Page 13 - Green Building Through Integrated Design

FOREWORD

In the year 2000 when I first began working to introduce green building at Harvard,
the most common perception I encountered was that green building was too expensive
and that LEED was a costly point-chasing exercise with no value. Things reached their
lowest point in 2001 when at one design team meeting, a faculty member acting as the
project’s client representative likened the belief that green building design could be
cost effective to believing that there were elephants in the hallway.
To help transcend these attitudinal barriers, in 2001 I found three building project
partners who agreed to pilot LEED at Harvard University. By studying these projects,
I was able to trace almost all of the criticisms leveled at LEED to a range of failures
in the design process itself rather than failures intrinsic to LEED.
For example, the complaint that LEED certification was too expensive turned out to
be the result of architects overcharging because they had little experience and were
trying to cover their own learning costs and perceived risks. The complaint that there
were too many unexpected costs turned out to be the result of change orders that were
in turn a result of poor integration of LEED requirements into the building construc-
tion documents. The accusation that LEED was a point-chasing exercise turned out to
be the result of flawed sequencing of tasks such as the engineer doing the energy mod-
eling after the design was already complete in order to satisfy the LEED documenta-
tion requirement, instead of doing it early enough to inform the design.
These pilot projects provided the necessary experiential evidence to prove that
green building and the LEED framework in particular did have enormous value if uti-
lized properly. Perhaps most importantly these projects proved to me that cost impact
was largely subject to our own ability to properly manage the design process itself and
that we needed to stop trying to answer the question “How much will green building
and LEED cost us?” and start answering the question “How do we improve the design
process to minimize or avoid additional costs for green building and LEED?”
By successfully working to answer this question at Harvard, my team and I have
now [Summer 2008] engaged the Harvard community in over 50 LEED projects, most
now striving for LEED Gold certification. Utilizing this momentum we were able to
work with the extremely decentralized Harvard community to define and adopt a set
of comprehensive green building guidelines that includes many key design process
requirements, along with a minimum LEED Silver requirement. At the same time I
have been working to foster the capacities of both the Harvard community and the build-
ing profession that serves it by leading an effort to get everything that we have been
learning about the process of green building into a publicly available web resource.*

*See www.greencampus.harvard.edu/theresource, accessed July 31, 2008.
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