Kellogg School of Management, Chicago, IL, USA

Kellogg School of Management

The Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University is a 6-story building with 1 story below grade, housing offices and classrooms with a central atrium.
A high-quality building facade, suited to the local climate, is a key priority in this high-performance building concept. Triple glazing in this high glazed building in combination with optimized window frames minimizes the heat loss. The solar control glazing limits solar gains in the summer, preventing the rooms from overheating and reducing cooling loads. Despite the low solar energy transparency, the light transparency of the glazing is high and allowed designing bright spaces with high daylight availability. Hence, the daylight control of artificial lighting leads to high electrical energy savings. One major piece to reduce energy demand for the building is a high efficiency heat recovery system. Due to the high humidity levels in Chicago´s climate in summer the latent load is very high. Therefore a total heat recovery system with 75% efficiency recovers sensible as well as latent load at a high efficiency.
The energy concept to heat and cool the office and classroom spaces uses radiant panels and radiant sails. Furthermore, the building has an all year cooling demand. These facts are ideal conditions for the implemented energy supply system. A heat shifting strategy balances the diverse thermal loads around the Kellogg building before supplementing with the district supply. A geothermal system with heat pumps provides over 50% of the total heating and cooling demand. Additionally, the connection of the building to the central system allows for supplemental heating and cooling to be provided if necessary.