Bruce Hall
Director of Engineering
Parkway Properties
Bruce Hall’s experience with buildings goes back decades, from mechanical systems to project and energy management at firms like CBRE and others. In his projects, Hall takes pride in “seeking environmentally sound solutions coupled with sound financial performance.”
A chiller plant becomes an artificial reef as a 30-year-old building becomes a model of sustainability.
By the time Bruce Hall’s firm purchased One Orlando Centre, several decades’ worth of deferred maintenance had added up. Rather than just bringing the building up to code, Hall and his team took an aggressive approach to cutting energy demand and waste while reducing potable water usage by over 30%.
The team attacked inefficiency from all angles, resealing the building envelope and adding new window glazing to reduce heat loads, replacing aging chillers with state-of-the-art systems, and interconnecting chiller plants to reduce loads even more. Each of these shaved gallons off the building's water use while increasing energy efficiency (an over 18% reduction in energy use).
Hall also found a novel way to reuse their decommissioned chiller plant: as home to thousands of organisms off the Gulf of Mexico as an artificial reef. As one juror put it, the reef shows “a great synergy between the building’s geographic location and its broader natural context.
WHAT THEY DID
- Reduced demand by resealing the building and adding window glazing
- Interconnected onsite chiller plants and optimizing the pumping strategy to reduce the total connected load
- Upgraded automation systems from pneumatic to direct digital control
- Disposed of old chiller plant by working with a third party to decommission and sink it 90 feet into the Gulf of Mexico to form an eco-friendly artificial reef