A Climate for Green Building

Stahl Construction has been doing business in Minnesota for three decades, and the company is comfortable with Minnesota’s climate—for weather and for building. When they built a Residence Inn for Marriott in Minneapolis, their client was impressed and asked them to bid on a similar project in Portland, Oregon.

Stahl’s Portland project was part of the Cascade Station development, land located near the Portland airport. Built in 1999, Cascade Station began as a light rail stop on the way to the airport, but the city of Portland had a bigger vision for the site—an “urban village” that involved retail, hotels and restaurants. After 2001, the project languished, but in 2005, the city changed the zoning requirements to allow big retail tenants. IKEA agreed to build a store on the property, and Best Buy and other retailers followed suit. Three hotel owners—Marriott, Hyatt, and Starwood—also committed to building on the site.

Retail stores at Cascade Station, Portland, Oregon

Greenery at Cascade Station, Portland, Oregon

Stahl was the general contractor for the Marriott Residence Inn and Hyatt Place projects. They found that Portland’s climate is a lot different from Minneapolis’s—not just the temperate weather, but the building climate, which has been influenced by Portland’s long-time commitment to sustainability in design and construction. Alisa Kane, Green Building Manager for Portland’s Bureau of Planning and Sustainability, says, “The building code is at the state level as well as the city. We were one of the first states to have an energy code. We know we have a complex regulatory structure, but we want to give builders assistance and make it cost-effective to do business here.”

Portland’s codes led to some adjustments in the building process and in the level of sustainability the finished projects achieved. Brenda Studt, Director of Marketing for Stahl, said, “They weren’t going for LEED certification, but were building to Portland’s standards.” In keeping with local concerns about sustainability, the project recycled 94% of the construction waste and sourced 20% of the building materials within 500 miles of the project—reducing fuel required for transport.

Residence Inn at Cascade Station under construction

The proximity to public transportation was a sustainable plus for Stahl and its clients. Building materials included recycled content, and low VOC paint was the rule. Both hotels relied on controls for exterior lighting, and common spaces were provided with large, energy-efficient windows to maximize daylight and decrease energy use.

Hyatt Place at Cascade Station under construction

Stahl was able to satisfy the city’s requirements and please both hotel clients. They weren’t fazed by building in Portland. They’re confident enough about more projects to have a Portland office.

Images of Residence Inn and Hyatt Place courtesy of Stahl Construction
Images of Cascade Station courtesy of the Portland Development Commission

A Well-Watered Green Roof

We’ve become accustomed to rooftop gardens—several stories up. When you walk through the “rooftop” garden at the Bookmen Stacks loft building in Minneapolis, you’re on ground level. It’s a garden planted on the roof of an underground parking ramp.

Bookmen Stacks Garden and Building

The area has very little greenery—the building itself faces a highway overpass. The project’s developer, Steve Frenz, wanted some green space and was open to new ideas. He’d worked with the landscape architects, Oslund and Associates, before, and asked them to come up with a plan.

Creating a rooftop garden had a few challenges. One was structural—working with the weight of the roof, and compensating for the fact that the roof slopes. Bookmen’s immediate neighborhood has no storm sewer, so managing stormwater was another challenge.

Tom Oslund, principal of Oslund and Associates, needed a way to combine storage and irrigation. He found it in a system manufactured by a Minneapolis company, RESI Inc. The system has three parts: a liner to store water, a chamber to control the water flow, and a sand fill.

In the Bookmen Stacks garden, the system stores stormwater in cisterns buried on the roof, and draws it through the sand as needed by relying on capillary action. Oslund says, “It is able to irrigate more efficiently, and you don’t see any of it. The surface becomes very durable and we’re not casting or using water. It’s all done through wick irrigation.”

The sand fill is good for plants, especially turf. Oslund says, “The biggest challenge presented by turf areas is compaction. It kills the root structure. With sand as a matrix, it doesn’t compact. It stays firm and the roots survive.”

Bookmen Stacks Garden, Aerial View

The system has other advantages. One is that gardens that rely on it need less soil than other rooftop gardens—6 to 8 inches as opposed to 12 to 14. The design of the parking ramp didn’t need to factor in the additional weight, which saved on construction cost. The system has no moving parts—the only element that moves is water. Oslund says, “It’s so simple that there’s not much that can go wrong.”

Planting the garden was really not different from putting plants in a pot. And it let Oslund plant taller plants—ornamental grasses and larger plants in pots. Oslund says, “It has the appearance of something that’s not on the roof. You’re hard pressed to realize it isn’t growing out of the ground.”

Bookmen Stacks Garden, Front View

The result was, Oslund says, “an open space in an area surrounded by access ramps to the freeway. It’s a respite spot.” The building’s dogs like it too—it’s a good place for them to run and play. The garden looks and feels like a private park for the people who live in Bookmen Stacks.

All images courtesy of Oslund and Associates.

This Book Comes with a Fountain

I’m stingy when it comes to buying books. I don’t like to own a book unless I know I’ll reread it with pleasure or refer to it again and again. So when I wanted to read Robert Winter’s biography of tilemaker Ernest Batchelder, I didn’t order it online. I ordered it from the public library.

When the book arrived, I opened it to find this snapshot tucked inside the front cover, which the photographer had helpfully identified. This is a picture of the drinking fountain surround at the Keewaydin Elementary School in south Minneapolis, built in 1924 and still in use today. You can see the garbage pails and the hand-lettered poster on the wall.

Keewaydin School Fountain Surround

Ernest Batchelder is best remembered today for his California tile company. Between 1912 and the late 1930s, his workshop—first in Pasadena, then in LA—made field and decorative tile that was installed in California and elsewhere. But he had strong ties to Minneapolis.

Between 1904 and 1909 he directed the summer school at the Minneapolis Handicraft Guild, which served as a school and a professional association for people interested in decorative metalwork, pottery and tilemaking, leatherwork and jewelry making, and bookbinding.

One of his first installations ever still graces the lobby floor of the old Guild building in downtown Minneapolis. Batchelder used the designs he created for the Guild’s tiles for the rest of his career.

Batchelder Floor Tile in Handicraft Guild Building

When the Batchelder Tile Company expanded during the post-World War I building boom, it made perfect sense for Batchelder to open a showroom in Minneapolis. His old friends were artists, architects, and well-to-do homeowners.

Minneapolis buildings from the 1920s, both public and private, are filled with Batchelder tile. I’ve had the pleasure of straying into more than one south Minneapolis house, built in the 1920s, to be able to identify a fireplace design straight from Batchelder’s mantel catalog.

Educational institutions used Batchelder tiles. The University of Minnesota’s original music building has lovely installations, and the College of St. Catherine in St. Paul has stunning examples. The Keewaydin school’s installation is smaller and less ornate. But it is as pretty an example of multicolored Batchelder field tile as you will see anywhere.

Like a lot of school districts, Minneapolis has been suffering financially, and the city has consolidated enrollments and closed school buildings. The Keewaydin school is still open and the tile is still intact. I’ll keep an eye on it. I like to think of the kids seeing that tile every day as they take a drink of water.

Sustainability in the Lavatory

Unless your commercial building has a cooling tower, most of the water used there is in the loo. According to Jim Keller, partner for Sustainable Design at Gausman & Moore, an engineering firm in St. Paul, Minnesota, about 60% of water used in an office building goes through “restroom plumbing.” Here’s how to save water while people are, ahem, producing it.

As an added benefit, all of these technologies—with the exception of the waterless urinal—are good to have at home, too.

Low-flow faucet aerators: The easiest way to conserve water is to limit the amount that comes out of the faucet. People should wash their hands in the loo, but aerators let them do it with up to 50% less water than conventional faucets. Conventional faucet aerators deliver 2.5 to 5 gallons of water per minute. Low-flow aerators deliver 0.5 to 1.0 gallons. Low-flow aerators are easy to install and have a swift payback period.

High-efficiency and ultra-low flush toilets: Both of these use about half of the water of conventional models, averaging 1.6 gallons per flush instead of 3.5. Ultra-low flush models are the more efficient of the two, using only 6 of the tank’s 13 liters per flush. An ultra-low flush model can be fitted with a dual-flush valve (see below) for even greater efficiency.

Dual-flush valves: Dual flush valves save water by offering two different water closet options: one for liquids and the other for solids. The real saving comes in the liquid option: it uses 0.8 gallons per flush, as opposed to 3.5 in a conventional commode or 1.6 in a high-efficiency version. Dual-flush valves can be easily retrofitted onto existing toilets.

Waterless urinals: Even though waterless urinals were introduced as early as 1992, they’ve since been refined, and interest in them has grown as building engineers and managers become more conscious about conserving water.

Waterless urinals use a sealing liquid—typically an oil, which is less dense than urine—that lets urine flow through and sink beneath. The oil traps any odor. There are two types of waterless urinals, one that uses a cartridge, which encases the sealing liquid, and non-cartridge systems, which put the sealing liquid directly into the drain hole. Waterless urinals don’t need piping, flush controls, or sensors. They greatly reduce maintenance and installation costs.

Despite the benefits, many people—plumbers, building engineers, and lavatory users—are resistant to the idea of waterless urinals. Plumbing codes in many cities prohibit their use. Success in installing a waterless urinal is likely to require 1) big increases in water costs; 2) significant commitment to water conservation; 3) education on the part of anyone who uses the lavatory.

Buy Your Green Vegetables in a Green Building

Existing Store on Randolph Avenue

Co-operative groceries are enjoying unprecedented growth these days. For Liz McMann, Education Manager at the Mississippi Market in St. Paul, Minnesota, the reason is simple. She says, “People want to know where food comes from and that you can trust it.”

For the Mississippi Market, sustainability has been at the core of their mission since their start in 1979. When they planned to expand, it wasn’t a stretch to decide to build to a green standard. Even though they decided not to apply for LEED status—they’d rather sink their resources into the building itself—their new building is up to the LEED Gold level.

Rendition of the New Store

Sustainability started with the site, which is a brownfield, remediated with help from the city of St. Paul and the Metropolitan Council. The site is accessible by bus, bike, or foot. They’re encouraging their employees to get to work on their own muscle power by including a shower in the store to clean up after a commute.

They’re installing a stormwater diversion system that will send runoff from the parking lot to water their raingarden. And they’re putting on a white roof to mitigate the heat island effect.

Like all groceries, Mississippi Market’s energy demands are heavy on refrigeration and lighting. A highly efficient HVAC system helps with one, and energy-saving lights—T8 lights for the retail areas and LED lighting for the freezers, coolers and the exterior—with the other. The new store will also take advantage of daylight, with eleven skylights equipped with on-off sensors. Overall, the new building is projected to use 42% less energy than a building of comparable size.

The building materials are sustainable, and recycling and reuse figure prominently. 75% of the construction waste is being recycled. The building’s concrete has flyash content—20% for the interior and 40% for the exterior. They’re putting concrete sealed flooring (no waxing required) in the store and non-slip epoxy in the deli. They bought some of their fixtures from the Seward Co-op across the river in Minneapolis, which built a new grocery last year, and they’re refurbishing those for a new life in St. Paul.

As they designed the new building, they made sure that the roof could handle the load of solar panels, if they decide to install them in the future. Even if they don’t, the Market already has a commitment to solar power. One of their current sites, the Selby Market, hosts one of the only solar-powered Hour Cars.

The design team wanted space for events that build community. One design criterion was to expand the deli within the store and to make it more of a community restaurant. Another was to provide parking for classes and events. The Market educates members on healthy eating, holistic medicine, and a perennial favorite, on raising chickens in the city.

Mississippi Market holds an annual energy challenge to remind employees to reduce their use of energy. Last year, their goal was a 3% reduction. Next year, in the new building, the bar will be set higher. To a Gold standard.

Images used with permission of the Mississippi Market.

A Cemetery for Memorial Day

As Memorial Day approaches, my thoughts turn to a special form of non-residential architecture and landscape: the cemetery.

The garden cemetery was a 19th century invention, a response to the crowded urban cemeteries of the previous century. In 1804, Pere Lachaise in Paris was the first cemetery designed as a landscaped “garden” to soothe the soul and delight the eye.

The first American garden cemetery was Mount Auburn, near Boston, founded in 1830. Modeled on the “domesticated landscape” of English garden design, it combined natural features and careful plantings. In Victorian times, when most people suffered a loss through death, the cemetery was a place to remember the dead during a pleasant stroll through a lovely landscape.

Mount Auburn Cemetery in Summer

The most famous garden cemeteries are elsewhere, but Minneapolis has a fine example in Lakewood Cemetery, founded in 1871, on land that was at the time in the countryside, far from the city’s center. Like Mount Auburn, it was carefully planned as a garden, with curving paths, attractive plantings, and memorials with classical, medieval, or natural motifs.

Exterior View of Lakewood Cemetery Chapel

Lakewood Cemetery’s chapel is essential to the planned beauty of the cemetery as a whole. Designed by the well-known Minneapolis architect Harry Wild Jones, the exterior was modeled after the Hagia Sophia in Istanbul. The mosaics of the interior, designed by New Yorker Charles Lamb, were inspired by a design in the San Marco Cathedral in Venice. The domed ceiling is a striking example of the mosaicist’s art.

Even if your plans for Memorial Day include a parade or a picnic, not a visit to a cemetery, a look at Lakewood—even a virtual one—is a good way to celebrate the day. Life is fleeting, but architectural beauty can last a bit longer.

Mount Auburn image courtesy of Wikipedia; Lakewood image courtesy of Todd Murray via Wiki Commons.

Sustaining Hope

I’m involved with a local bungalow club, and our most recent event was a talk by Peter Lytle, director of the Live Green, Live Smart Institute. The Institute’s charter is to encourage sustainable behavior, and its showcase is the Sustainable House™, a 1948 rambler Lytle remodeled to show how green an ordinary house could become. Lytle’s contractor, Ron Jensen, talked about the house, but Lytle himself talked about global warming and greenhouse gases and the imminent catastrophe the world was facing—by 2050, he told us, the global environment would be toast.

As I looked around the room, I could tell that the audience, a group of bungalow owners who are mostly 45+, were all having the same grim thought: “2050? I’m planning to be dead by then.” We needed a little encouragement—to keep going, much less to improve the efficiency of our beloved old houses.

Steven Chu, the new Energy Secretary, was recently interviewed for a piece in the New York Times Magazine. Chu thinks about reducing global warming in a very serious way, since he’s charged with policy and action on it, but when interviewer Deborah Solomon asked him what Americans could do to improve the energy efficiency of their homes, he had some simple advice: “The most important thing is making sure that your home is properly insulated, that your leaky doors and windows are fixed.”

Sustainability in building isn’t about whizbang technology or glitzy design. It’s about the small things that any homeowner or home dweller can do. Those small changes can have a big result. If all of us use less electricity, run less water, and put less waste into landfills—the kind of thing that involves small decisions and small changes every day—it translates into a big impact on sustainability.

You may be planning to be dead by 2050, but your kids and grandkids aren’t. To save the planet with the built environment, turn off the lights, shorten your showers, put the eggshells in the compost, and don’t give up hope.

Better Building through Green Chemistry

Visitors to Regents Hall, the new science building on the campus of St. Olaf College in Northfield, Minnesota, are impressed by the by the green roof, reliance on passive solar lighting, and the use of recycled building materials—features that have put the building on track for a LEED Platinum rating. They’re less likely to notice a feature that the chemistry department and facilities management are equally proud of: the labs use about two-thirds the number of fume hoods in an older building of equivalent size and complexity.

In a conventional chemistry lab, fume hoods capture toxic or hazardous fumes and use a fan to pull them through the hood and vent them out of the building. Chemical labs with fume hoods are heavy energy users. To vent the fumes, the fans need to run constantly, and to refresh the air in the lab, the HVAC system needs to bring in 100% of its air from outside, which puts an additional burden to dehumidify and heat or cool the air, depending on the outside temperature.

Regents Hall has only 55 fume hoods, down from 88 in the previous science building. They’re more energy-efficient, too. Pete Sandberg, Director of Facilities Management at St. Olaf, says, “The newest generation of fume hoods are low-flow. There are only a few fans pulling through all these hoods. Fewer fans are called on as needed, and only the amount of air needed at any one time is being pulled through.” According to Sandberg, the result so far has been greatly reduced energy use and lowered operating cost.

But the real innovation in the design of Regents’ Hall goes beyond fume hoods. It’s the result of new thinking in chemical practice and education: green chemistry. Paul Jackson, associate professor of chemistry at St. Olaf and a champion for green chemistry throughout the building’s design process, explains that “The goals of green chemistry are to design chemical products and processes that reduce or eliminate waste or hazardous materials. It’s predicated on the idea that there are two ways to reduce risk—through the hazard itself and through exposure. Green chemistry is about reducing hazardous materials or levels to the level where exposure becomes trivial.”

Using green chemistry techniques meant a big difference in the building’s design. Fewer fume hoods—and lowered energy demand—meant that the HVAC system could be sized and designed for the human load, not the fume hoods. Greatly reducing the amount of hazardous or corrosive substances in the labs meant that resistant materials, which cost more to install and maintain, could be used only where they were needed.

The interior space could be different too. Jackson says, “The counter space at the perimeter, or the counter room space, becomes much more flexible. You can have movable furniture, not fixed benches. There’s a daylighting opportunity around the perimeter—you can have windows, since you don’t have hoods.” Regents Hall labs move easily between functioning as labs and as classrooms.

Regents Hall didn’t have to look like a conventional science building, and that’s been an education for everyone—architects, students, and visitors. Jackson says, “The building re-engages other campus users, non-scientists, because it’s not a stereotypical ‘lab.’ The building interacts with users as much as users interact with the building. It’s a teaching tool for everyone who walks into it.”

Preserve a House, Sustain the Environment

I was happy to read the recent NY Times editorial piece, “This Old Wasteful House,” by Richard Moe, head of the National Trust for Historic Preservation. The National Trust has been making the case for preservation as a form of sustainability for a while, but the inclusion of funds for weatherization in the stimulus package has given the idea—well, a new stimulus.

Moe points out that any house can become more energy efficient. Better insulation, weatherstripping, sealing for windows are all easy to do, and don’t interfere with the house’s historic character. Working on older houses is labor-intensive, and creates much-needed skilled work, especially in urban areas.

But he’s most eloquent on the place of preservation in sustainability:

“Before demolishing an old building to make way for a new one, consider the amount of energy required to manufacture, transport and assemble the pieces of that building. With the destruction of the building, all that energy is utterly wasted. Then think about the additional energy required for the demolition itself, not to mention for new construction. Preserving a building is the ultimate act of recycling.” Moe, NY Times 4/6/2009

Many American cities have housing stock built during the boom years of the 19th and early 20th century, and recognize that keeping it healthy is one of the best ways to keep a city vital. The city of Chicago has been in the forefront of preservation-as-sustainability for nearly a decade now. Recognizing that the bulk of older Chicago homes are bungalows, the city launched the Chicago Historic Bungalow Initiative in 2000. The city has been helping bungalow owners improve and green their houses with information and financial assistance. And they’ve incorporated preservation into their energy efficiency program. In Chicago, you can’t get a loan to green and improve your house unless you meet the HCBI guidelines for preserving the house’s original character.

The approach can work for any kind of house—a mid-19th century rowhouse, a Victorian mansion, a Tudor cottage, or a mid-20th-century rambler. It’s a great idea to tie the incentive of energy improvement to keeping the house’s historic footprint. In Chicago, it’s been surprising what’s been saved so far—attractive bungalows, whole neighborhoods, and the earth, too.

Better Buildings are Boring

When the local chapter of BOMA gathered a few weeks ago to learn about sustainability in commercial real estate, they met in the kind of building they get excited about. The Ameriprise Client Financial Services Center is 1.2 million square feet of recently built, highly efficient space that is beautiful in a modernist gleaming way.

The message they heard, from CBRE’s Sustainability Program Manager Adam Fransen, must have come as a surprise. He told them that any building—a five-story, 30-year-old, suburban office building where LEED certification isn’t realistic—could be sustainable.

Building operations and maintenance, O&M, isn’t the stuff that architects dream of. Continuous improvement in energy and waste reduction doesn’t get your building written up in Architectural Digest. It turns out that making a building sustainable, making it perform better, is the result of doing the kinds of mundane things parents nag their kids to do: Turn off the lights when you leave the room. Don’t let the hot water run. Put the glass bottles in the recycling bin.

In a commercial building, reducing energy use, reducing water use, and reducing waste are the mainstays of sustainability and better building performance. In O&M, as in any kind of continuous improvement, what gets measured gets managed. Having “key metrics” means that building owners and tenants can see how well they’re doing and whether they’re improving. The measures can drive changes in behavior, whether it’s to encourage the building engineers to perform routine maintenance on the flush valves or remind the building occupants to put their office paper in the recycling bin.

There’s been some criticism of LEED certification recently, pointing out that there are new buildings that get certified for glitz and looks rather than true sustainability. LEED-NC is only the beginning for real sustainability. The rest is O&M. Whether it’s LEED-EBOM or just ordinary good ongoing O&M isn’t so important.