A different kind of green space will come to Northwestern when the Ford Engineering Design Center takes over the lawn south of the Technological Institute.
The center’s groundbreaking ceremony was Wednesday.
Officials from the Rocky Mountain Institute, a Colorado-based environmental think tank, helped to integrate features such as solar heating and water-efficient landscaping in the building.
“From the beginning, we had the objective to make the building as green as possible,” said Michael Besancon, McCormick associate dean. “We’re looking to achieve some specific levels of environmental responsibility for the building.”
“Green” design uses features such as passive solar heating and ventilation, reusing heat energy and using more sunlight to make a building more energy efficient.
A 1994 study by the U.S. Department of Energy and the institute reported that green design has major benefits, such as lowering long-term energy costs and improving the productivity of workers.
Commercial and residential buildings are responsible for more than 30 percent of total greenhouse gas emissions in the United States and consume 65 percent of the nation’s electricity, according to the U.S. Green Building Council.
To counteract this trend, the council created the Leadership in Energy & Environmental Design Green Building Rating System, which credits developers for meeting energy-efficient criteria. Buildings earning the most credits get a platinum rating, and those with fewer credits earn gold or silver ratings.
“Our guidelines say that we’re trying to achieve a minimum silver level,” said Jay Baehr, NU’s project manager for the Ford Center.
The Ford Center is the first university building project in Illinois to seek a Leadership rating. Twenty buildings in the Unites States have attained Leadership certification since the program’s inception in 1993, with 340 other building projects currently registered for the green design certification.
The Rocky Mountain Institute signed onto the Ford Center project in January after the building’s initial design phase was complete.
“Even though we’re catching it at a little later than optimal phase, it could still make major strides,” said Ben Shepherd, an institute consultant working on the project.
Institute founder Amory Lovins spoke at Tech on May 2 about sustainable design, ending a day of meetings between institute consultants and Ford building architects and engineers.
The institute recently worked with Oberlin College in northern Ohio to design its new environmental studies building. In the past year, 48 percent of the building’s energy was produced from a solar system.
Incorporating the same energy efficiency into the Ford building could be tougher to do because NU does not have the land to move the building to a position better-suited for solar collection, Baehr said.
“We can’t make it the perfect green building because of all of these other site conditions and constraints,” Baehr said, “but the goal is to do the best we can within the constraints.”
