The Oak Park Residence Corp apartment building at 7 Van Buren in Oak Park, IL establishes a new benchmark for quality and performance in the multifamily residential building stock in the Midwest. The new 45-unit building consists of a 6 total stories, with a ground floor concrete parking podium and 5 stories of wood frame above that replaces an existing two-story structure. Stemming from an ambitious mission to reframe discussions about affordability, equity, and sustainable development, the project is targeting PHIUS+ Source Zero certification as a zero-energy building.
The project has received the first round of acceptance from the Illinois Clean Energy Community Foundation (ICECF) grant to support the zero-energy goal for the project. As part of that goal, the project will pay particular attention to the envelope design, mitigation of thermal bridging, and selection of HVAC systems in support of the zero-energy requirements. Additionally, through solar analysis and scoping, the project will include enough solar production on the rooftop and façade to meet the demands of the units within the building.
Level of Responsibility & Detailed Description of Services
dbHMS serves as engineer of record overseeing the mechanical, electrical, plumbing, and fire protection design. Additionally, through its DataBased+ studio, dbHMS provided building performance analysis support to the design team to validate the zero-energy performance of the building, to provide a performance metric necessary to solicit a request for proposal to solar developers, and to document the building’s approach for the application to the ICECF. dbHMS navigated the utility coordination, solar production, and building systems performance, putting the project on the path to successfully attaining zero-energy building status.
