Ontario Project Uses Walker Bird-Friendly Glass for Sustainability goals

The new headquarters for the Ontario Secondary School Teachers’ Federation, designed by Moriyama Teshima Architects (MTA), marks the firm’s first completed mass timber development. Formally titled the Ontario Secondary School Teachers’ Federation (OSSTF/FEESO) Headquarters and Multi-Tenant Commercial Building, the project delivers 127,000 square feet of mixed-use space. From the outset, the design prioritized carbon reduction, environmental stewardship, occupant health and wellbeing, and the achievement of LEED Platinum certification.

In pursuit of net-zero operational carbon, which is one of the criteria to meet the top tier of the Toronto Green Standard version 4, MTA specified AviProtek E glass with a Solarban 90 low-e coating by Vitro Architectural Glass on the second surface. Because the bird-friendly markers are applied to the first surface, the low-e coating could be positioned on surface two, improving thermal efficiency without compromising bird safety. This configuration also provided greater flexibility to expand glazing areas and maximize daylight harvesting. The final composition delivers a Solar Heat Gain Coefficient of just 0.23, along with 51% visible light transmittance.

“The heating and cooling were the largest energy loads, but what surprised us were the high lighting loads, which we had to find a way to reduce. We solved this by utilizing daylight harvesting techniques. We designed the head of the windows to be as high as possible, fine-tuned the window-to-wall ratio – in our case it was 60:40 – and placed the lighting on daylight dimming controls. These measures brought the energy required to run the lighting down by 60%. This builds in lifetime cost savings using passive solutions.  The high-performance building envelope allowed us to slightly increase the window area without impacting solar heat gain,” says Phil Silverstein, B.Arch., MAATO, LEED AP BD+C, GRP and Partner at Moriyama Teshima Architects.