Page 204 - Green Building Through Integrated Design

180 GETTING STARTED—PREDESIGN CONSIDERATIONS

PLATINUM PROJECT PROFILE
Audubon Center at Debs Park, Los Angeles, California
Located 10 minutes east of downtown Los Angeles, the Audubon Center at Debs
Park is a nature center within a 282-acre urban wilderness owned by the Los
Angeles Department of Recreation and Parks. The total project cost (excluding
the land) was $5.5 million. The design and construction of the 5020-square-foot
building cost approximately $2.5 million, or $371 per square feet. Designed to use
only 25,000 kWh of energy annually, the facility is operated completely off the
grid; all of the power used is generated onsite. Estimated to use 70 percent less
water than a similar conventional building, the center treats all wastewater on site.
Fifty percent of the building materials was manufactured locally and 97 percent
of the construction waste was recycled.*

Programming

In the programming phase, the amount of space and various uses for the individual
users of the building are specified in enough detail for the designers to begin to place
them within the physical structure. At this time, it’s useful to pay attention to the energy
and demand natural ventilation implications of space utilization in the building.
Programming also specifies adjacencies, uses that need to be put close together. These
decisions are often dictated by a client’s organizational structure or by the nature of
the work, such as a need to have researchers’ offices and labs close together.
Let’s look at the process for creating another LEED Platinum project, the Biodesign
Institute at Arizona State University in Tempe, Arizona. There are two completed build-
ings adjacent to each other, one awarded LEED Gold and the other LEED Platinum.
The design was a team effort between the nationally known lab design architect, Lord
Aeck Sargent and the Phoenix-based Gould Evans. Jim Nicolow is a principal at Lord
Aeck Sargent. He says: †

What we’ve found on the Biodesign building (and with other projects) is if you start
early with the intention of doing a green building, you can essentially get to Gold with
a conventional project budget. It seems that Platinum tends to be that threshold where
you really need to look at onsite renewable energy or technologies that have a higher
cost. In the case of Biodesign in particular, it is two different projects, Building A and
Building B. Building A is Gold certified and Building B is Platinum certified. The dif-
ference really was the PV array on the roof of Building B, which was enough to

*Building Green [online], http://www.buildinggreen.com/hpb/overview.cfm?projectId=234, accessed April 2008.
† Interview with Larry Lord and Jim Nicolow, Lord Aeck Sargent, March 2008; Trudi Hummel, John Dimmel,
and Tamara Shroll, Gould Evans, March 2008.