Page 122 - Green Building Through Integrated Design

INCENTIVES AND BARRIERS TO GREEN BUILDINGS 99

also knew it would be a stretch to get to Platinum. At this point [March 2008], we
think Platinum is attainable.

Dr. Douglas Treadway of Ohlone College in California described how the overview
of the college’s mission led to the requirement for a LEED Platinum building.

The goals were determined after series of planning retreats, visioning exercises, inter-
views and research within the Bay Area to determine the feasibility of certain
approaches to green building. We then tied that into the vision the new campus, which
also had not been targeted. It was going to be a general college and then we changed
it to a health sciences and technology college. We then had a different rationale for
our green building, because the nature of the institution’s mission had changed.
Repurposing the building from a general college campus to a thematic health science
and technology campus was really important in the early design because it drove
everything after that.
We also consulted with local industry leaders and hospital leaders to get a grasp of
where the emerging fields were going and how green architecture would be a part of
them. If you go into our new building now and you have asthma, you’ll feel instant
relief. I just had a person give me testimony to that. As soon as he walked in the door,
he realized the air inside was of much better quality than the outside air. He felt an
instant relief of some of his symptoms.

OVERCOMING BARRIERS TO GREEN BUILDINGS
Some of the barriers to green building performance have little to do with cost and a lot
to do with how engineers and architects have become accustomed to working with
each other, much like brothers and sisters in the same family who want nothing to do
with each other during adolescence, but who become good friends later in life. Dan
Nall is senior vice president of Flack+Kurtz, one of the leading building engineering
firms in the United States. Here’s his take on the situation.*

Engineers don’t really necessarily understand what is that architects are trying to
achieve and probably architects, with respect to mechanical engineers, don’t under-
stand why we’re so concerned about certain things.

The biggest sort of conflict occurs with respect to—and right now this is an issue
because of fashion—the amount of glass in the façade of the building and the nature
of that glass. Architects don’t necessarily understand that making the window wall
out of clear glass not only means that the energy consumption of the building is going
to go up, but also it makes it almost impossible for the people inside to be comfort-
able no matter how much air you put on them. They don’t understand the basic
physics and heat gain occurring from both a conductive standpoint and from a radi-
ance standpoint. That’s really an issue. Engineers don’t necessarily understand how

*Interview with Dan Nall, April 2008.