Page 32 - Green Building Through Integrated Design

10 THE RECIPE FOR SUCCESS IN HIGH-PERFORMANCE PROJECTS

so much as they were the principles and assumptions that would govern the design.
The college community and some of the employers in the area developed the goals
during a set of retreats and visioning sessions. We gave the architect eight to ten
planning concepts. They gave those a voice and put them into a document. The
nearby San Francisco Bay estuary became a planning paradigm for the architect’s
work. They were quite creative in taking what we did and putting it into architectur-
al terms.
It’s been a blended process because we didn’t have the contractors involved early on.
We used a CM-at-Risk process and used Turner Construction Company, who is very
experienced with green building, although two of the systems we put in, they had
never done before. So they learned too. My role at that point was kind of like the con-
ductor of the symphony. I was very much involved in making sure this project was
integrated with our other college campus and with our planning.

In this whole period of continuous iterations, at every decision point, we asked, “Do
we cut back? Do we sacrifice the solar? What do we do?” There was a major decision
point when we were getting the bids where I said, “I’ll go out and raise the $10 mil-
lion for the furnishings, don’t cut the building back any more and don’t take any of
the sustainability elements out. I’ll find matching money.” So I went out on a limb
during the latter part of the project, because it did get a bit out of our reach. Because
we had all of these partners on with us early on, they came back and said, “We’ll help
you raise the money.” And we did.
Number one, the most important key to reaching Platinum certification was the part-
nership between the architect and the builder. We didn’t start out with green [certifi-
cation] being a goal. However, they were very motivated to push everything and come
back to us and offer suggestions. They would ask us, “How about if you did this?
Could you do this and would you see the value of it, not just for LEED but in itself?”
We helped make a lot of decisions along the way that we thought were good decisions
and ones we wanted to make anyway. We didn’t just look for a particular standard but
they were really aggressive about it. We had a board policy that required LEED cer-
tification of all of our buildings. So certification was a must, but we didn’t think we’d
get to where we got [Platinum].

On the rationale for integrated design using the LEED rating system, Treadway says:

My advice is to use the LEED criteria, not so much to make a certain mark, but
because they are very sensible; they really relate to the quality and health of the learn-
ing environment as well as to the long-term affordability. Ongoing maintenance costs
are harder for most of us to come up with than the initial capital costs. [Considering]
“total cost of ownership” is also an environmental principle, and LEED helps you
think that way.

Treadway also spoke to the need to handle rapidly rising construction costs by
rethinking the building and designing a smaller project, to stay within the original
budget.