pARTy Walls & Artworks in OTR: More Than Wall. More Than Party. More Than Art.

They used to call Cincinnati's Over The Rhine (OTR) neighborhood "the Paris of the West". It was once a thriving community of about 50,000 people and hundreds of clubs, bars, beer gardens, and theaters on the north side of the Erie Canal (Central Parkway). Now there are only about 5,000 residents. Many of the homes have fallen into disrepair. About 500 buildings are vacant. But many are but a hop, skip, and a jump away from becoming high-performance energy-ass-kickers in a great neighborhood. I've been lucky to be a part of some very cool energy renovation projects in historic Over The Rhine. OTR is home to the nation's highest concentration of urban homes on the national historic registry and is the funkiest place in Cincinnati! But this blog is about my petition to the universe to help me join some of my energy work with some of the city's public art bandwagon. 

My OTR wish for 2011 has three parts: 

1) stop tearing down non-obsolete buildings in OTR;

2) where buildings have already been torn down, exposing old party walls, install exterior insulation/plaster systems;

3) then request Artworks come and do what they do better than anyone-- beautify--like they did at Jackson St.(see pic below)

4) then stand back and watch, not only the beautification of the neighborhood, but MAJOR ENERGY SAVINGS 

BEFORE

AFTER

It's not immediately obvious why this Artworks project is associated with any sort of energy savings. It is because this wall was never meant to stand open to the elements. This building wasn't originally designed with an adjacent parking lot, but another building that is no longer there! Now, these old party walls are leaking energy like sieves. Since OTR's heyday, about half of the buildings have been torn down. That leaves a LOT of accidentally exposed party walls with super-soft brick, failing mortar, and high utility bills. 

Energy is lost not just by conductive heat transfer (molecular vibrations) through the dense brick (poor insulator), but more importantly, energy loss occurs via air ex/infiltration through the porous brick and mortar. We need to be making a big friggin' deal out of this!-- for there is a multiplicity of benefits that come from one very elegant (and artsy) solution. 

TRUE STORY

In one of my projects in OTR, a 16-unit condominium/retail LEED renovation, the owners wanted to leave some of the brick walls exposed, to maintain the historic "urban/loft/chic" character. They also wanted to spray foam all of the walls before framing and drywalling for maximum energy savings. In order to get the best of both worlds (historic preservation and energy performance), we ran a little experiment to see what the energy penalty would be from leaving a single brick wall exposed (former party wall). 

Exposed brick wall in a condo in historic Over The Rhine suffers tremendous air leakage as was shown by my experiment-- taping plastic against the wall and sucking the air out of the home with a huge fan and watching the plastic sheet fill up like a balloon. 

THE TEST RESULTS
We conducted a blower door test and infrared inspection after foam spraying and drywall three out of four walls, but leaving one brick wall as is. The results were shocking. The unit suffered 12 ACH@50. That's 12 air changes every hour on a windy day (~22 mph). As a reference, most new homes that don't get spray foam insulation and air sealing suffer only about 5 ACH@50. The funny thing was, we couldn't find any holes because we just weren't looking for the problem to be in the brick EVERYWHERE. But then we taped sheets of plastic all over the wall and de-pressurized the unit again, and the plastic came balloonin-ing and was even torn right off the wall. Sure enough, if I stood next to the brick wall while the blower door was running (or on a windy day), it would feel like I was in a wind tunnel.

THE SOLUTION
The problem could easily be remedied by painting the brick. But because the exposed brick "look" was so important to the owners, several units were painted with a transparent sealant. The bricks and mortar were so porous, they just drank that sealant right up. It took four coats and several dozen tubes of transparent caulk! This method finally reduced the whole unit air leakage to just under 7ACH@50 (~42% improvement) in all 16 units. This is one solution. An equally effective solution would be to seal the brick from the outside...

ARTWORKS TO THE RESCUE
I have the good pleasure of getting to ride at Spinning class with the director of Artworks-- the very talented and humorous Tamara. She tells me that she gets many requests from building owners, wanting their very own Artworks mural. It sometimes comes as a disappointment to them, that the owners would have to bring the surface of their old party walls to a minimum standard of preparedness--sealed with a skim coat of cement, and it would cost the building owners some money. They opt not to beautify, oblivious to the energy savings in store.

It would be very good news to these same frugal building owners that the prep work itself, to make their walls even mural-worthy, would deliver more than enough energy savings to pay for their beautification project. And while my 16-unit condo project realized a great benefit by merely installing an air barrier to stop the leakage, the BEST case scenario would be to ALSO install an exterior thermal barrier (rigid insulation) to reduce the conductive heat transfer across the party wall. By installing the insulation on the exterior surface of the wall, the brick becomes integrated into the inside of the building, adding a huge thermal mass. Thermal mass is thermal inertia-- something that is hard to change the temperature of. Brick is so heavy and has a high heat capacitance, so it is hard to heat it up and it is hard to cool it down. But once it reaches room temperature, it stays at room temperature and keeps occupants quite comfortable.

To request a mural contact Artworks HERE