Page 188 - Green Building Through Integrated Design

164 INTEGRATED PROJECT MANAGEMENT—COST/BENEFIT ANALYSIS OF GREEN BUILDINGS

understand the value of sustainable design. We really try to use LEED as a tool for rat-
ing green buildings but prefer not to make LEED the focus of the overall goal. Rather,
we talk about the owner’s values and what is important for the building occupants.
We use a six-step integrated design process for sustainable design. Our process starts
with setting client-specific and project-specific goals and prioritizing them. There’s
also a value piece where we try to figure out what’s important to the client. The sec-
ond step is identifying green measures. We categorize them in four different areas.
They are: energy conservation and efficiency; indoor air and environmental quality;
resource efficiency and effectiveness; and building occupants. In the past, clients
really drove a heavy focus on the LEED checklist, and we found that didn’t get us to
the right solution. We’ve found that if we focus instead on these categories, it really
helps us find the right solutions. After that, the third step is green building measure-
ment. That might be LEED or another program or even our own metrics [another
tool, discussed later]. The fourth is the selecting the solutions based on the measures
identified in the second step. The fifth step is implementing them. The sixth step is
called life-cycle management.
The thing that we’ve found critically important is the green-building measurement
piece, which is our third step in the process. There’s so much talk about life-cycle
analysis and articulating the costs and life-cycle benefits of solutions to clients. We
have a tool that looks at environmental and economic risk and benefits. We have inter-
nal group of economists at HDR who have worked with infrastructure and community
projects. They apply fundamentals of good economic theory and process. But we’ve
taken it a step further and look at environmental risk and benefit. We’ve come up with
a set of inputs, some are specific to technology we’re considering. Others are data such
as the amount of carbon dioxide a particular technology might require or how much
emission we might expect for a technology that uses X amount of fuel. We have industry-
accepted data and we have data that’s specific to the technologies and sustainable
solutions we’re considering. We’re able to give our clients a pretty good idea what
types of environmental risk and benefit they’re going take on as part of a project.
For example, we used our economic and environmental assessment model on one of
our Platinum Core and Shell office buildings. It was a spec office building and we had
no way of measuring future productivity because we didn’t know who was going to
lease the space. We were able to take this model and say, “Given all of the sustainable
solutions that we’re using, such as a raised floor, photovoltaics, roof decks, operable
windows, and all of the other items, what is the economic value as well as the envi-
ronmental benefit of sustainable solutions we used?”

PLATINUM PROJECT PROFILE
McKinney Green Building, McKinney, Texas
Completed in April 2006, the McKinney Green Building is a 61,000-square-
feet, three-story speculative office building. The facility is projected to reduce
energy use by more than 70 percent and reduce water use by 30 percent compared