The Orbis

Issue date: 9/11/07 Section: News/Features

Media Credit: Madeleine Fentress

The new Commons Center is the flagship of the movement toward more sustainable architecture on campus, and we've used the LEED certification of The Commons Center to justify its extravagance. This certification is good, but if our goal truly is sustainability, it is imperative our designs consider more than just the LEED certification criteria. LEED certification means little if a building is not designed with minimum energy consumption in mind.

There are four different levels of LEED certification, and a building project is ranked by how many points it gets. A new commercial building needs at least 26 points to qualify for certification, and while some points require extensive design consideration, others are as simple as having a heating and air conditioning system. As a point of comparison, every dorm on campus has at least nine points, including those built in the 1940s.

When a LEED-certified building is recognized as being energy-efficient, it means the building implements techniques to use fewer resources, and these gimmicks result in a certain percent energy savings when compared to an imagined version of the same building without them. This does not mean the building was designed to use as few resources as possible. The problem with the LEED certification process is that it doesn't put an emphasis on designing buildings with longevity or economy of both material and energy in mind. The certification process simply asks that your building be a certain degree better than the worst possible version of itself.

If we are trying to build an environmentally sound campus, we need to think about designing buildings that use as little energy as possible. The largest energy load in a building the size of The Commons Center is the heat and air system. Since hot air rises, it makes the top floors of buildings the hardest to keep cool in the warmer months, so more energy is spent cooling the top floors of a building than the lower floors. For most of the summer, The Commons Center was largely unoccupied. Thus, more money was spent and more energy consumed to cool a nearly empty building.

Some of the steps taken toward certification have been counterproductive. The large windows on the west face of the building and the high ceilings of the new dining hall of The Commons Center allow for more natural light, which means less electricity is needed to illuminate the room. It also means that during the warmer months, the dining hall will be hotter since a greater amount of heat and sunlight is allowed into the room, and the energy saved in lighting will be needed several times over in air conditioning the dining hall.

Another problem with LEED certification process is that it can lead to design solely for the sake of certification. Several features of The Commons Center, like the showers for employees who ride their bikes to work, were clearly included in the design just to elicit another certification point. While the new buildings are in many ways more energy-efficient than older buildings around campus, the push for sustainable architecture has only been carried far enough to ensure certification.

While I appreciate Vanderbilt's interest in creating a more sustainable campus through The Commons, I think we need to take a more holistic approach to sustainable design rather than simply running through a certification checklist.

For more information, visit LEED's Web site at http://www.usgbc.org/leed/nc.

Page 1 of 1

Article Tools