model.

The advantage here is that model creation and analysis are really quick. Model creation for a complex building like this should only take a couple of minutes. If it takes longer than that, it's likely that there's a problem in your model that is causing the Energy Analytical model creation process to bog down. The analysis process is quick as well. It should take maybe 15 minutes for a complex model.

It takes place in the cloud. So you're not losing access to your PC. You have access to all of your resources, and they're able to apply a lot of computing power to every model. And then once we have a model, we can develop our dashboards.

We can create the metrics and factors and lay them out in the way that we want, and we can apply that dashboard to future runs of the model and even different projects. So we don't need to reinvent the wheel. Every time we get an update, we can just update the Energy Analytical Model, upload it to the cloud, and then get the same analysis with the same dashboard that we got on the previous version.

So what are these dashboards? Let's take a look at the dashboards from start to finish. First, we start with factors, and these include things like the emissions rates. You can define your own emissions rates. You can edit the emissions rates. You can duplicate and have multiple emissions rates for different fuel types.

So these factors can-- and it's not just emissions rate. You can include things like cost or efficiency. So these factors are going to be applied to everything else in the building, the metrics. And then you're going to see the benchmarks applied to those.

So factors are a part of your calculation. There are predefined factors, but it's very easy to define your own. You can then apply these factors to metrics. You can use the pre-made metrics or define your own.

In these metrics, you can calculate using factors using model data, like square footage or volume of certain types-- certain types of surface or areas. You can also apply analysis results, so calculation results from other metrics or from other parts of your analysis.

So metrics can include other metrics. They can include a lot of different factors as part of the calculation, and you can put together your own complicated formulas.

Additionally, you can apply benchmarks. So once you have metrics, you can say, I want this metric to be a certain value, or I want to see it compared to a certain value and then see that benchmark on your graphs of metrics. So you can apply different year goals. For SB 2030, you can apply ASHRAE 90.1 and compare that to SB 2030. You can compare it to different buildings in your library or in your portfolio.

So once you have benchmarks, it's really easy to modify them, to ratchet them down, and to progressively use these to design more and more efficient buildings. So we have our factors, our metrics and our benchmarks. Let's create a dashboard.

How do we do that from the very beginning? Well, first, we're going to add a card. And these cards could include data displays, factors, or metrics, and then benchmarks would be included in those cards.

So the process is pretty simple. We can open up our card library, place a certain type of card, and then see it immediately in our dashboard. And it is interactive from the very beginning, which is pretty nice.

And as I mentioned before, for different runs of your model or different projects, you can use the same dashboard. So once you develop a cool dashboard that you like that has comparisons that you want to see for this building and for future buildings, you can apply that dashboard to future projects. So you only need to develop these once.

So you can design different dashboards for different audiences. If you are having an internal meeting with your mechanical engineering department, you can have a very granular dashboard that digs into a lot of different details and provides all the data that they want to see. If you're presenting this to the owner, you might just want to provide a 3D view and a few simple bar charts. So design the dashboard that you think can communicates your project to the audience most clearly.

And then save your dashboards. Cycle between dashboards. It's very easy to make all the dashboards that you need.

So we created our Energy Analytical model. We uploaded it to the cloud. We did our analysis. We viewed it through dashboards. What did we learn about the project and what did we learn for future projects?

Well, our energy analysis results gave us carbon analysis for embodied carbon and operational carbon, and it broke it out for different material types and allowed us to see where our embodied carbon and operational carbon were really coming from. We also got a good estimate of the EUI very early in the project, and we're able to compare this to other buildings that need to meet Minnesota B3. And so we were able to make sure that the building was in compliance, and explore a few of the design options, and make sure that the architect wasn't proposing anything that was going to blow the building energy usage way out of line.

We were also able to do an HVAC-system comparison. And we did get a lot of assistance from Autodesk with this, but they provided us with some custom conversion factors that allowed us to compare some HVAC-system comparisons in terms of active carbon and determine which HVAC system we really wanted to use. And then we were able to not just see these details on a dashboard but through an overview of the entire project that showed us where our problem areas were and where the energy usage was coming from.

So what lessons did we learn? As I've mentioned already, we want to download our cloud models. If you're working in the cloud, you want to slow the pace of updates so that you are not putting an undue burden on your mechanical engineers and restarting your model every time the architect makes a change. So when you're working with the cloud, download those cloud models.

Additionally, this allows us to make those modifications that we need to make an energy model that calculates efficiency-- make a Revit model that creates a meaningful Energy Analytical model. But those changes, those modifications would probably ruin the model in the architect's opinion. So download your cloud models, separate them from your project, detach them, make sure that they are completely separate, and then work with those offline models as part of your energy model.

On the other hand, we do want to update frequently. We want to find a balance. We want to make sure that the architect is able to make changes early in the project because that is when the biggest changes are coming. And we want to make sure that we are keeping up with those changes.

So a weekly update cadence is just about right. If you feel comfortable with more frequent updates, I'd say go ahead. Every other day would be fine, but longer than weekly, and you're starting to slow down the architects. You're dragging them, and you're acting as like a-- you're introducing friction into the situation. So update frequently, but not so frequently that you are reinventing the wheel every day.

And then finally, if you're lucky, like I was, get to work with the Autodesk team. I believe they will be in attendance at Autodesk University, so you will get to meet them. But they were very helpful in walking me through the creation of dashboards, how we apply our own factors and metrics.

And so I encourage you to reach out to them. I know that they'll be receptive. And I worked, especially with Giuseppe, Corina, and Tatsu. And so I owe them a debt of gratitude. Thank you very much.

How would we apply Insight to our projects? How would you apply it to yours? First, start working with next-generation Insight right now. It's very, very easy.

You can do it with any version of Revit from 2023 onward as long as you're patched to the latest version. So just start with a simple mass model or a very simple building model and create an Energy Analytical model. Play around with your energy settings. Explore those. Make sure you understand them.

Upload your model to next-generation Insight and start playing around with factors and metrics and dashboards. It's really easy to just drag cards around and make the dashboard that you want, so create some dashboards that you think are meaningful right now, even if you're just working on a starter project. And then you can bring those dashboards into future projects where they will be more meaningful.

When you are working on a project, start early. Insight is applicable from the earliest design stages, as showed in the slide with different Revit functions and external programs in the design process.

Insight comes in right at the intersection of planning and design. So when we are just starting to make a Revit model, you can get a rough estimate of your UI. If you want a more robust energy model, there are tools like Revit Systems Analysis, but Insight is really that early-stage energy modeling tool.

So start early in your modeling process. Evolve your model, evolve your models, start with your mass model, start with just your building form, and then create spaces within your building once you have enclosed spaces.

And then once you have wall assemblies, floor assemblies with actual insulation and the right surface thicknesses and everything, transition to your building elements. The Energy Analytical model creation is intelligent enough to work with those wall assemblies. And so once you are able to start working with building elements, you can really refine your model and get a very accurate EUI.

Finally, as I keep mentioning, ask for help. Help is out there. Help is available.

You have the Autodesk team available to you. If you want to reach out to me, I can provide some help as well. Help is out there.

The Autodesk team wants people to use this tool. I know that even though it's a cloud tool, they specifically allow people to use it without needing cloud credits because they want this tool to be accessible and open to everyone. They want everyone to be designing accessible buildings. And part of that is they're going to provide help. So reach out and ask for help, and you will get it.

So we've looked at the design process using next-generation Insight. We took a look at how we applied it to the library project using some of our custom dashboards. Let's wrap it up.

Here is one last look at the Hennepin County Southdale Library and Edina Arts Center. These renders come from MSR design, the architecture firm that is making this-- designing this beautiful building. As you can see, it fits into the landscape beautifully. It provides a lot of daylighting in the interior spaces.

It's an open, airy space that is just going to feel free and natural and bright. And the people in there will appreciate the design that goes into it. I think so. Our sustainability goals, I think, are pushing us to make a building that is going to be one that people are going to want to occupy for many years into the future.

And having said that, I guess I wonder if anyone has any questions. If you do have any questions, again, please feel free to reach out to me, but let's get that out of the way. I want to see the library again. That is a beautiful building. So that is it.

Once again, we are part of the unofficial sustainability track at Autodesk University 2024. I'm going to leave this slide up here for a few seconds, so please take a look at the course numbers, at the titles. I encourage you to check out any of these other recordings. They should all be available.

So all of these courses are part of the sustainability track. If you are interested in sustainability or the use of Revit sustainability tools like Insight or Systems Analysis, these courses are going to be very valuable. And thank you very much for watching.