Center for Urban Waters LEED® Platinum Marine Laboratory
Jason Chiu, Perkins+Will
The Center for Urban Waters was envisioned by the City of Tacoma, Washington, to be a beacon on the water and an example of using sustainable building and site strategies for all future projects in the city. The 51,000-square-foot, three-story building functions as a shared research facility for the city of Tacoma, the University of Washington-Tacoma, and the non-profit organization Puget Sound Partnership to receive and analyze water samples from the waterways of Tacoma and surrounding areas. The building program is comprised of laboratories and offices, conference rooms, an exhibit and customer service center at the lobby entrance, and related building services including a mooring facility on the Thea Foss Waterway. The building is sited to optimize views across the waterway to downtown Tacoma and Mt. Rainier, to maximize public open space, and to provide access to the public esplanade along the shoreline. The esplanade, similar to the ecological vision for the area, was initiated with this project and is planned to extend along the waterway with future development. The building is tracking LEED Platinum certification, the highest level of certification available from the United States Green Building Council. Sustainability strategies include natural ventilation of the office environments, exterior automated sunshading to optimize heat gain and daylight, vegetated roofs, storm water collection, and water reuse.
Materials chosen for the building's interior and exterior were selected based on quantity of recycled content, where the product was manufactured, amount of volatile organic compounds in the product, and whether the product was certified (as in the case of wood products). Laboratories that have low-flow fume hoods and reject water from the reverse osmosis water system are combined with water collected from the green roofs and reused for irrigation and toilet flushing in order to minimize water usage. Responsible waste management before and during construction will also be a factor in achieving this certification. An advanced building management system (building information modeling) is used to gather data and optimize building performance. Lessons learned include specifying exterior materials to withstand a corrosive marine environment and interior materials that avoid the use of phthalates, while meeting the strict University of Washington performance standards for laboratories.
The 51,000-square-foot facility was completed in 2010, and has won the American Institute of Architects (AIA) Seattle Regional Top Ten Green Award and the 2008 AIA Washington Civic Design Merit Award.
Biography:
Jason Chiu has been designing and building laboratories for more than 10 years. Mr. Chiu's project experiences range from high-containment laboratories for the federal government to manufacturing clean rooms for large pharmaceutical companies. Mr. Chiu is an architect and currently works in the Toronto office of Perkins+Will.