Page 65 - Green Building Through Integrated Design

42 GREEN BUILDINGS TODAY

building this project without knowing who was going to be in it. In fact, the director,
Dr. George Post, had not even been hired yet. He came in shortly thereafter and was
very quick to come up to speed and give us his vision but fundamentally when we
started, we didn’t know who was going to occupy the building.
When that’s the case, you build a basic, flexible facility, which is what they wanted
in the first place. Then you’re not influenced by a lot of individual researchers who
want it the way they always had it. It allowed us to break out of box. We set up the
labs and did what I call the minimums. That way there was enough infrastructure
in the lab so when the researchers came in we retrofitted it to their specific needs.
It was set up to handle everything from optics and lasers to chemists, physicists,
and engineers—and we’ve got them all. We can set up the lab areas to accommo-
date them.
After the first building was built and occupied, the whole LEED movement got going.
We decided because ASU is the premier institution in the state, that all university
buildings should be LEED certified. The administration gave me the directive to go
back and certify Building A. Luckily, we had an excellent design and we had done
some of the big dollar things already, for example, commissioning. In fact, we com-
mission all of our buildings. A lot of people include commissioning as a cost of
LEED, but we do it because we believe it’s the right thing to do. I went back and filled
out the LEED application and looked at some modifications that were needed—we
had to add carbon dioxide sensors and some other things. It cost just a little over
$250,000. Basically, it was just a good, solid, design and a well-built building. I
would say 85 percent of the exercise was filling out the application and going through
the process. It shows that if you do a good building, getting a LEED certification is not
as a big of a deal that a lot of people make it out to be.

PLATINUM PROJECT PROFILE

Biodesign Institute, Phases 1 and 2, Arizona State University,
Tempe, Arizona
The Arizona Biodesign Institute consists of two LEED-certified buildings—one
Gold (Building A) and the other Platinum (Building B). Connected by glass
walkways, together the two buildings contain 350,000 square feet of offices,
open labs, plus dining, and auditorium facilities on three floors. The construc-
tion cost of the Institute was $104 million and the total project cost was $160
million. Remote sensors can detect air pollutants in a particular zone and cue the
system to flush out the air as needed, minimizing energy consumption (by
reducing the number of ventilation air changes) while meeting the strict fresh-
air requirements for lab buildings. Rainwater and air-conditioning condensate
are collected in a 5000-gallon cistern for reuse in landscaping. An internal lou-
ver system automatically tracks the sun’s path, diffusing sunlight by reflecting
it off the interior ceilings. A 167-kilowatt photovoltaic array contributes to