Page 155 - Green Building Through Integrated Design

HIGH PERFORMANCE ON A BUDGET 131

■ Have a clear green design goal from the outset.
■ Make sure the design team is completely integrated.
■ Incorporate green elements in the design from the beginning.
■ Have centralized management of the green building process.
■ Team members should have experience with/knowledge of green building.
■ Obtain sufficient technical information to make informed decisions.
■ Provide sufficient upfront time and funding for studies to get the technical
information.
■ Always insist on life-cycle costing of green investments.*

We will return to these points in several places in this chapter, since each design
team has to address the challenge of identifying green building costs (and benefits) and
justifying them to clients. (Chap. 6 presented the business case for green buildings by
placing the full range of benefits into perspective, often a necessary prelude to con-
sidering whether to bear additional costs.)

High Performance on a Budget

A large developer-driven, build-to-suit project in Portland, Oregon, the Oregon
Health & Science University’s Center for Health and Healing, occupied in the fourth
quarter of 2006, exposed flaws in the notion that dramatically higher levels of per-
formance must always lead to significantly higher capital costs. The 412,000-square-
feet, 16-story, $145 million project received a LEED Platinum rating early in 2007,
the largest project in the world thus far to achieve this rating. The developer has
reported a total cost premium, net of local, state, and federal incentives, of one percent. †
The total costs for the mechanical and electrical systems were about $3.5 million
below the initial budget estimates from the general contractor, based on standard
‡
approaches to space conditioning and lighting. These results were achieved with a
strong bias toward integrated design, which the engineers define as having the same
system perform multiple tasks. For example, an underground garage ventilation fan
doubles as a smoke evacuation fan in case of a fire, through a motorized damper. At
the same time, energy and water modeling indicated a 61 percent savings on future
energy use and a 56 percent savings in water consumption. In other words, from a
performance standpoint, this project demonstrates the benefits of an integrated design
process, coupled with an experienced developer and design team willing to push the
envelope of building design.
One of the key strategies employed in integrated design projects is the notion of “cost
transfer,” particularly from mechanical and electrical systems, to the rest of the project,

*A fuller discussion of life-cycle costing is far beyond the scope of this book. For one example, see www.
wbdg.org/resources/lcca.php, accessed April 2008.
† Personal communication, Dennis Wilde, Gerding Edlen Development, 2006.
‡ “Engineering a Sustainable World” by Interface Engineering, October 2005, available at www.
interfaceengineering.com, accessed April 2008.