Iowa homeless shelter marries envelope aesthetics with high performance.
Rob Smith’s design team faced a dilemma.
They needed to identify a design solution for a new homeless shelter in Des Moines, Iowa that projected a “caring institution without looking like a Taj Mahal” and still stick the landing on key envelope performance goals.
“We wanted to achieve as high an R-value as possible without insulating the stud space,” Smith explains. “It’s all about water vapor. We wanted to eliminate dew point as an issue.” (more…)