Page 18 - Green Building Through Integrated Design

xvi PREFACE

The objective of all green building efforts is to build high-performance buildings at
or close to conventional budgets. I have found that an integrated design process is the
best way to realize this goal. There are good examples of LEED Platinum–certified
buildings built for little or no additional capital cost, including the building described
in the Foreword, Harvard’s Blackstone renovation. Another LEED Platinum project,
Oregon Health & Science University’s Center for Health and Healing, currently the
world’s largest, was completed in 2006 at a 1 percent cost premium, net of incentives.
Through following an integrated design process, Manitoba Hydro’s new 690,000-square-
foot headquarters in Winnipeg expects to exceed Canada’s Model National Energy
Code by 60 percent, in a climate with nearly 70°C (126°F) annual temperature swings.
As a government building, the design focus was on long-term ownership economics,
including enhancing the health and productivity of the workforce, and providing an
exemplary sustainable building.
This book abounds with a number of such real-world examples. From them, I’ve
extracted core principles and practices of integrated design, as practiced by leading
architects, engineers, builders, developers, and owners. What I discovered is not a sim-
ple formula such as combine A and B, and you get C. It’s a more complex manage-
ment task, one that has to be thought about from the beginning of each project, even
at project conception: why do we need this building and where are we going to locate
it? To make the task more manageable, I’ve come up with nearly 400 important ques-
tions, largely based on the U.S. Green Building Council’s Leadership in Energy and
Environmental Design (LEED) green building rating system, that you need to ask at
each point in the sequence of planning-design-construction-operations.
Green Building Through Integrated Design was written with the commercial
and institutional building designer, owner, and builder in mind. I have worked to,
first, understand everything I could about green buildings, and, second, report
back to important stakeholders on how to make sense out of a field that’s growing
50 to 75 percent a year, a growth rate that results in a doubling in size every 12 to
18 months!
I hope that Green Building Through Integrated Design will be your guide to green-
ing your next project. This is not a book about how to design a green building—there
are many fine books on that subject by leading architects—but rather a book about
the design and delivery process. I also show you one of the available project man-
agement software tools that will help cut the costs of green building projects, and I
present the experiences gained by many fine architects and design teams in dozens of
successful LEED Platinum projects.
So, grab a cup of shade-grown, organic, fair-trade coffee, put in a skinny squirt of
nonfat milk and some natural organic sweetener, kick back, and let me help you find
out from the experts how to design and deliver a high-performance building.

Jerry Yudelson