On a hillside in Berkeley, CA, overlooking the San Francisco Bay, a team of building scientists is exploring the future of building systems integration. Among their collaborative partners is another group of scientists who are also working from a considerable height — in this case, the roof of a seven-story building in Singapore.
The first group is the FLEXLAB team at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, which since 2014 has been testing building products and systems under real-world conditions at a freestanding facility located on the lab’s hilly campus. There, researchers are measuring the energy performance of integrated building technologies and, in some cases, helping make them more efficient.