Page 209 - Green Building Through Integrated Design

PREDESIGN WORK 185

PLATINUM PROJECT PROFILE
Center for Neighborhood Technology (CNT), Chicago, Illinois
LEED-certified in December 2005, the 13,800-square-feet building houses the
Center for Neighborhood Technology, a Chicago-based nonprofit. With a cost of
$82 per square-foot, this renovation cost considerably less than conventional reha-
bilitations in Chicago, which ranged at the time from $90 to $130 per square foot.
The building was designed to use 50 percent less energy than a conventional
building. A thermal storage tank serves as the building’s primary cooling system
and shifts peak electrical cooling loads to nighttime hours, when ice is made to
serve the next day’s cooling requirements. Recycled, regional, and healthy mate-
rials make up 13 percent of the building’s total materials cost. Permeable paving
was used for the parking lot, to encourage stormwater infiltration and the remain-
ing site area is a rain garden.*

Predesign Work

One of the frequently overlooked aspects of LEED Platinum projects is that most of
them had the contractor on board from the beginning, carrying out various aspects
of predesign and preconstruction work. John Pfeifer is senior vice president at
McGough Construction, Minneapolis; his team had just finished (spring 2008) a
high-rise office project in that city which expects to get 58 points on the LEED scale
and to receive the LEED Platinum rating. He speaks about the importance of the pre-
design effort:

With this project in particular, we took those [collaborative] ideas to the extreme. We
were involved with the pre-construction before the architect put any significant pen to
paper. Early on in the project we had the entire team involved, not only the architect
and McGough, but also a highly involved owner as well as all of the consultants.
Because the Great River Energy headquarters wanted to become LEED Platinum, one
of the first things we did was go through the LEED scorecard and understand all of
the parameters, especially the parameters of the site location and geographical aspects
and constraints. We established early on which points were easily obtained—if there
is such a thing, which points we had no chance of obtaining, and then we analyzed
everything in between. We rated the points by asking: Is it possible? To what extent?
At what potential cost exposure? We then worked out that equation until we reached
a point range of 55 to 58, which gives you a little comfort factor to hopefully achieve
Platinum.

*Green Bean [online], http://greenbean.typepad.com/greenbean/2007/05/center_for_neig.html, accessed April 2008.