Building The Future: Green Designs Save More Than Money

The design of the Little Rock headquarters of Heifer International had to reflect the organization’s mission. Known primarily as a hunger fighting organization, it also emphasizes the need for environmental sustainability. If its headquarters wasn’t consistent with that message, how could it ask donors to support the cause? So the organization asked its Little Rock-based architectural firm, Polk Stanley Wilcox, to design its special new home.

The result was the first building in the South to receive a “platinum” rating from the U.S. Green Building Council’s Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) program. The headquarters has been featured in architectural magazines and books. It uses 50 percent less energy than a comparable structure thanks to a combination of design features. Planned so that any extra design costs would be repaid in seven years, the payback was actually five years because of a spike in energy costs, according to architect Reese Rowland, AIA. Its narrow 60-foot width and east-west orientation mean all employees work in offices bathed in natural light. For visitors, it reinforces the organization’s message of environmental sustainability.

“A building that doesn’t have a story to it, that doesn’t have a message, in my mind is not really architecture,” Rowland said. “It’s just a building.”

THE SHIFT
Polk Stanley Wilcox has been the design firm on a number of recognizable landmarks in Little Rock, including the Acxiom building along Interstate 30 and the Fellowship Bible Church, and it was the Arkansas partner in the design of the Clinton Presidential Center.

According to Rowland, there’s been a significant shift among his clients in the past 10 or 15 years. When he graduated college in 1990, clients were mostly concerned with a project’s first cost. Now, they are looking at long-term energy costs, the working environment, and the story the architecture tells.

The Acxiom building, for example, is designed to look like a modern information technology building. Its curved shape causes the eye to follow its contours, suggesting movement and speed. “It’s just a different building than any other building downtown, and it’s different because it’s Acxiom,” Rowland said.

Among the primary drivers of new architectural trends, of course, is saving money. According to the green building movement Architecture 2030, building operations and construction consumes nearly half the energy produced in the United States – far more than transportation, which consumes about 28 percent of the nation’s energy, and industry, which consumes about 23 percent. According to Rowland, clients are far more willing than in the past to invest more on the front end – in insulation, in energy-efficient heating and cooling systems, in lighting technology – in order to save money on the back end.

Glass technology also has improved in recent years so that clients can enjoy more natural light without seeing big increases in energy bills. For Fayetteville’s Happy Hollow Elementary, the Rogers-based architectural and engineering firm Crafton Tull determined that the best glass would cost $30,000 more than the typical double-glazed insulated kind. At first this seemed cost-prohibitive, but mechanical engineers determined the increased energy efficiency would allow the district to save about $100,000 on its HVAC equipment and would reduce its monthly utility bills by 10-15 percent, said architect Wes Burgess, AIA.

Front-end economic considerations will always remain a key factor, of course. Even the Heifer International headquarters originally lacked solar panels because they were prohibitively expensive, though ground-based panels later were added. Rowland said that, in the architectural world, there’s a certain amount of “green washing” – details like green roofs and bike racks that are nice to do and add LEED points but don’t really save much energy.

Because the documentation they would have to submit for certification is expensive to prepare, some clients now instead are seeking simply to be “LEED equivalent,” said Burgess. Schools in particular often approach architectural firms with a fixed budget and can’t afford extras.

“They’re not so much interested in a LEED certification and a plaque on the wall, but things that save the district money in yearly operating costs of their buildings are becoming more and more important to them,” said Michelle McClaflin, AIA, with Rogers-based Hight-Jackson.

OLD WORLD, NEW WORLD
Some current energy-saving techniques are state-of-the-art, while others are based on long-established principles.

When Hight-Jackson designed Darr Elementary in Rogers, it added insulation to the roof and spray foam insulation to the walls. McClaflin said increasingly common techniques include occupancy sensors so lights shut off when no one is present and daylight sensors so the row of lights closest to the windows shuts off when enough natural light is streaming in. No-wax flooring reduces maintenance as well as the need for toxic cleaning products. The price of LED lighting has been dropping closer to compact fluorescent bulbs, making it a viable option.

“I think the unusual is becoming the usual,” she said. “The HVAC systems are getting more and more efficient all the time.”

In addition to saving energy costs, new designs also are meant to increase employee satisfaction and health. Employees are more productive and miss fewer workdays when they work in places with healthy air circulation. Structures are being designed to be more inviting and have amenities that keep employees working longer in the day. Those include cafes where they can hang out, pull tables together, and end up having impromptu meetings, Rowland said.

Architects try to position buildings in an east-west direction so that the sun is never too low on the north side, while the south side, where the sun is lower, is protected by shading. That’s because proper use of natural light reduces lighting bills and results in health and productivity benefits for employees. According to Burgess, that fact would be self-evident even without numerous studies showing it to be true.

“Everybody wants the window, obviously, because natural light’s better,” he said.

Rowland says structures once were oriented according to the sun’s heat and light, and windows were designed to circulate the air and make hot summers as comfortable as possible. Then air-conditioning came along and made all of that seemingly unnecessary. Designers could simply replicate the same old rectangular box and shut out the elements.

Employees were shuttered from their natural environment and spent the day breathing stale air and the chemicals emanating from the building components and from cleaning compounds. The thinking among employers was that they wanted employees at their desk working and not distracted by anything in the office. The result, however, was that it made offices an uninviting place and made everyone less healthy.

Now architects are reaching back to the days when designers had no choice but to take the elements into account.

“It all got back to how they captured wind, how they lit the rooms that needed light in the morning, that needed light in the evenings,” Rowland said. “The buildings were organized around the way the sun moved and so our generation of architects has embraced that. I call it stepping back and stepping forward at the same time.”

Companies also appreciate how a green design can help their image. For younger employees, it’s an important tool for recruitment and retention. Moreover, according to Rowland, there is some interest among clients in being green for being green’s sake. In higher education, Crafton Tull’s Burgess said colleges and universities seek LEED certification because they know their competitors will.

Other trends in architecture don’t have much to do with light or energy, but appearance. A noticeable change in recent years has been exposing air ducts instead of concealing them with drop ceilings. Rowland said this has been done because it raises the ceiling three to five feet and also gives occupants a better idea of how things are built. In other words, it tells the building’s story. Sometimes his firm will paint water lines – blue for cold water; red for hot water. Plus, he said, it just looks cool.

EDUCATION LEADS, IN MORE WAYS THAN ONE
Just as workforce expectations are changing, so are those in education. A 2006 study by Gregory Kats, managing principal of Capital E, a national clean energy technology and green building firm, reviewed 30 green schools built in 10 states between 2001 and 2006. It found that those schools cost about 2 percent more to build, or about $3 more per square foot, but they resulted in significant energy savings as well as decreased student absenteeism and an increase in test scores.

The old model of a single authority figure lecturing in front of rows of desks is slowly giving way to the idea of a teacher as learning facilitator. Fourteen schools in Arkansas are part of the New Tech network, which emphasizes project-based learning using technology followed by oral presentations. Two subjects are often taught concurrently by two teachers in classes of more than 60 students, with the teachers roaming from student group to student group as they work on their projects.

That model simply can’t be taught in schools designed like they were in the 1950s, so designers now are creating larger, flexible spaces used for multiple functions that create opportunities for collaborative learning.

McClaflin said school designers are trying to create a more office-like environment, so there’s more glass in the corridors, more visual sight lines, and more opportunities for students to interact. As with offices, some schools now include a cafe environment and casual seating areas.

FUTURE EXPECTATIONS
What’s ahead? According to Architecture 2030, buildings were responsible for nearly half the nation’s carbon dioxide emissions in 2010. Its associated movement, the 2030 Challenge, encourages architects to keep improving their techniques so that their structure’s operations are carbon neutral by the year 2030.

Rowland predicts that scarce water will be more of a consideration in America, as it has already become elsewhere. The Heifer International building is designed to capture and store rainwater for use throughout the building and to avoid creating giant asphalt parking lots where rainwater collects motor oil and chemicals and flows into the city’s drinking water supply.

Moreover, the tools of architecture are changing. Using virtual reality, architects are creating models where clients physically can be in the room to see the design before the first bricks are laid.

At the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, the new George W. Donaghey Emerging Analytics Center will create 3D technologies unlike any available anywhere else in the world, at least for the time being, and architectural firms will be able to rent that technology for their work. At the time the technology was unveiled, Gov. Mike Beebe called it a “flight simulator for everything.”

If current trends hold, that technology will be used to design buildings that offer state-of-the-art energy savings but enable occupants to work, study and live closer to the natural environment. That’s a combination that would have been rare 20 years ago. Now, it’s commonplace.

“I got out of college in 1990,” Rowland said, “and we’ve gone from almost this soulless sea of cubicles in office buildings to communities where they have cafes, they have fitness centers.”