The Zion National Park Visitor Centre

The Zion National Park Visitor Centre is located on a remote site in Springdale, Utah in America. The visitor centre building, shown in the picture below, is one storey high with a floor area of 710m² and was completed in May 2000. The whole ethos of The National Park service is about allowing visitors to experience the great outdoors whilst protecting the environment. To maintain this policy they constructed a low energy sustainable building.

Design Philosophy

From the beginning of the project The National Park Service decided to adopt an integrated design approach to construct the most sustainable building for the allocated budget. The design philosophy was to:

· Reduce environmental impact

· Increase occupant comfort and health

· Increase employee productivity by providing a comfortable environment to work in

· Reduce maintenance and capital costs

Energy Efficient Features of Zion

To minimise energy and resource impacts the Zion Visitor Centre employed technologies which would be successful in a remote site and warm climate. The following energy efficient technologies were used in the Zion Visitor centre.

Daylighting – The building orientation has been designed so that they make optimal use of the energy available from the sun, in the form of daylight to minimise the need to provide artificial lighting. Natural light can also give a healthier working environment for employees.

Thermal Mass Flooring – Zion has a concrete floor which absorbs and stores heat from the sun during the winter. This heat is then released from the concrete after sunset to warm the occupants.

Trombe Walls – The Trombe walls provide most of the buildings heating through trapping the heat from the sun between glazing and a black selective coating. A masonry wall stores and releases the heat at night when outside temperatures fall.

Downdraft Cooltower – This facility is used when natural ventilation is not enough. Water is pumped over warm pads at the top of the tower which in turn evaporates, cooling in the air. This cool air fall to the bottom of the tower and is released at the bottom into room space.

Energy Efficient Lighting – Most of the building’s lighting is supplied naturally. However, there are daylight sensors which provide only the amount of traditional light needed to meet the building’s requirements.

Advanced Controls – The building has a building energy management system to ensure all of it’s energy demanding plant (small pumps, lighting, motorised opening windows) is optimised.

Roof Mounted PV – The building has a 7.2kW photovoltaic system providing approximately 30% of the electricity needed. Batteries are used to store energy from the PVs.

Optimised Overhangs – These prevent unwanted heat and daylight from the sun entering the building in the summer when the sun is higher in the sky, hence, reducing the need for cooling

Energy Efficient Landscaping – The natural resource of water from the Virgin River is diverted into irrigation ditches which distribute water to foliage and trees; preventing water transportation and storage requirements.

Glazing – Low emissivity glass.