Stephen Turner is the president of Stephen Turner Inc., a building commissioning company based in Providence, Rhode Island. With over 35 years of experience in the field, he brings us insights from the inception of building commissioning as a practice right up to the front lines of the industry today. In this interview, we discuss the basics of building commissioning, why commissioning is important to green building, and the future of scale and sustainability — is the answer to build big?
YOU CAN SUBSCRIBE TO THE PODCAST ON ITUNES, SOUNDCLOUD, STITCHER OR TUNEIN
“It’s viewed as so essential for high performance buildings to be commissioned that it is not possible to obtain any form of green building certification without commissioning the project.” - Stephen Turner
Show Notes:
- What is building commissioning?
- The history of commissioning
- Why commissioning is especially important for green buildings
- How commissioning works with other construction reintegration tactics
- The built systems involved in commissioning
- Where commissioning as an industry is moving
“When we talk about overall sustainability, and hopefully someday taking very large buildings beyond sustainability into the regenerative range, I think that’s really where large buildings come into their own.” - Stephen Turner
- What kinds of problems commissioning can solve
- The differences between new commissioning, recommissioning, and retrocommissioning
- How sustainability and form are related
- The pros and cons of building big
- What the future holds for economies of scale
- The regenerative potential of large buildings
Links Mentioned:
“Looking at the planet’s caring capacity, the population burden, if we’re not talking about large scale, we’re not talking about real solutions.” - Stephen Turner