|| Structural - Sustainable ||

JVA helped pioneer the use of Insulated Concrete Forms (ICF) in public school buildings on the East Grand Middle School in Granby. This 90,000 s.f. facility is the largest ICF structure in Colorado, and recently received an Award of Excellence from the Rocky Mountain Chapter of the American Concrete Institute. The award acknowledged innovative use of a structural system which (in the words of one of the judges) “ ..... will continue to save energy dollars for the taxpayers of Grand County for the next 50 years”. In fact, the school district has documented a 33% reduction in heating bills compared with their conventional schools. That same structural system is currently being used on Mt. St. Vincent Home School in Denver.

We are proud to have been on the design team responsible for the AIA award-winning Boulder County Recycling Center. This $13.6 million complex utilizes state-of-the art recycling process equipment in a 30,000 s.f. process facility and an 18,000 s.f. tipping floor building.

Construction was recently completed on the Renovation of the North Boulder Recreation Center, which is the City of Boulder’s first building constructed to meet the U.S. Green Building Council’s Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (L.E.E.D.) Silver Standard. JVA designed the roof structure to support solar panels that help heat the pools and form the largest flat panel solar array built in the U.S. in the last 20 years.

JVA’s staff has hands-on, personal experience and commitment to sustainable design in our own homes… we do “walk-the-talk.” Bob Hunnes, principal, designed and built his own passive solar home in 1980. It continues to enjoy space-heating bills of less than $120 per year. His family is currently building a mountain home using ICF and log construction from standing-dead timber.

Kevin Tone, Director of Civil Engineering, used recycled timbers to construct his own strawbale home, which is powered by solar and photovoltaic energy. He is literally “off-the-grid.”

JVA has been a corporate sponsor of RESOURCE 2000, a nonprofit organization specializing in the “deconstruction” of existing buildings and in recycling of building materials. During the program’s inception, we provided personnel support and salvage trailers to prevent usable building materials from being sacrificed in landfills.

Our firm has structurally designed numerous adobe homes throughout Colorado. We were also the structural engineers for the Ute Mountain Ute Tribal Headquarters in Towaoc, Colorado. This building was reported to be the largest “modern” adobe structure built in Colorado. In addition, JVA has designed several earth-sheltered homes and commercial buildings including the first steel-framed “Sunearth” Home in 1978. This home was a test-project that included several hundred thermocouples monitored by NASA as part of a research project on energy efficient building construction.

Bob Hunnes helped “write the book” as a coauthor of the City of Boulder’s building code for strawbale and adobe materials. In addition, he’s designed several strawbale residences and one strawbale commercial structure in Boulder. He was recently a juror evaluating University of Colorado teams competing in the Solar Decathlon, a nationwide competition of architectural/engineering designs for zero-energy-use buildings that was held in Washington, D.C. To their credit, the CU team won the national competition.

JVA continues to expand its horizons, whether pursuing new structural applications of “esoteric” building materials such as pumice-crete, researching applications of High Volume Fly Ash Concrete mixes to expand the use of this waste by-product, designing Frost Protected Shallow Foundations, or advocating the use of helical-pier foundations in wetlands areas.