Terry Wedel interviews Keith Hempel, LPA Architect and Joe Lozoski, President Tangram Interiors. Keith and Joe talk about the playhouse their team designed and built - the Ocean Adventure Lab. This unique playhouse is Project Playhouse's first net zero entry and the first to receive Honorary Certification from the U. S. Green Building Council - Orange County Chapter.
Segment Transcription
Terry Wedel: Welcome back to Cox Forum. You’re about to meet a couple of the gentlemen who are behind the home that you just saw. We have Keith Hempel, who is an architect with LPA and Joe Lozowski, who is president of Tangram Interiors. How did you friends get involved with Project Playhouse?
Keith Hempel: Well Cindy Kennedy at Pro Repro, was kind of the ringleader and she organized LPA, Tangram, Turner Construction, Fuscoe Engineering and we’ve all worked together, so it was a great partnership.
Terry Wedel: Anything like this kind of project before?
Keith Hempel: We’ve done lots of different types of projects together, but nothing on this scale.
Terry Wedel: Yeah, so to speak. Usually when you talk about it it’s like something big and something small. Did doing something like this present any sort of special problems in designing something this small?
Joe Lozowski: Well you would think making something small would be easy, but actually it takes the same amount of work and thought going into it and sometimes it a little more work because you have to make it smaller. You’re not used to thinking in that scale.
Terry Wedel: And how did you come with the idea of kind of tying it in with the Ocean Institute?
Keith Hempel: Well we’re all sustainably minded on the team, Tangram, Turner, Fuscoe, and LPA. We all do sustainable work, so we wanted to try to find something that talked about conservation and ecology and we wanted to do something that educated, so an Ocean Institute seemed to kind of fit kind of all those parameters.
Terry Wedel: So we hear this term net zero, what exactly does that mean?
Keith Hempel: Well net zero is a term in sustainable design where a project produces as much energy as it uses, so every building has lights, air conditioning, heating. To offset that you usually have a wind turbine or solar panels that creates energy, so our playhouse has lights. It has a little projector, so we have some solar panels on top of our roof that allow it to produce energy.
Terry Wedel: So how did you decide what was going to go inside there?
Joe Lozowski: We wanted to use materials that would actually be the actual materials that you would use in a sustainable building, so the architects picked a lot of sustainable materials and we also used a lot of reclaimed materials, so when we went with Turner Construction and who actually physically built the building we asked them to go out to their subcontractors and out to the field and we used a lot of reclaimed materials.
Terry Wedel: A lot of reclaimed materials?
Joe Lozowski: Well okay, not so much.
Terry Wedel: I know where you’re getting at. How long did this take to build from concept to completion?
Keith Hempel: We must have started it in spring, so we’ve been working on it for months. Like Joe said, it has all the problems of a big project, budget, schedule, deadlines, lead times, so yeah, it took about three, four months.
Terry Wedel: But you guys have all worked together before, so this was not like strange bedfellows at all.
Keith Hempel: No, not at all.
Joe Lozowski: Like every other project, it all came together at the very last minute.
Terry Wedel: What does HomeAid mean for your companies?
Keith Hempel: Well I think it’s great to be involved with a project that has direct impact on a community, so the idea of doing this playhouse that is going to generate funds that help the homeless is something we all took great pride in.
Joe Lozowski: And what I think is really unusual is we all got to volunteer on a project in doing what we actually do for a living and building something like we do for a living, but then volunteering and donating back to the homeless community.
Terry Wedel: When you guys are putting together- Talk about the sustainability thing a little bit. It sort of seems like a buzzword now, but how many projects right now that are out there being built really have all these sort of things built into them?
Keith Hempel: I think actually the playhouse is a really good microcosm for things we’re doing in all our projects, selection, materials, energy efficiency, water conservation. All those things are being applied broadly across the United States right now because of the green movement, so it’s real exciting. It was really great to showcase it in such a small little project.
Terry Wedel: And what was the sort of impetus for your company to get involved in something like this?
Joe Lozowski: Well first of all, it fit the mission of our company. We always like to be involved in things in the community that give back to the community and so when I was approached by LPA and we’ve done work on sustainable projects together, but this was the first time we got to work on something where we could actually take our company’s mission, which is to do a good job for our clients and then give back to the community. This really fit together where we got to do something that was a physical manifestation of what we do and give back at the same time. It was fantastic.
Terry Wedel: It looked great, a lot of fun and looking forward to- I'm sure somebody is looking forward to being able to buy one of those for themselves and during our next segment we’re going to tell you how you can do that. We’ll tell you more about the auction and how that is taking place and how you can participate right after this.