Page 31 - Green Building Through Integrated Design

THE RECIPE FOR SUCCESS IN HIGH-PERFORMANCE PROJECTS 9

right brain and left brain; each time someone says, “what if we did it this way?” and
takes up the pen to extend the sketch, there is a creative moment in which everyone is
brought along to find better solutions.
Finally, there’s a hidden gem in Hydes’ remarks. To participate fully in the IDP, you
have to have a “track record,” in other words, you should have successful experience
with previous projects that allows you the freedom to be wrong with a given design
idea. High-performance building design is an intense process, in most cases using
highly trained and experienced practitioners, tight deadlines and limited budgets.
There is a lot of pressure to move quickly to find basic solutions, lock in on them and
then turn the details over to the rest of the team. The experience of the experts we
interviewed for this book is that you have to resist this tendency to close off promis-
ing design avenues until you have fully explored the terrain of possibilities. That’s why
“knowing what you’re doing” is so important. There’s no time during a design charrette
to go research good ideas. You need to bring them to the table and then be creative with
using them. “No country for old thinking,” would be a good title for a high-
performance building design meeting.
So far, we’ve discussed the architect and the engineer. What about the building
owner, the person for whom all this effort is being made? How do building owners
approach the issue of high-performance buildings? We spoke with Dr. Douglas
Treadway, president of Ohlone College, Newark, California, who presided over the
LEED Platinum design of a new community college campus in the San Francisco Bay
area. Here’s his take on the process.*

My role in designing the new campus was maybe a little bit more hands-on than the
normal role of a college president. Prior to my coming on board, they had the funds
and had finalized their plans, but I was able to convince the board to take a brief
hiatus and re-examine their plans. That was the first thing that I did. I also pulled
back the time frame so we could do a green building, because we weren’t planning
to do one. They had some vague references but no specific vision of what we were
actually going to do. [The time frame was pushed back only about six to eight
months.]
The goals were determined after a series of planning retreats, visioning exercises,
interviews and research within the Bay Area to determine the feasibility of certain
approaches to green building. We then tied that into the vision of the new campus,
which also had not been targeted. It was going to be a general college, and then we
changed it to being a health sciences and technology college. We then had a different
rationale for our green building, because the nature of the institution’s mission had
changed. Repurposing the building from a general college campus to a thematic
health science and technology campus was really important in the early design
because that drove everything afterward.
We were in discussion with the team about the project goals but we also had our
own independent design criteria. The criteria didn’t make up the actual physical design

*Interview with Dr. Douglas Treadway, Ohlone College, March 2008.