Michael E. Clark, RBEC, RRO, PE, CSRP President PRESIDENT’S MESSAGE The theme for this month’s edition of RCI Interface is The Building Envelope. Most everyone in our industry understands the terms “building envelope” to mean the six sides of the building. The envelope includes the roof, the four exterior walls, and the basement slab. When the Roof Consultants Institute was formed in the early 1980s, its primary focus was on the roof. In the early 2000s, we decided to expand our emphasis to include the remaining five sides of the building. This paradigm shift was accomplished by the inclusion of exterior wall and waterproofing consultants to our core roof consultant membership, as well as changing our name. RCI, Inc. has grown steadily since that decision. Although we are now all about the entirety of the building envelope, we have not forgotten our roof roots. One outcome of this “bigger-tent” decision was the creation of our highly informative annual Building Envelope Technology Symposium (BETS). Last month, I told you about the first RCI BETS to be held in Canada, on September 13-14 in Mississauga, Ontario. By the timeyou read this message, the Canadian BETSwill have concluded. My thanks, on behalf ofyour association, to all of you who attended. Increasingly, the word “enclosure” is being used in lieu of the word “envelope” to describe the six sides of the building. This shift can be seen in ASTM’s two standards that cover Building Enclosure Commissioning (Cx). Also, the National Institute of Building Sciences (NIBS) and ASTM are developing a Building Enclosure Cx educational program. RCI, Inc. has begun work on the development of a BECx certification program and has recently signed an agreement with NIBS and ASTM not to duplicate efforts along those lines (see page 62). The Building Enclosure Councils (BECs), started by an agreement between NIBS’s Building Enclosure Technology and Environment Council (BETEC) and the American Institute of Architects (AIA) in 2004, today numbers upwards of 26 chapters representing cities and states all across the U.S. Debate raged in the early 2000s over the use of the term “envelope” vs. “enclosure” and can still be occasionally heard in our gatherings today. In an effort to weigh in on the debate, Dr. Joe Lstiburek published his Building Science Insight (BSI) number 24, entitled “Vocabulary,” in October of 2009. Dr. Lstiburek, or Dr. Joe as he is affectionately known, is widely considered to be the Dean of Building Science. In BSI-24, Dr. Joe pontificated: “They are building enclosures—they are not building envelopes. You put letters in an envelope, not people.” Towards the end of BSI-24, Dr. Joe’s “Simple Glossary” section defines the building enclosure as “the system or assembly of components that provides environmental separation between the conditioned space and the exterior environment.” Far from being “settled science,” I believe the words “enclosure” and “envelope” are interchangeable. Finally, I have the great honor, as your association’s president, to represent RCI, Inc. and to speak this October at the 2018 edition of the Advanced Building Skin (ABS) Conference in Bern, Switzerland. Whether you refer to the exterior environmental separator as the building envelope, the building enclosure, or, in the ABS’s case, as the building skin, I remind you to… Keep Pushing the Envelope, er, Enclosure?! 6 • RCI Interface September 2018
