Planning for Green Building: Consensus in Academic Projects

Elizabeth Vandermark, SmithGroup Inc.

In planning, we explore new ways to anchor our professional lives in our local and global community and develop appropriate tools and mental constructs for effective service. We stand at the threshold of significant and revolutionary change in our profession. Three concurrent movements of building information modeling, integrated practice, and a growing ecological literacy have already changed and will fundamentally redefine how we conceive, develop, and communicate our designs. Even more fundamental, they set the stage for how we conduct planning for effective design with our educational clients. This presentation will highlight the process and tools we have developed to guide students, faculty, and administrators through the early planning process to fully consider appropriate green strategies for teaching laboratories.

Featured in the presentation will be several recent academic laboratory projects (built, under construction, and in design) to illustrate how the programming and planning process has changed with the development of building information modeling tools and green design strategies. Specifically, it will feature St. Mary's New Science Building, Madonna University's New Science + Media Building, Mesa Community College's New Physical Sciences Building, and Mesa Community College's Red Mountain Campus Life Science Building.

Also featured in the presentation will be a 'no-brainer' academic LEED® scorecard and side-by-side comparison of which projects achieved which credits. Several common credit strategies will be detailed to show how higher education can market the story of going green in their teaching laboratories while 'putting science on display'. It will also highlight several new tools under development to model early concepts to understand how design decisions might affect energy and water efficiency. Finding new ways to 'see' critical planning criteria sets the stage for successful green projects and builds a great team to shepherd everyone through the process.

Educators want buildings that cost less to maintain and minimize their environmental impact, and want to participate in an educational process that allows them to manage their buildings more effectively and tell their story more eloquently. As a result, we as architects, spend as much time educating as we do designing. Our tools are ever-expanding along these lines to encompass dynamic displays of quantitative information. We lead our clients to a better understanding of how they fit into their larger global context. Through practice, we engage our educational communities at all levels.

Biography:

Elizabeth Vandermark has 10 years experience working in design, architecture, and project management on diverse projects in retail, education, research and development, business, and hospitality. Her projects include both new construction and renovation projects through all phases of the design and construction process. In her work on high-performance buildings she seeks new design approaches to successfully explore the complex interplay of program, building technology, and the environment. She is particularly interested in assisting complex and dynamic organizations to balance their financial, environmental, societal, and human goals to craft sustainable design solutions for our future.

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