2008 Woodie Awards
Vote Absentee
How green is Brown?
Sidney Frank Hall to become first LEED-certified building
Taryn Martinez
Issue date: 11/13/07 Section: Campus News
|
The Sidney Frank Hall for Life Sciences will be Brown's first LEED-certified building - the building, which opened in 2006, is currently going through the certification process - but the University's dedication to constructing energy efficient buildings predated the widespread adoption of LEED as a standard, said Kurt Teichert, Environmental Stewardship Initiatives manager.
LEED, the widely accepted benchmark for high-performance green buildings, has four certification levels - certified, silver, gold and platinum - which represent how many "points" a LEED project has earned for meeting standards such as sustainable site development, water savings, energy efficiency, materials selection and indoor environmental quality. New and existing buildings, building shells, schools and homes may all be registered for LEED certification.
In Sidney Frank Hall, for example, energy efficiency measures focused on electronic control systems. The building's cooling system uses the most efficient non-ozone depleting chiller plant technology available, Teichert said. Sidney Frank Hall also serves as a chilled water "core plant," which feeds a number of buildings in that area, saving effort and energy.
"Free cooling" in Sidney Frank Hall allows outside air that is already the appropriate temperature to flow through the ventilation system without being heated or cooled, Teichert said.
Additionally, lighting occupancy sensors were set up to control the heating and ventilation systems. "When the room is unoccupied, it sends a message to the system to scale back the temperature," Teichert said.
In general, with features like Sidney Frank Hall's, Brown makes good use of sustainable design principles, said Julia Beamesderfer '09, an organizer of the student environmental group emPOWER. "Brown standards and objectives have been very close to a lot of those LEED guidelines," Teichert said, "particularly around indoor environmental quality and energy and environment. It's just a matter of going through the process."