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Building for Keeps
November/December 2007
by Mark Alden Branch ’86
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.
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Kroon Hall was conceived to be “a realization of our ideals in built form.” |
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.”
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Sustainable design is only partly about technology. |
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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