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Green Mansions The new b-school at Ithaca College in Ithaca, New York, will be a striking building with a curving glass wall, a three-story atri- um, and carefully planned building heights that will allow for an unhampered view of Lake Cayuga. It will also incorporate radiant flooring heat, fritted glass to control daylight, natural ventilation, and a vegetated roof—in short, environmentally friendly features that will determine almost everything about the school's design. The goal for the building, which is sched- uled to open in 2008, is to achieve platinum certification in the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design program (LEED) run by the U.S. Green Building Council. "The School of Business wants to emphasize the triple bottom line. What better way to do it than through the design and construction of a new building?" says Susan Engelkemeyer, the school's dean. "It's important for us to demonstrate to students how to juggle different perspectives among the envi- ronment, operating costs, and people." Schools across the country are also com- missioning buildings that incorporate elements of sustainable design because such elements reflect the schools' educational bias. Like Ithaca, many hope to attain some level of certification in the LEED program, which assesses how well build- ings have achieved sustainability goals in areas such as site development, water savings, energy efficiency, materials selection, and indoor envi- ronmental quality. (See box on page 35.) The University of Oregon in Eugene achieved a silver LEED designation for its Charles H. Lundquist College of Business building. The school had reinvented its cur- riculum to focus on leadership and experi- ential learning, with a strong dose of cor- porate social responsibility thrown in. The new building "is a huge billboard for our program," says Christopher Murray, the associate dean of external affairs. California's Santa Clara University has established a policy officials need to know early on if they want an environmentally friendly design for their new building. This means focusing on a range of key elements: heating and ventilation systems, energy efficiency, water conservation, material choices, and recycling. HVAC. There are several inventive ways to design heating/ventilation/air conditioning systems for green design. At Santa Clara, the new business school will be heated and cooled by displaced ventilation, which delivers air to the floor and returns it from the ceiling. Because the air is pulled upward by the system, the stale air stratifies at the ceiling, rather than a few feet down where people are breathing. Chilled air for the building will be supplied by a big block of ice that is created when coils of coolant are run through large under- ground tanks of water. At the University of Oregon, the business Warm air naturally exhausted or fed into HVAC system Solar hot water panels Solar gains Air rises in cavity Fritted glass and/or fritted photovoltaics Shading devices Vision glass and spandrel panels Air intake school will be heated and cooled with the help of a large thermal mass—think of a large brick or concrete wall—that will store heat or cold and slowly radiate it back. According to architect Kent Duffy, a princi- pal at Portland-based SRG Partnership Inc., air will be drawn through the building dur- ing chillier hours, allowing the building and the mass to cool off. Meanwhile, ceiling fans keep air moving throughout the building. Energy efficiency. Well-planned HVAC sys- A sketch of the atrium wall at Ithaca College shows how solar panels, fritted glass, natural ventilation, and other features will work together to improve efficiency and sustainability. tems naturally make a building more effi- cient, but many other techniques add to the overall savings. For instance, at Santa Clara, all buildings on campus are wired to a com- puter that manages temperature, changes it for night, day, and weekend use, and moni- tors all equipment to see if it's drawing more power than it needs. At the University of of sustainability that affects the way the institution uses resources, spends money—and constructs new buildings. Steve Brodie, an architect with MPM in Sausalito, has been brought on board to manage all the green building projects at the uni- versity with an eye toward achieving LEED certification. "We looked at sustainability as part of the mix," says Brodie. "We tried to integrate it into the process rather than to start out by saying, 'This is going to be a green building at all costs.' We wanted it to become part of the culture." Because a green building requires extensive planning, school Ore gon, some of the power outlets are wired to the same occu- pancy sensor circuits that control the lights, meaning there will be no power to these outlets at all unless someone is in the room. The University of Oregon's 65-foot south-facing glass wall is also more than an architectural element—it holds bands of photo- voltaic cells that collect sunlight and convert it to energy, generat- ing 40 percent of the building's energy. The school also incorpo- rates a system of high clerestory windows that allow it to utilize natural daylight most of the day. Blinds that close from the bottom up allow light to come in through the top of the windows even when it's desirable to shade the rest of the room from the sun. A specialized roof. Ithaca's new business school calls for at least one green roof, which insulates against both the heat of the sun BizEd NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2005 33