Green Building and Smart Features
Center for Science and Education
Opened in 1999, the Center for Science and Education includes many green building features, as illustrated in the cross-sectional diagram (pdf) prepared by FXFowle Architects (formerly Fox & Fowle), who designed it. (It was a precursor to the LEED rating system.) The Center includes laboratory and classroom space for researchers and students from elementary through graduate school, and serves as the base for the Consortium’s environmental monitoring network. The Forest Lodge, completed in 2004, contains most of these features as well as additional ones.
Green Building Features
Building shape and orientation
- The Center’s rectangular shape, with the long axis stretched across the ridgeline, maximizes the southern exposure and thus both solar gain and views.
- Building the Center on the slope of the hill made it possible to create a basement caretaker’s apartment on the downhill side while maintaining a smaller presence on the quiet, uphill, forest-facing side of the building.
Building design
- The structure on the top (the roof monitor) maximizes natural daylighting and ventilation by bringing sunlight into the middle of the building and enabling the effective use of ceiling fans.
- The “building envelope” (foundations, walls, roof, window glazing) was designed to provide high thermal performance, thereby reducing heating and cooling requirements, energy consumption, and costs. (For example the roof is constructed with structural insulation panels topped by light-colored zinc-aluminum allow roofing that reflects light and heat; it was also designed to permit the addition of solar panels on the south-facing side.)
- The overhang of the eaves of the roof directs water runoff away from the building, reducing maintenance needs and costs.
Energy and water efficiency
- With funding partially provided by the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority (NYSERDA), the architects hired an energy consultant, Steven Winter Associates. Using computer models and working with the design and engineering teams, the consultants helped to create a design that would yield annual energy savings of 43-49% compared to an equivalent building that was merely code-compliant.
- Features included different amounts of window glazing on windows facing different directions, motorized windows in the atrium to maximize ventilation, variable-speed fans and pumps, an air-to-air heat-recovery system that introduces outdoor air into the building to achieve good indoor air quality while recovering heat form exhaust air, energy-efficient lighting systems, and light-controlling occupancy sensors.
- Geothermal ground source heat pumps provide heating, cooling, and hot water, avoiding the use of conventional air conditioners and heating systems that use fossil fuels. Learn how the geothermal system works.
- Waterless composting toilets reduce water use. The Center has three composters in its basement, and the Forest Lodge has four. Together, they can save up to 420,000 gallons of water a year, and produce safe, nearly odorless compost material.
Materials from the Forest
The Consortium was able to take advantage of materials obtained directly from the Forest.
- All of the red oak wainscoting and the tamarack columns that support the north deck were produced from wood sustainably harvested from the forest.
- Forest Manager John Brady and a team of volunteers painstakingly hauled rocks from the Forest that were used all around the exterior walls of the Center.
- John Brady also cured the huge red, white, scarlet, and black oak tree trunks, cut from Forest trees, that form the corners of the Center’s atrium.
- Additionally, whenever possible, the architects specified materials that were locally produced (to reduce transportation costs) or recycled (such as the wood product used in the roof insulation panels) and that had low outgassing of chemicals to protect occupant health (such as low-formaldehyde wood and paints with low levels of volatile organic compounds.
Photo courtesy of FXFOWLE
