Chihuly offers lessons in green to 400,000 people a year

The following post is by Kathleen O'Brien:

In recent coverage of the new Chihuly Garden and Glass located at the Seattle Center, much has been said about art — both the art it displays and the dramatic artistry of the building design itself. While art is said to sustain the mind and soul, this particular building goes further, by employing sustainable techniques and taking the opportunity to educate its visitors as to their value.

O'Brien

In spite of a challenging design and an even more challenging schedule — 7 months to TCO — the project is slated to garner a LEED Silver Certification this fall. "LEED can be challenging even under normal circumstances," according to Jason Sturgeon, PM with Schuchart, the project's GC. "The aggressive schedule meant intense planning and coordination to assure that subcontracts were properly bought out and executed to follow guidelines imposed by LEED certification." Sturgeon adds that "it helped that there was significant harmony" between the players regarding implementing LEED.

In addition to Schuchart the team included Owner, Center Art, LLC, Development Manager Seneca Group, and Owen Richards Architect. (Full disclosure: O'Brien & Co. provided technical consultation on the LEED Certification process to the project team.)

When asked why make a fairly complicated project even more complicated, Seneca Group Principal Bob Wicklein cites the opportunity "to educate over 400,000 visitors expected each year about the environment and green construction."

As with many projects, a good percentage of the effort  towards the LEED green building certification is not visible once the building is complete.  Signage and tours will provide visitors with the story behind the story.  Visitors will experience a lush garden but they will also learn that this area was formerly an acre of pavement.  And those who "mourn" the Fun Forest" will be happy to learn that it has a second life — 100% of the Fun Forest exterior walls, roof, and floors were reused in the interior exhibition spaces, cafe, and gift shop.

Photo courtesy Owen Richards Architect

Chihuly Garden and Glass under construction.

Adapting rather than demolishing the old building not only kept tons of materials out of the landfill, it also saved the energy and water used to manufacture new materials and construct a new building. Overall, 97% of all the waste from construction of this project was diverted from the landfill, about 250 tons.

Signage will also point out that The Glasshouse, which was conceived as an indoor-outdoor space, is not fully heated or cooled in a conventional way. It uses natural systems to efficiently moderate temperatures while allowing the indoor temperatures to fluctuate along with outdoor conditions. Using high-efficiency boilers and chillers and other energy efficiency strategies, the rest of the building exceeds local energy code requirements. The restrooms feature low-flow fixtures that reduce water use by more than 30% over standard fixtures, saving an estimated 160,000 gallons of water per year in this building alone.

For each station on the tour, pertinent tips will be provided.  One hopes that while every visitor will be inspired by the space and glass art to be creative, they will take  some of that creative energy to green up their businesses and homes.

Kathleen O'Brien is a long time advocate for green building and sustainable development since before it was "cool." She lives in a green home, and drives a hybrid when she drives at all. She continues to provide consulting on special projects for O'Brien & Company, the firm she founded over 20 years ago, and provides leadership training and mentoring through her legacy project: The Emerge Leadership Project.

Share this:

How a dashboard helps drive energy savings

The following post is by Tim Cox:

Lucid has partnered with the Seattle 2030 District to provide energy, water and transportation tracking to commercial buildings in downtown Seattle. As of June 2012, 103 buildings—representing over 29 million square feet of office space—have joined the Seattle 2030 District, a high-performance building district that aims for a 50 percent reduction in energy, water and transportation emissions by 2030.

Screenshot of the Seattle 2030 District building dashboard.

Already, the District has seen substantial progress toward its goals:

• 8.4 percent energy reduction compared to the national average

• 2.3 percent water reduction

• 11.4 percent reduction in CO2 from transportation

To accurately track resource use and progress, participants are using Lucid’s Building Dashboard platform. This Web-based technology offers buildings owners and facility managers an integrated system for monitoring energy, water and transit data. Armed with improved transparency and goal setting facilitated by the Building Dashboard, building managers can engage tenants and occupants in a building’s conservation actions. Already, efficiency opportunities such as plug loads and behavior change—factors that have historically not been included in green-building initiatives— are being successfully implemented and measured.

Additionally, the Dashboard allows the District as a whole to track aggregated performance of all buildings. Energy and resource efficiency look very different at a building level than at a district or city scale. By focusing on improving the entire portfolio the District can focus its resources and initiatives on those that represent the best opportunities for improvement and associated payback. The District’s Building Dashboard also allows buildings to share data publicly and compare their building with its peers, adding an element of competition and knowledge sharing to the commercial building world.

Tim Cox is the founder and principal of ZingPR, a public relations firm based in Woodside, Calif.

Share this:

Check out Hybrid’s container camping shelter

The Seattle firm Hybrid Architecture won a competition sponsored by King County Parks to create a camping structure from used cargo containers.

The 8-foot by 24-foot structure can accommodate up to six people overnight. The first unit is being delivered to Tolt MacDonald Park and Campground for permanent installation this summer.  Put your name on a waiting list to be notified when the container is available for reservations by calling (206) 205-5434 or emailing regional.scheduling@kingcounty.gov.

The first Hybrid-designed unit is being delivered to Tolt MacDonald Park and Campground for permanent installation this summer.

The container will be available for public viewing Thursday, July 26, from noon to 2 p.m. at the Parks World Headquarters at King Street Center at Second and Jackson. The public can check it out and learn about the eco-friendly interior design and green materials, including a soy-based spray foam insulation.

The project started as a design competition for re-using a surplus cargo container to provide an overnight camping shelter, demonstrating both conservation and sustainability.

The project staff will be available Thursday to answer questions about the container and the design process. They are: Sujata Goel, King County Parks program manager; Bill Schwartz, King County Parks Small CIP contract manager; Jason Anglin, King County Parks carpenter; and Patti Southard, Solid Waste Division, green tools program manager.

Matson and Premiere Spray Foam were also sponsors.

Share this:

LEED-rated bank branches also lead in business activity

While many corporate sustainability programs are inspired by a commitment to creating shared value for a company’s stakeholders, employees and customers, according to Wall Street expectations, any effort needs to show some form of return on investment to gain company buy-in. Often, this payback is measured in dollars saved versus dollars invested – for instance, how long it will take to recoup investment in an energy efficient building system through savings on the electric bill.

Photo courtesy of PNC Financial Services Group

The relationship between sustainability investment and corporate performance has received a lot of attention in recent years, aptly illustrated through the findings of the recently published Harvard Business School study by Robert G. Eccles, Ioannis Ioannou and George Serafeim that strongly showed companies with a culture of high sustainability outperformed those with low sustainability in stock market and accounting performance.

Yet Georg Kell, executive director of the UN Global Compact, estimates that only 15% of global 1000 companies are sincere and serious about sustainability and long-term value creation.

While we know that green buildings provide a host of so-called intangible business benefits, from brand potency and recognition, to public relations opportunities, to improved employee retention, it’s often hard to pinpoint how these benefits contribute to business performance or sales of an organization.

So the question becomes, what is the tangible business value contribution of green buildings?

University of Notre Dame professors Edward Conlon and Ante Glavas set about answering that question in their study comparing business performance of PNC Financial Service’s (full disclosure: PNC is one of our clients) LEED rated branch banks with non-rated branches (“The Relationship Between Corporate Sustainability and Firm Financial Performance”).

The researchers hypothesized the LEED rated branches would conduct more business with individual consumers, based on a theory that the consumer experience would be different– perhaps because the employee was happier and thus providing better service, or the customer preferred to patronize a branch aligned with their own green values.

The findings were remarkable: not only did the LEED rated branches outperform non-rated branches, but by quite a margin. Specifically:

• LEED rated branches opened 458 more consumer deposit accounts and had over $3 million more in consumer deposit balances per facility per year over non-certified properties.
• LEED rated facilities also opened 25 more consumer loan accounts and had almost $1 million more in loan balances per facility per year.
• All told, performance increased by $461,300 per employee at LEED branches compared to non-rated locations, after controlling for other variables that influence performance (such as consumer net worth, employee demographics, market demographics, branch size and age and advertising spend).

This is the first time we’ve seen a quantifiable correlation between an owner’s investment in green building and a tangible financial measure impacted by a customer purchasing decision – in this case, customer deposits and loan balances verified by an independent, third party academic study of such a green building program.

This finding has important implications to building owners and the green building industry as a whole, as it shows that return on investment in green building is not only quantifiable in terms of money saved on operational expenses – but that these other “intangible” benefits such as employee satisfaction may directly influence customer spending.

In 2007 my firm performed a post occupancy study on PNC’s LEED bank branches and looked at factors such as general workspace satisfaction thermal comfort and air quality, and discovered a significant improvement between the non-rated branches and the new LEED prototype.

The Notre Dame study is an important complement to our study and to the growing body of proof points for the business value of green buildings, demonstrating the business value inherent in sustainability that expands beyond LEED impact areas and the physical structure itself.

Tom Paladino is Founder and President of Paladino and Company, a green building consulting firm.

Share this: