Page 187 - Green Building Through Integrated Design

INTEGRATED VALUE ASSESSMENT 163

evaluating solutions. The analyst should consider carefully the impact of even slight
changes in operation cost inflation. The team can then assist the owner in selecting a
set of solutions that fits their needs and aligns the best with triple bottom line goals
established at the beginning of the process. By delivering the project to the owner in
alignment with their sustainable goals and the programmatic needs of the project, the
team can be confident of success. Most clients want to harness the economic value
from environmental performance, and this approach helps you do that.
Ted van der Linden is director of sustainable construction at DPR Construction. He
attests to the value of this approach:*

There are not a lot of green building tools out there on the market today. We were an early
user of Ecologic 3. We, at DPR, have created a lot of custom tools that are MS Excel
macro-based. We have a tool called the Custom Delivery Model where we not only eval-
uate the “yes, no and maybe” for each of the different green strategies, but we also do a
cost-benefit analysis of those strategies. For each credit you need, we have a yes, no or
maybe and then we have another series of columns that list design-cost impacts, con-
struction-cost impacts, and benefits for the first year, or payback if there is one. That way
we have some quantifiable data on what the return on the initial investment is for the
client. Ecologic 3 is a good tool for the pre-construction period, but it doesn’t take a proj-
ect all the way from start to finish. Without it, though, we would have been worse off.
Once we’ve arrived at the precursor information—the LEED credits we are going to pur-
sue, the first costs for those credits and the proposed benefits, Ecologic 3 allows you to
input all of the information and then evaluate which credits have the most impactful
return in the shortest period of time. You can select the strategies that make the most sense
economically. It outputs, “Here’s what LEED Silver would look like, here’s what LEED
Gold would look like, here’s Platinum and here’s just plain Certified.” It shows the first-
cost investments. If you look at the left side of column of a graph, it would show you that,
for example, a Certified building has a first cost impact of $25,000, Silver has a first cost
impact of $85,000, Gold has an impact of $1.1 million, Platinum is $1.6 million. It shows
on a graduated scale when you’ve returned your first costs and when you’re making
money effectively. It’s a great tool for pre-construction analysis. I think a lot of architects
may not necessarily see the value because they don’t have the answers to the information
required by the software. But it’s a great tool for people with the cost data.

Integrated Value Assessment

We interviewed Michaella Wittmann, sustainable design director at HDR, a large archi-
tecture-engineering firm with nearly 7000 employees. Her firm has developed a tool
called Integrated Value Assessment that is used to guide high-performance projects. †

As this industry is moving forward in sophistication, we strongly feel that it’s critically
important to work with building owners at the beginning of projects and help them

*Interview with Ted van der Linden, DPR Construction, February 2008.
† Interview with Michaella Wittmann, HDR, February 2008.