Green ArchiTEXT

Canada's Glendon College and the 21st-century campus: open, interactive, transparent

CREDIT: Glendon Campus, York University

By Christopher Hume

As long as you don’t mention tuition fees, university campuses everywhere are starting to lighten up.

Glass-filled pavilions are replacing Gothic arches carved in stone and red-brick Romanesque towers. From solidity to invisibility, opacity to transparency, the new architecture of higher education reveals all.

A sort of reversal is unfolding; architects who once designed structures that embodied the (sometimes uncomfortable) nobility of scholarship now devote themselves to setting a stage on which students direct their own learning in their own way.

The most recent example, and one of the best, is Renée Daoust’s Centre of Excellence at Glendon College. In her first Toronto project, the highly regarded Montreal architect happily turns the structures of academia inside out. The cloister has been replaced by openness.

There’s nothing new about glass cubes — Toronto is awash in see-through towers — but Daoust’s is one of special elegance. Sitting just inside the main entrance to the campus at Lawrence and Bayview, the centre is the first thing visitors and students see. For that reason, transparency also serves as a kind of welcoming gesture, a way of demystifying the institution and revealing it, symbolically at least, to the rest of the world. READ MORE >>

via m.thestar.com

University of South Carolina will Debut the Largest Net-Zero Building in the World

When the Darla Moore School of Business is completed next year, the University of South Carolina will have 1.2 million square feet of green building space. The Moore School will be the largest net-zero building in the world.

via www.environmentalleader.com

Seattle University's buildings go carbon neutral with facilities upgrades, offsets

By Mike Thee

Seattle University's buildings are carbon neutral. Just pause a moment and let that sink in.

Yes, that's right-through new infrastructure enhancements and offsets, our campus buildings have completely shed their carbon footprints, further cementing the university's status as a leader in sustainability.

David Brugman, assistant director of utilities and sustainability, is playing an instrumental role in making SU's campus more energy-efficient. It is unknown how many colleges and universities in the country can claim their buildings are carbon neutral, but Brugman believes the list is pretty short.

SU's buildings have achieved carbon neutrality largely through two recent developments. First, a new, highly efficient heating loop serving five facilities has reduced our buildings' carbon output by 18 percent. Second, the university is offsetting the remaining 82 percent primarily by investing in a project that's turning cow manure into power. READ MORE >>

via www.seattleu.edu

Eden Hall Campus - A splendid vision (VIDEO)

A cutting-edge "living and learning laboratory" underway at the new Eden Hall Campus for Chatham University near Pittsburgh.

This project could serve as a prototype for deep green campus design in the 21st century. Two of North America's leading sustainable design firms are leading this development:

• BNIM led development of the master plan for restoration and adaptation of a number of historic farm buildings and the original homestead mansion, as well as plans for new academic and residential facilities for students and faculty while restoring the natural systems to become learning tools for the school and the larger community.
• Mithun is providing architecture, landscape architecture and interior design for the first phase of the campus which includes the design and construction of the EcoCenter, a renovated barn with a large multi-use assembly hall, gallery space, classrooms and offices; New Lodge housing for up to 100 students; a Cafe and Library; and a Field Lab with water treatment facilities, lab and classroom spaces and aquaculture systems.

For more information on Chatham University, the School of Sustainability & the Environment and plans for the Eden Hall Campus, go here.

360 View of Wetlands Around Oberlin's Adam Joseph Lewis Center

A great tool to view and monitor the newly rebuilt wetlands adjacent to the Adam Joseph Lewis Center at Oberlin College - still one of the greenest buildings in North America (even after more than 10 years). This panoramic view is made possible using Microsoft Photosynth - an onsite, on-line camera feed.

More on this special restored landscape is available on the college's AJLC site:

"Wetland restoration entails three tasks: reestablishing wet hydrological conditions, reintroducing native species and selectively removing invasive and non-native plant species. With time, a complex set of relationships between living and non-living components develops and results in a resilient ecological system that is resistant to invasive species and to disturbance. The reconstructed wetland at the Lewis Center was initially planted with a diverse community of wetland vegetation in the spring of 2000. Fish and painted turtles were added. Song birds, ducks, toads, frogs and a wide variety of insects also inhabit the wetland but have come of their own accord. In 2010, in response to a breach in the lining the wetland system was rebuilt. The new wetland restoration was expanded in size in order to accommodate a more diverse and representative aquatic ecosystem at a scale that better matches the building. A number of the original plant specimens were saved and reused."

New Information Curriculum Embodied in Building Design

Nice piece in Environmental Design + Construction on merging digital and information technology within Goody Clancy's design of the new Center for Informatics at Northern Kentucky University (NKU) outside Cincinnati.

...

Griffin Hall is the new physical home of the College of Informatics and the centerpiece of Vision 2015, the northern Kentucky’s region’s 15-year strategic plan to bring together business and academia to strengthen the regional economy. 

The driving force of the program is the emerging integration of digital and information technology throughout the curriculum at NKU. Recognizing that business informatics and medical informatics are changing the very nature of human interaction, the program called for extracting traditional areas of study from their distinct academic “silos” and aggregating them in a central crossroads on campus.

The sustainable building solution, built for approximately $255 per square foot, features innovative materials and intelligent building systems (IBS) that align with the mission of integration and collaboration. The project was designed utilizing BIM (Building Information Modeling) across the entire team to represent the design and construction process in on-going and real-time three-dimensional representation.

“A sustainable building approach is part of NKU’s commitment to environmental stewardship,” said Rob Chandler, principal in charge of the project for Goody Clancy. “As architects and planners, we are committed to delivering highly responsive buildings with the very best tools and technologies available to us. NKU recognized that part of its ground-breaking approach to integrating information extended to the building itself. As a result, the building truly communicates with its systems and achieves higher efficiencies, lowers utility use, and reduces the University’s carbon footprint. ”

The George and Ellen Rieveschl Digitorium is the figural heart of Griffin Hall, comprising a two-story hall, embraced by the layered transparent skin of the Commons. The sweeping form acts as a forecourt to an L-shaped classroom and administrative wing. The Commons and the exterior of the Digitorium are illuminated by a dynamic assemblage of RGB LED lighting that is visible from the interior campus and west quad.  On the interior, the digitorium can be transformed into a reception space, high technology classroom, digital movie theater, recital hall, computer simulation center (for gaming, security, finances and other simulations), distance learning center, or a place for many other performance and teaching experiences. Eight “digital opera boxes” surrounding the central core also function as small breakout rooms. They feature computational equipment that allows for active, simultaneous engagement with building events and simultaneous display from all eight opera boxes on the 13’ x 25’ microtile wall. READ MORE >>

via www.edcmag.com

Beyond Green: A Net-Zero College Community

By Jim Witkin

Designing buildings that leave a lighter imprint on the environment has become the de facto standard these days. The target for many is zero net energy use, meaning that a building makes as much energy as it uses over the course of a year.

Noteworthy net-zero-energy homes, commercial buildings and government structures are regularly built. But none have matched the scale of West Village, a net-zero community at the University of California, Davis, that its developers describe as the largest project of its kind in the country.

Stretching over 130 acres on the campus, which is just west of Sacramento, the initial phase of this $280 million project officially opened last weekend with the completion of 315 apartments, 42,500 square feet of commercial space and a recreation center. Once it is completed in 2013, the development will be home to about 3,000 students, faculty and staff in apartments and single-family houses. READ MORE >>

via green.blogs.nytimes.com