Stars of Our Community: Steven Guttmann
Posted by jteo on Dec. 1, 2024 / Member Spotlight / Subscribe 0
Meet our featured member, Steven Guttmann, a Principal Emeritus at Guttmann & Blaevoet (G&B), has over 35 years of expertise in integrated building design, energy conservation, and sustainable building practices. As a leader in sustainable design, G&B has won national ASHRAE awards, and Steve’s dedication to early collaboration with architects and owners has helped shape high-performance facilities. Since 2018, he has led G&B’s Commissioning Team, which he helped establish in 2004. A seasoned presenter at conferences like GreenBuild and ASHE, he has published extensively on energy-efficient design, including his recent publication "Building Decarbonization Guide: A zero Carbon Future for the Built Environment". His work spans complex projects from hospitals to museums, and he remains active on committees shaping sustainable healthcare practices.
How long have you been involved with ASHRAE in years? Describe the roles or capacities in which you are involved with ASHRAE.
If I recall correctly, I joined ASHRAE while I was still in college; so, if you insist that I date myself, I have been a member for over 40 years. Once I got a job in San Francisco, I joined the Golden Gate chapter, and became a regular attendee at chapter meetings. My only involvement during those early years (~1986 – 1996) was on the Seminar Committee where I helped organize the annual seminar for at least three years, including as Chair of the Committee for at least one year. I took a long break from significant involvement with ASHRAE until 2021. The only project I worked on between 1996 and 2021 was the AEDG for Multi-Family Buildings. In 2021, I joined a Subcommittee of the Task Force for Building Decarbonization (TFBD). In 2023 I joined three different work groups: the Hospital Decarbonization Guide and the Heat Pump Application Guide (both offshoots of the TFBD), and the Cold Climate Design Guide.
If you had to describe the ASHRAE community in three words, what would they be?
Setting the standards.
This is a very important role, and one that ASHRAE, in my opinion, has sometimes failed to embrace from a position of industry leadership. It was very gratifying to see ASHRAE embrace decarbonization of the built environment, which ideally should have come years earlier.
What has been your favorite ASHRAE memory, event, or experience, and why?
Being involved with the local chapter’s seminar committee made me feel very connected to a number of my peers in the greater Bay Area. Feeling part of a broader collaborative community, even as we competed for projects and clients, had a very positive influence. It helped me to find joy in this career in spite of the building industry’s tendency to punish innovation through the efforts of owners and contractors to transfer risk to the design team.
How has your involvement with ASHRAE influenced your career and personal growth?
Being involved with the Golden Gate chapter made me acutely aware of the need to be exceptional at how one communicates about technical issues to both technical and non-technical audiences. Frankly, my involvement with ASHRAE and my passion for “high-performance building design” influenced two particular decisions that have had a major influence on my career.
- I found it much more satisfying to get involved with organizations that had a multi-disciplinary membership, as this allowed for significantly more creativity in problem solving. Over my career, I have generally found engineers to be linear thinkers, satisfied with incremental change from the status quo as the starting point. I much prefer defining visions and goals, and then working backwards to figure how to get to where I want to go. This often means major departures from the status quo in order to facilitate the future I am striving for.
- I found it very meaningful to focus on ASHRAE Technology Awards as a way to bring discipline to our work (design with the end in mind), as well as to force us to always follow our projects after completion to better understand what was successful and what was not. As a result, I believe that our firm has become better at, for instance, developing energy models that attempt to predict actual performance, rather than just code compliance, as well as staying engaged with clients in a way that helps our projects perform as intended. This has led to our firm earning a very significant number of local, regional, and national awards; we are very proud of this.
Do you hold any ASHRAE or other professional certifications/licenses? If so, how have they benefited your career?
I hold two ASHRAE certifications. I am a Certified Building Commissioning Professional (BCxP) and a Certified Decarbonization Professional (CDP).
The commissioning certification was extremely important in my efforts to build a credible commissioning team within Guttmann & Blaevoet. As commissioning work became more ubiquitous, the need to stand out from the masses of people who claimed to be commissioning providers became increasingly important. As owners became more sophisticated in their procurement processes for commissioning services, certification by a “recognized” body became a minimum requirement for consideration. As my focus for the past 6 years has been on decarbonization of the built environment, G&B has carved out a profile as leaders in all-electric building design and commissioning. Hopefully, being part of the first cohort to take and pass the new CDP exam will be an opportunity to continue to demonstrate leadership in this space.
Where do you see the industry heading in the next 5-10 years, and what developments are you most excited about?
Decarbonization of the built environment will force our industry to promote and adapt to change for the next few decades, with most of the change in how we approach design needed in the next 5 to 10 years. I find it very exciting that AI appears to be, finally, mature enough to begin to help with the automation of design. Efforts in this direction have been going on for my entire career, but the tools have never been sophisticated enough to capture the “art” of MEP design that is essential to inform the science of design.
What is one key piece of advice you would offer to young professionals entering this field?
Pay attention to the details.
What I mean by this is that design for design’s sake has been less satisfying than making sure our design’s work (at least to me). This requires that the engineer dig into the details of how things are actually built, and how they function. This has resulted in a career for me that I can look back on with pride, as all our projects “work” (even if it is sometimes a painful process to get there), we have an almost claims free history (6 claims in our 68-year history, only 3 of which occurred under my “watch” and none on projects for which I was the PIC), and I have innumerable examples of occasions on which my analytical skills and engineering “intuition” have solved problems in the field. Perhaps this is why I started our commissioning team in 2004 and transitioned to commissioning full-time in 2018.
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