Programming and Early Design Decisions Help Take a Marine Biology Laboratory to Net Zero
Joshua Gassman, RA, LEED AP®, Lord, Aeck & Sargent
Zandy Hillis-Starr, National Park Service
The National Park Service (NPS)/Joint Institute for Caribbean Marine Studies (JICMS) Marine Research and Education Center (MREC) project is a partnership project to build a collaborative marine biology research laboratory in a live-work environment. The facility, a 58,000-gross-square-foot campus complex of buildings, will be located in Salt River Bay, St. Croix, U.S. Virgin Islands. The facility will be designed to support teaching and research laboratories, on-site housing for 40 students, as well as researchers and staff, and will include a community outreach center that incorporates a K-12 hands on educational experience.
Architecture firm Lord, Aeck & Sargent led the owner and design teams in an eco-charrette to establish the key program goals at the forefront of the design process. Prior to the charrette, site and climate analyses were performed to inform the design opportunities. After exploring the available data based on climate and program analysis, the team was able to develop a series of strategies that allowed for significant energy and water use reduction.
St. Croix is hurricane-prone and seismically active, has unreliable power service and the highest kilowatt hour cost in the U.S. (0.49/kilowatt hours), and is dependent on rainfall for potable water. It is vital that these local area conditions have no impact on MREC scientific research to ensure high quality and reliable results, as well as support the aquatic life within the laboratories. The MREC critical goal is to provide researchers with reliable and consistent energy, which meant designing for passive survivability such that critical life-support conditions can be maintained if an event were to occur. By producing electricity onsite via passive solar and wind systems, researchers do not have to rely on the local power grid, which could disrupt their research. Passive survivability also meant the ability to capture sufficient rainwater from the buildings to support potable water demands. Adding a fabricated wetland to treat onsite wastewater led to the additional goal of not connecting to municipal water.
During this session, the second of three presentations on this project, the speakers will focus on the design team and owner interaction and how collaboration on very early conceptual components, including programming and space design criteria, can have a dramatic effect on energy use in laboratories.
Lord, Aeck & Sargent will have completed the master plan for the project prior to the conference and in preparation for the fundraising stage. The speakers will focus on the integrated design process considering relationships between all systems (energy, indoor air quality, site, water, etc.) at multiple scales. More than just a selection of green technologies or a series of checkmarks on a LEED® scorecard, the integrated design process is a comprehensive approach that considers how sustainable design choices can enhance other design criteria. The MREC is focused on science, but it will be the first marine laboratory that will also meet both LEED Platinum and a minimum of three petals in the Living Building Challenge.
Biographies:
Joshua Gassman is a project manager with Lord, Aeck & Sargent. With more than 11 years of experience, Mr. Gassman enjoys coordinating technically challenging projects with large, multi-faceted consultant teams. By serving as the point of contact between the client and project design team, Mr. Gassman manages his projects by effectively communicating project criteria, assuring the client's budget and schedules are met. Mr. Gassman has a depth of knowledge of the USGBC LEED Green Building Rating System and is a LEED 2.1 Accredited Professional. Mr. Gassman has worked extensively on projects involving challenging daylighting criteria. He received a Masters of Architecture from Arizona State University and a bachelor's degree from Washington University.
Zandy Hillis-Starr has more than 23 years of experience in natural resource management and monitoring and has published papers on a variety of species and resource issues including sea turtles, non-native invasive pest control, and coral reef ecology. Ms. Hillis-Starr received her Bachelor of Arts from the University of Maine. Mr. Hillis-Starr is currently the chief of resource management and research for three national park units in St. Croix. As program coordinator for the Buck Island Sea Turtle Research Program from 1987 to 2010, Ms. Hillis-Starr was responsible for the critical hawksbill sea turtle research/monitoring program for United States Fish and Wildlife Service index population, development of the sea turtle monitoring protocol with the U.S. Geological Survey, and development of the long-term database program. In addition, Ms. Hillis-Starr is responsible for the cultural resource program, including museum collections, archives, and both natural and cultural resource compliance.