Achieving LEED® Gold in a Chemical Engineering Laboratory: The Schlinger Laboratory at the California Institute of Technology

Todd See, WSP Flack+Kurtz
Michael Maiese, Bohlin Cywinski Jackson

The Schinger Laboratory at California Technical Institute (Caltec) is a 60,000-square-foot (sq. ft.) chemistry and chemical engineering facility, completed in March 2010. The project is expected to earn LEED Gold certification under LEED NC 2.2, pending final review.

The project program includes intensive organic chemistry, inorganic chemistry, and chemical engineering research and is a facility with 90 hoods. The design by BCJ and F+K provides an intensive research facility while creating a human work/research space for occupants (who dedicate their lives to science). The program was completed on a tight site and a suburban campus; the compact building minimizes footprint, while using native landscape materials as part of an aggressive water conservation strategy. The project includes an outdoor space created for the chemistry division and overall campus.

Sustainable building attributes include:

  • Overall building energy use is 21 percent below standard.
  • Fan Power: Fume hood zone presence sensors close the fume hoods after three minutes and reduce airflow to the fume hood to less than 30 percent of the maximum flow. This reduces supply fan power and heating hot water/pumping power needed to reheat the air.
  • Synthesis Laboratory Transfer Air: Transfer air from adjacent write-up areas provide makeup air to to the synthesis laboratories. This reduces the airflow required to each laboratory suite by approximately 5 percent.
  • Provided a separate biological safety cabinet (BSC) exhaust system to reduce the static pressure of the general exhaust, his reduced system horsepower and connected the electrical load as the BSC systems reduces flow when not in use.
  • Low-flow Hoods: Waldner hoods manufactured in Germany are designed to operate at 60-feet-per-minute face velocity.
  • Lighting: The design provides a high level of lighting control by individual occupants while simultaneously reducing energy when lights are not required. Laboratory benches are served by dual-level overhead lighting and task lighting at benches and workstations. Lighting can be controlled individually or overridden on a room-by-room basis. Active daylighting control strategies minimize energy use for lighing systems.
  • Photovoltaics (PV): Provision has been made for 2500 sq. ft. of (future) PV on the roof. Once installed, this will provide approximately 1.8 million kilowatts per hour annually of electricity for the building/campus.
  • Water Use: Water use has been reduced approximately 48 percent from the baseline case.

Biographies:

Todd See is a senior vice president in the WSP F+K San Francisco office. He has been with WSP F+K since his graduation from Pennsylvania State University in 1991. While his primary concentration is the design of heating, ventilating, and air conditioning systems, Mr. See has applied innovative design solutions on many of his projects, including passive cooling solutions, heat recovery underfloor air distribution, natural ventilation and mixed-mode systems, and displacement ventilation systems. His value-conscious designs are based on early communication with the design team to develop creative system concepts that respond to the architectural goals of the project.

Mr. See's project experience includes a wide variety of building types including laboratories, government, commercial, and corporate headquaters. Example projects include The Bren School of Environmental Science at the University of California, Santa Barbara; Pixar Animation Headquarters; the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals; Westfield San Francisco Centre; Bloomingdale's Flagship stores; and NOAA Pacific Regional Center in Honolulu, Hawaii.

Michael Maiese is a senior associate and has been with BCJ since 1989. He is experienced in new construction, adaptive reuse, and renovation at all scales. He was the project manager for the chemistry and chemical engineering building at the California Institute of Technology and the University of California, Riverside Materials Science and Engineering Building. Mr. Maiese’s experience with construction technologies, building systems, and construction delivery methods comes from a diverse range of projects, including Rensselaer's Center for Biotechnology and Interdisciplinary Studies, Yale University's Chemical Research Building, the Macromedia (now Adobe) Headquarters in San Francisco, the Apple Software Development Studio at Carnegie Mellon University, Apple's High Profile Retail Stores, the Intelligent Workplace at Carnegie Mellon, and Pixar Animation Headquarters in Emeryville, California.

Mr. Maiese is particularly experienced with technically sophisticated buildings that integrate the client's program into facilities that speak of the character of the institution. Two recent examples are Rensselaer’s Center for Biotechnology and Interdisciplinary Studies and Yale's Chemical Research Building, which both integrate a modern research facility into their campus context while evoking the sophistication and purpose of the client's program. Another example is the award winning Rakow Research Library for the Corning Museum of Glass. The existing 1960s engineering building was renovated to house Corning's extensive glass research archives.