Sustaining a Budget With Sustainable Design
LEED certification has made facility design concepts easier for architects, engineers and owners to achieve by standardizing and formalizing much of the approach to facility design. But what process should architects, engineers and owners apply in selecting green design strategies?
Buildings for K-12 and post-secondary education have proven to be laboratories for sustainable design in the United States. With their educational missions and reputations for innovative thinking, schools and universities are often at the forefront of building design and construction processes, facility operations and management.
Green design concepts are not difficult to apply to educational facilities. With generally tighter budgets, however, local school districts may not be able to incorporate more expensive features such as automatically ventilated atriums.
But some local school districts, such as the Evanston/Skokie School District in Illinois, are finding ways to be environmentally friendly without stretching their budget. The district’s Joseph E. Hill Education Center houses administrative offices, preschool facilities, special and adult education classrooms, and social services agencies in a cost-conscious, but environmentally responsible structure.
Siting the Hill Center with access to commuter bus lines made it easier for people to use public transit, while reducing automobile traffic and congestion. Because the building footprint was minimized, the overall site disturbance and cost was also diminished.
Twenty percent of the materials used in this building were sourced from local manufacturers. Structural steel- and aluminum-cladding systems contain enough recycled material to achieve LEED recycled material targets.
Proper materials selection can improve indoor air quality. Specifying adhesives, sealants, paints, coatings, carpet and composite wood products with low-or zero- volatile organic compounds will dramatically improve IAQ. Moreover, a construction IAQ plan, if properly implemented, can protect building systems and ductwork from contamination. These steps will also increase a project’s LEED score.
Highly reflective roofing materials reduce solar gain during hot summer months and decrease the cooling load. Storm-water runoff from the site is collected, filtered and drained into the adjacent North Shore Channel instead of being discharged into the municipal sewer system.
These relatively easy-to-achieve design strategies are applicable to nearly any building type.
Jeff Nudi is an architect at Cannon Design.