Talk title: "Clustering Stuff: The Many Benefits of Architecturally Compact Mechanical Infrastructure"
Gary Klein is a hot water distribution and efficient plumbing systems expert who has spent decades studying how buildings deliver hot water to fixtures. In this talk from the Westford Symposium, he makes the case for architecturally compact mechanical cores: clustering plumbing, and the wet walls and risers that serve it, into the smallest reasonable footprint. He walks through why the volume of water sitting in a pipe, not just distance, determines how long it takes hot water to reach a fixture, why most plumbing sizing still relies on 1940s-era peak flow assumptions instead of modern measured data, and shares a real case study of a building whose mechanical core shrank year over year as the design was refined. He closes with a look at fixture flow types and a broader vision for keeping building cores serviceable for the life of the building.