Ultimately, the goals of the green building movement are five-fold: to reduce energy expenditures; to simplify and detoxify building materials and processes; to eliminate atmospheric health hazards inside the completed project; to coordinate human impacts with the natural environment; and to restore ecological systems that have been damaged. The U.S. Green Building Council’s Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design program is a sensible, simple process by which a facility owner can measure and move toward these worthy goals. By doing so, a project is already well on the road to sustainability and could help save your corner of the planet.
As the building industry digests and makes sense of the green building movement, especially with regard to the LEED rating system, architects can deliver value to the design and planning process through proactive LEED analysis. The green building movement sets lofty goals for high performance, and LEED is the most widely accepted, comprehensive green building metric in the country. It is an excellent starting point for setting goals for a project’s environmental impact.
While the ultimate goal of green buildings is to integrate projects seamlessly into the environment through designs that incorporate strategies such as net energy generation, zero waste production and biologically restorative processes, LEED is an essential step along the way to such ideal conditions.
However, the financial and political cost of achieving even a basic LEED rating can be unacceptably high for many institutions. An informed architect can effectively negotiate compromises between competing agendas – it is one of the best services that architects can offer their clients – that otherwise would result in business, or buildings, as usual.
Great Strides
Examples of clients making great strides in green building abound. One client, a public library in New Hampshire, sensibly decided to spend its limited resources enhancing the building program (i.e. constructing more space, purchasing more books and increasing its staff) rather than seek a formal LEED rating. While the group is very sensitive to the community’s ecological agenda, its primary goal, first and foremost, is to create a state-of-the-art library and resource center. However, the project architect has been asked to use the LEED system as a benchmarking tool for achieving high environmental performance. As it turned out, the New Hampshire project will come very close to achieving a base LEED certification. The costs of documenting, verifying and specifying to satisfy the LEED process were not justifiable given the program and budget. Such compromises are not unusual when an institution is learning how to improve the value of its ecological currency with various constituencies. The good news is that the project escaped the “all-or-nothing” trap that would have eliminated the possibility of any progress toward environmentally sensitive building.
Another client, a private college in Tennessee, also recognized that while a LEED rating is certainly desirable, it is equally important as a first step to understand what is appropriate for the institution’s unique mix of curriculum, tradition and environmental point of view. Green building advocates are sometimes loath to understand that money may be better spent on program or other client needs.
The importance of these projects is that, as a trend, they represent a deep understanding and appreciation for the goals of the green building movement. That is, most owners do not object to LEED per se, but want to initially use it as a benchmarking tool without pursuing the formal rating. The Tennessee project will meet nearly all LEED criteria necessary for a basic rating, simply by hiring a competent architect and engineering team. The institution is also taking it a step further by joining the USGBC and initiating a campus-wide dialogue on ecological issues.
As a consensus driven process, the LEED rating system itself is always subject to compromise. For instance, a building’s longevity, durability and moisture control are not directly measured and rewarded in the current point system of LEED version 2.0 but may be in the future. Nonetheless, these are some of the most critical benchmarks that architects, engineers and facility owners can use to modify the building’s environmental impact.
For example, a building enclosure could last up to 100 years through the use of durable, cut-stone cladding and a well-designed air/water cavity; or it could last 25 years with a less expensive envelope system that would have to be replaced four times over the next 100 years. Institutional owners don’t need help doing that kind of math. While this decision making process is only indirectly addressed and rewarded in the LEED system, the heart of the matter is not the LEED rating, but the thought process behind the decisions about the project’s environmental impact.
To facilitate such decisions, it’s helpful to use the LEED matrix that includes metrics such as life cycle costing, whole building energy modeling and building commissioning. All of these tools can be applied independently, although cost savings increase by using all three. LCC in the stone cladding example above would take into account the embodied energy of the wall system, which is the energy expended per material unit from quarry process to eventual building demolition. Frequency of replacement, annual maintenance costs and aesthetics are all factors in such a decision.
Using several readily available BEM software tools (such as the U.S. Department of Energy’s DOE-2, ENERGYplus or ENERGY-10; or the Environmental Protection Agency’s EnergyStar programs), a design team can make decisions about energy efficiency through a comprehensive analysis of wall and roof systems, doors, windows, building orientation and other design elements. One drawback to BEM is that the design must be relatively far along to be properly modeled, which may prohibit substantial design changes resulting from this energy analysis. Building commissioning is essentially a peer review of all mechanical building systems by a commissioning entity of engineers and other building system specialists. This watchdog function, which begins early in the design process, ensures that the project design works as intended.
For further information, visit the U.S. Green Building Web site at www.usgbc.org, which features the new Eugene (Ore.) Public Library, designed by Shepley Bulfinch Richardson and Abbott.
Architect PETER R. NOBILE III is an associate at Shepley Bulfinch Richardson and Abbott, a national architecture firm based in Boston. He is a LEED 2.0 accredited professional.
