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The Yale Alumni Magazine is owned and operated by Yale Alumni Publications, Inc., a nonprofit corporation independent of Yale University. The content of the magazine and its website is the responsibility of the editors and does not necessarily reflect the views of Yale or its officers. |
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Nearly a decade ago, when Forestry & Environmental Studies professor Stephen Kellert ’71PhD began talking up the idea of a new building for the environment school that would be a model of sustainable design, his colleagues were excited by the idea. But the higher-ups at Yale? Not so much. “The idea was so foreign in those days,” recalls Kellert. “The initial reaction was to dismiss it as a kind of blue-sky thing. They said, ‘You guys are academics, you don’t know anything about building, we have an office of facilities for that.’ There was an inclination to dismiss us as a bunch of interfering amateurs.” But Kellert and the FES faculty—who soon gained an important ally when Gus Speth '64, '69LLB, was appointed dean in 1999—persisted, and attitudes at Yale changed. Now, as excavations for the new building are being completed, the building is less a demonstration of what could be and more a flagship project for a widespread green building program at Yale. The new building, which is to be named Kroon Hall after donor Richard Kroon '64, is being built on the site of a former power plant at the base of Science Hill, on Prospect Street between Sage Hall and Osborn Memorial Laboratory. When it is finished in 2009, Kroon Hall will be the environment school’s headquarters, with offices for the dean, faculty, and staff; a library; classrooms; and a top floor “environment center" with an auditorium and space for conferences and other events. Kellert, who chairs the building committee, says the building was conceived not only to bring together the scattered faculty offices and encourage a sense of community in the school, but also to be “a realization of our ideals in built form.” Its planners say it will be climate-neutral, meaning that it will operate without a net addition of greenhouse gases to the atmosphere. What does it look like when an environment school faculty and a leading architect get together to make the greenest building they can? Not necessarily what you'd expect. Not the self-conscious environmental expressionism of the 1970s, when many green buildings looked like mere support structures for a raking array of solar panels. Not the high-tech look that suggests an inhabitable machine calibrated to ration energy use. And not the straw bales and earth berms at the low-tech end of the spectrum. Above all, says Mike Taylor of Hopkins Architects, the London firm that is the building’s principal designer, “we've tried to make a building that feels like it belongs to Yale, rather than a building that says, ‘Oh look, I’ve got lots of bits of sustainable technology from circa 2006‘ that in 20 years‘ time will look completely out of date.” The idea is that a green building must be popular with users and long-lasting, in order to justify the energy and resources that have gone into its creation. “If you keep a building in existence such that people have a loyalty to and attachment to it and recycle it generation after generation, that’s really sustainable,” says Kellert. (By this standard, the 257-year-old Connecticut Hall might be the greenest building on campus.) Mark Simon ’72MArch of Centerbrook Architects, which is also working on the project, has a simple slogan to express the same idea: “Endearing is enduring.” That’s not to say Kroon Hall has no technological bells and whistles. Photovoltaic panels on the south side of its barnlike roof will convert sunlight into electricity. A geothermal energy system will take advantage of stable temperatures underground to help heat and cool the building. Rainwater will be collected from gutters, filtered, and used to flush toilets. But by and large, the environment school wants to make the point that sustainable design is only partly about technology. It’s also about time-honored building techniques that had been temporarily forgotten during the postwar era of cheap energy. So Kroon Hall’s aesthetics will be both environmentally sound and appealing to users in a timeless way: the shape and orientation of the building allow for lots of natural light to enter; the windows can be opened; and the skylit public space on the top floor has exposed wooden roof beams that remind one of the school’s historic focus on forestry. Other features contribute to reducing energy use, but in a quiet way. The structure of the bottom three floors is made of reinforced concrete, a material that absorbs and retains heat and helps stabilize temperatures in the building. Deep walls and aluminum shades on the south side of the building help optimize the amount of sunlight that enters the building at different times of year. And while ideas like these might once have been forgotten at Yale, the discussions over Kroon Hall helped jog the university’s memory. Now, every new building will be designed to earn at least silver-level certification through the LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) green building rating system. (Kroon Hall itself is expected to win platinum, the highest available.) “Yale has gone through an enormous change in attitude just in the three years I’ve been working on this project,” says Taylor. “And the standards are moving so fast that a building won’t be as radical when it’s built as it was when you were proposing it. We might be Yale’s greenest building now, but let’s hope we’re not for long.”
10 ways to make a building green
A section of the architect’s model of Kroon Hall reveals some of its sustainable features: 1. Photovoltaic panels on roof Photovoltaic panels convert sunlight into electricity; the panels on the south side of Kroon Hall’s roof are expected to produce a portion of the building’s electricity needs. Although photovoltaic panels are themselves sometimes used as a roofing material, the architects decided to attach them to a frame on top of a metal roof, so they can more easily be replaced as photovoltaic technology improves. 2. Glass-embedded photovoltaic panels At the top of the roof, where a skylight will run the length of the building, the photovoltaic panels will be embedded in glass to let light pass through. The panels will be visible from the public rooms below, to show off a bit of Kroon Hall’s greenness. 3. Laminated wood roof beams The roof will be supported by beams made from layers of wood glued together—a technique that allows builders to use smaller pieces of wood from timber plantations instead of large trees felled from old-growth forests. The exposed wood beams will be an emblem of the school’s history as a leader in forest management; the architects hope to use wood from Yale’s own forests. 4. Environmental center Environment school dean Gus Speth said at Kroon Hall’s groundbreaking that the building will be “a magnet for all those at Yale with environmental interests.” This will be especially true of the top floor, which will hold an auditorium and conference space to be called the Carl and Emily Knobloch Environmental Center. 5. Rainwater collection Gutters will collect rainwater from the roof, filter it in a “cleansing pond” that will be part of a plaza next to the building, and then store it for use in toilets and for watering plants. 6. Windows that work The windows will be operable, so that people inside can have natural ventilation during mild weather. The windows will also be highly insulated so they perform well when closed. Deep window frames will help control how much direct sunlight reaches the interior. 7. Local sandstone walls The outer walls will be made of sandstone that harmonizes with the dark stone structures nearby. The stone will be quarried no more than 500 miles from the site so that the energy used in transporting the stone is kept to a minimum. 8. Concrete structural system Except for the roof, the building’s “bones” will be made of reinforced concrete, as will the ceilings of each floor. Concrete absorbs heat and helps to stabilize temperatures. “Walk in a medieval cathedral in Europe in the summer,” says architect Mike Taylor, “and it’s still a cool space because there’s so much thermal mass.” 9. Ground-floor colonnade This covered walkway faces a courtyard between Kroon Hall and Osborn Memorial Laboratory. There will also be paved plazas at either end of the building. Such outdoor spaces are designed to afford the building’s users a sense of connection with the outdoor environment. 10. Geothermal energy Kroon Hall will have ground-source heat pumps, which cycle water from the earth below through the building, thus helping to heat and cool the interior.
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