Armand Harpin, Director of Federal Healthcare at IMEG, joins this episode to discuss the firm’s extensive work with the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA), Defense Health Agency (DHA), and Indian Health Services. Under Armand’s leadership, IMEG has been ranked the top Veterans Affairs engineering firm by BD+C Magazine.

“We serve the VA across probably 75 percent of the campuses throughout the country,” Armand says. These projects span a range of services, from facility condition assessments and master planning to infrastructure upgrades like boiler and chiller plants. “We've also spent a great deal of time over the last few years and are still involved in electronic health record projects for the VA,” Armand adds.

For most of the firm’s federal healthcare projects, IMEG collaborates closely with more than 20 service-disabled veteran-owned small businesses—partnerships that are extremely valued. “It’s a real pleasure to support those architectural and AE firms,” says Armand. On larger projects, those $100 million and above, the firm partners with national AEC firms across the country.

Armand says the federal healthcare market is currently experiencing a transitional period, with shake-ups in leadership within the VA’s Office of Construction and Facilities Management (OCFM). “They’ve lost their senior director, they’ve lost a good portion of their associate directors, and so they're in the process of rebuilding,” he says. This comes as the VA continues to face major issues with its building stock; most VA facilities are 50 to 60 years old, creating significant operational challenges. “It’s becoming more and more difficult... to provide for today’s healthcare needs,” Armand says. Some major campuses, he adds, are being “decanted,” with their services being moved to leased, community-based outpatient clinics in more population-dense areas. “That’s called ‘commercialization,’ and it's been a critical piece for bringing services and positive outcomes to veterans in underserved areas.”

Speed and efficiency in project delivery have become top priorities, with Armand citing increased use of design-build and integrated delivery approaches to accelerate project timelines. One such example is a $600 million healthcare center project in El Paso, Texas, currently being executed by IMEG in partnership with Clark Construction.

Armand has been involved in the federal healthcare market for many years and his work in the sector hits close to home. “My brother served in the Air Force. My father served as a Marine... and passed away in the VA hospital in San Diego,” he says. “This is an incredibly personal mission.”

His passion also dovetails with IMEG’s stated purpose to create positive outcomes for people, communities, and the planet.

“It’s a mission of stewardship, of accountability, and trying to provide the healthcare outcomes that VA and active military patients need,” he says.

This episode of The Future Built Smarter examines parametric engineering, which transforms design from a static, linear process to a dynamic, adaptive one. “By leveraging specialized 3D software like Rhino, Grasshopper, and Karamba, engineers can create flexible and intelligent design models that respond instantly to changes in parameters as opposed to building a model using fixed dimensions,” says Michael Kilkelly. A member of IMEG’s Innovation Team, Michael has been working with others on a new structural service for clients that has just been launched: Project SPEED, which stands for Structural Parametric Engineering for Efficient Design.

“Building owners want projects delivered on a shorter timeline than ever before,” says Michael. “Traditional design processes, however, are not well suited to this reality, especially for structural engineers, for whom complexity and time are two of the biggest challenges. As a result, engineers often can’t fully explore the breadth of possible solutions, one of which might better meet a project’s goals. Parametric engineering allows engineers to create lightweight structural design models, very quickly make changes, test the design, and iterate quickly.”

Instead of taking a few days using the traditional design process, parametric engineering enables engineers and clients to instantaneously see the feasibility and impact of changes—moving shear walls, changing bay sizes, using concrete or mass timber versus steel, etc.—as well as the resulting impacts on material cost and embodied carbon. “So instead of, ‘It'll take us two days to get back to you,’ it's ‘Let's look at it right now.’ It becomes a much more interactive, collaborative process.”

Watch a video on parametric engineering and learn more on the IMEG blog.

This episode of The Future Built Smarter examines modern high performance computing facilities and the opportunity to use their waste heat as an energy source.

“High performance facilities for computing are different than what most people would consider a data center,” says Brandon Fortier, IMEG's Director of Science and Technology. “Data centers serve general purpose IT needs for a building or a company, things like web hosting, cloud storage capabilities, et cetera. High performance facilities for computing serve more of a scientific or other research need. They use significantly more computing power because they're doing things like climate modeling or machine learning for AI.”

Such energy-intensive AI deep learning computing requires an intense amount of cooling, which generates a significant amount of waste heat. In the right locations—such as on a healthcare, higher education, or federal campus, as well as private research campuses—this heat can be recovered and pushed into district energy systems for use in the heating of neighboring buildings, greatly supporting overall sustainability and greenhouse gas reduction goals in the process.

“These high performance data centers definitely produce a lot of heat,” says Ken Urbanek, a client executive in IMEG’s Denver office. “On the other hand, that's a great energy source. Let's grab that source energy from that data center and push that into the campus.”

Ken provides several real-life examples of leveraging such an energy source, from an East Coast university that is planning to condition millions of square feet across its campus to more niche examples such as conditioning greenhouses in colder climates and even warming a pond at a trout farm.

“There are a lot of synergies out there,” Ken says. For a campus, he adds, “as you're looking to decarbonize and you're looking at various options, part of that exercise should be if a data center makes sense… There's not a research facility, whether it's on a healthcare, academic, or other campus, that probably can't find a business case to say, ‘How can we utilize advanced AI to help further our research?’

Now you just have to say, ‘Where on this campus can we find 10, 15, 20 megawatts of power?’ In your decarbonization plan, you might be pulling that energy anyway. And better to put it into AI and utilize it for research than to put it into heat pumps or some sort of electric generation system.”