Precious Metals

Local builders reach for the Platinum mark

by Melody Finnemore

All that glitters is not gold. In the case of sustainability, the precious metals also come in bronze, silver and platinum under the rating categories designated by the U.S. Green Building Council for LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) status.

The metals correlate to the number of points achieved on the LEED rating system. The five major environmental categories of review are sustainable sites, water efficiency, energy and atmosphere, materials and resources and indoor environmental quality. The more points, the more precious the metal. The Platinum designation is so valuable, that only three buildings have achieved it since the rating program started in the 1990s.

Over 1,400 buildings are waiting to be rated across the country, but in the Pacific Northwest so far, 14 have achieved a LEED status. One of the most potentially significant hasn't even been built yet.

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Located along the Willamette River, in Portland, the University of Oregon Health Sciences University is building a complex that screams "green". Hospitals, research space, classrooms and even employee and general housing will eventually sit on the site, creating a mini-medical community. OHSU River Campus Building One is the front door to the project. Hoffman is the CM/GC on this landmark building that anchors the future river campus. The 16-story 400,000-sq.-ft building, located on a two block, 600 car underground garage, will house research and education labs, medical clinics and offices, an ambulatory surgery suite, imaging services, and a wellness and fitness center. The building's location at the base of the future aerial tram will offer easy access to the OHSU Marquam Hill facilities. Foundation work is under way and completion is set for 2006.

If the building achieves the Platinum LEED status as the developer Gerding/Edlen, Portland, hopes it will, it will be the largest building in the country with the designation. Painstaking planning for the process has brought the building to within three points of the prized designation.

"The building will be a great benchmark for Portland and for the South Waterfront," said Kyle Anderson, architect with GBD.

Gerding/Edlen has created a successful development company by focusing on building high rating LEED projects. It has the process down to an art, starting with the "ecocharrette", where all the members of the design team and the general contractor get together to develop the most efficient building design possible. In this case some of the major players were architect GBD and mechanical engineer, Interface Engineering Inc., all of Portland

Major points for the rating of Building One will come from high performance glazing, daylit interiors and high efficiency lighting. A bioreactor system will treat 100 percent of the wastewater.

Consisting of an anaerobic chamber and a series of filters and membranes, the bioreactor will be the first used in the area. "The treatment system will bring all the water used in the building up to a Level 4 for sterility," said Andy Frichtl, mechanical engineer with Interface. "I've offered to drink the first water that runs through it." Though the water will be fit for human consumption, health officials don't recommend it. Instead it will be used for irrigation and flushing toilets.

Another feature of the building will be the south façade, a glass curtain wall with automatic shades and photovoltaic panels. The first floor slab features radiant heating. Water for it comes from a rainwater reclamation system and from a dewatering system installed to relieve pressure on the parking garage walls. The water conservation efforts will save 1 million gallons of water per year and contribute to energy savings 60 percent better than code.

Passive heating and ventilation will also help. Though it will look like an interesting architectural feature, a two-story glass rectangle will sit on the south of the building. Solar energy will heat the water inside, which will then be used to heat the building interior.

Frichtl hopes another part of the ventilation system will help with the health of the patients visiting the center. In the 320 exam rooms, air will be introduced from the lower part of the room. "That pushes all the airborne contaminants to the top and should help cut down on patient contamination," he said. In September the Interface team presented a computer model of the air interchange to a national conference.

"Any one of these would be a cool thing to do, said Scott Lewis of Brightworks, a firm that consults with owners on LEED projects from the ecocharrette to the final paperwork. "The hardest thing to do is keep everybody on track and make sure they comply," he said.

Of course, projects like Building One could not be possible without studying the success of previous buildings. The Honda Facility in Gresham, designed by Group McKenzie, Portland was the first warehouse facility in the country to achieve a Gold rating. Built in 2001, the building uses green products in almost very aspect of its design from its lighting, heating, flooring, bathroom tiles and exterior landscaping.

"Then it was much harder, especially to find materials with recycled content and finishes that might work," said Mike Nichols the project manager from Opus Northwest, in Portland. "And there's less you can do to a warehouse to earn LEED points."

Like Building One, stormwater is recycled and used for irrigation. The contractor used a system designed by Stormwater Management Systems in Portland. Though it an unusual practice at the time, "the code was very clear that we could do it," Nichols said. Opus also gained points for using odd interior finishes such as Japanese phone book pages as wall paper and sunflower seed shells as a binder in resin chairs.

Other features include:

• A chiller, boiler and cooling tower system that provides an energy efficient source of heating and cooling.
• A gas-fired, boiler fed, in-floor radiant heating system in the training area.
• A lighting control system that controls lighting automatically, integrating daylight from skylights and "light shelves" which bounce natural daylight up onto the ceiling and down to the workspace.
• Warehouse usage of 123 skylights, which along with reflectivity from the walls permits work to be carried out without additional light in the daytime.

Nichols occasionally attends maintenance tours of the building. "It's holding up well," he said.

Another industrial type building to achieve LEED status is the TRACON building (Seattle Terminal Radar Approach Control) near Seattle's Sea-Tac International airport. There air traffic controllers track planes before they receive instructions for landing. PCL Construction Services completed the facility nearly two weeks ahead of schedule and within budget. The contractor used a design-assist/general contractor approach for project delivery, with assistance of the URS Facilities Group as the primary designer.

The 51,000-square-foot facility is the first gold LEED project for the Federal Aviation Administration. It also won an Excellence in Construction award from the local Associated General Contractors chapter.

The project included considerable site work adjacent to an environmentally sensitive wetland, which made stormwater and erosion control a high priority. A large hill in the center of the site required excavating nearly 350,000 cubic yards of soil, while maintaining the quality and purity of the surrounding wetlands and streams. PCL harvested 250 trees on-site to be reused for wetland mitigation. The landscaping consists of wildflowers and native plants. The facility includes a white roof membrane, natural lighting, glass floors, photo sensor lighting fixtures and recycled materials.

Construction methods also complied with a stringent site-specific air quality and recycling plan that resulted in over 95 percent of construction waste being recycled.