Page 248 - Green Building Through Integrated Design

224 CONSTRUCTION DOCUMENTS PHASE

Photography by Van Fox, courtesy of Collaborative Design Studio.

Peter Rumsey led the engineering team. He says that having the LEED Platinum
goal helped even during the CD phase of the project, when some teams might think
it’s too late to make significant changes:

There was clarity in the goal. The owner said, “We’re going to go for the highest
LEED rating possible and if you can get Platinum that would be great.” At the
eleventh hour in the CD phase of the design, they said, “If we need to spend a little
bit of extra money on a couple of the LEED features of the building, we’re willing to
do that.” A couple of elements of the design were added then to push it over the top
and get it into LEED Platinum. All of the design team members were on the same
page, and were confident that we could do it.
This is the first lab building in the country to use chilled beams, which are a way
of heating and cooling without using reheat [the energy-inefficient practice of
cooling down outside air for general distribution and then reheating it for certain
rooms]. It’s one of only a small handful of the labs that don’t use reheat for air-
conditioning the lab, eliminating reheat can be a gigantic energy-saving measure.
The chilled beams save on construction costs as well. I think not only is it a
LEED Platinum building, but for a lab, it’s a real breakthrough design. Since this
building has been built, many labs are using or have seriously considered using
chilled-beams.