Aggressive Growth and Sustainable Values

A Happy, Cost Effective and Thoughtful Pairing at Rice University

By Barbara White Bryson and Richard Johnson

Barbara White Bryson	Richard Johnson

Rice University, known as a bucolic and lovely campus community shaded by more than 4,000 trees, is suddenly growing at a pace commensurate with Houston itself. This fall the collegiate air is rent with bulldozer engines and back-up signals. Construction fences have invaded the campus as insidiously as King Ranch bluestem grass across Texas. Rice is expanding its 3.7 million square feet of built space by almost one million square feet by the end of 2009, quickly and cost effectively, in concert with the university’s Vision for the Second Century. Interestingly enough, however, in spite of this singular focus, the explosive growth is also accompanied by a commitment to construct all new buildings to meet the US Green Building Council’s LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) standards.

But why should Rice take on an additional challenge at this critical moment of growth? After all, everyone knows that LEED buildings cost more, don’t they? At the levels of LEED-Certified and LEED-Silver, we’re commonly told to expect about a 1 ½ to 2% mark-up in project costs. Rice has challenged this statistic and found that the figure -- and even the question itself -- can be misleading.

What’s my Baseline?

The proper starting point is to ask “What is my baseline?” Rice is a university. Many of its buildings are designed to last 100 years or more. Controlling operations and maintenance costs in these buildings over the long term is critical, because, while donors may be willing to fund new construction, they rarely want to pay the electricity bill. Indoor environmental quality is also of prime importance, as we have occupants who live in some of our buildings, and employees who work for so many hours inside others that those facilities become almost like second homes.

So Rice continues to approach each project with a mindset of designing for durability, utility efficiency, and health. Sound familiar? These concepts are central to green building philosophy.

In spite of this natural synergy, the LEED checklist at first appeared daunting and overly prescriptive. Our teams and leadership worried that innovation would be replaced by compliance. Instead, we have found the LEED process provides an opportunity for focused discussions on how to deliver a better building for Rice. For example, the energy model required by LEED to verify the energy efficiency of our designs has positioned us to make better decisions in evaluating technologies like enthalpy wheels, chilled beams, and various window systems. The model and the varying scale of LEED points devoted to energy efficiency also enable us to challenge and reward our project teams for finding additional energy savings.

Clearly, to be successful, these discussions require consultants who understand our notion of quality, because LEED can become counter-productive when someone starts to treat the program like a checklist. When one consultant who wanted to do business with Rice asked why we’d spend thousands of dollars to get a LEED point for energy savings from a more efficient HVAC system when we could spend just a few hundred dollars to get a LEED point for a bicycle rack, we knew that he was not the right fit for Rice. Rice isn’t looking for the cheapest LEED points; we’re looking for effective points. From an economic standpoint, we want the energy savings if there’s a reasonable payback. As an employer with a sizable population of cyclists, we also want the bike racks. Both fit into our view of designing a quality Rice facility, and not surprisingly, both align with LEED.

Other very surprising and very beneficial outcomes have developed from this “green” commitment. Although it quickly became apparent that LEED would work hand-in-hand with our approach to delivering quality facilities, we did not anticipate how receptive donors would be to the university’s commitment to LEED. This August, Rice announced a $30 million gift to fund a new residential college (dormitory) that will achieve a LEED-Gold rating. For this particular donor, the opportunity to fund a leading “green” building proved to be the right fit for the family’s interests, and LEED offered the means to verify that the building would be as “green” as we intended, physically and pedagogically.

Faculty and Students Jump in to LEED

Our commitment to green building and sustainability has also allowed our Facilities Engineering and Planning department to interface with faculty and students in a new and positive way. For example, a team of environmental studies students learned about utility paybacks by helping us to select water-efficient fixtures for a dorm restroom renovation. They then one-upped us by arranging for the older fixtures to be donated to Habitat for Humanity for re-use. A chemical engineering class learned about heat transfer and the benefits of reflective roofing materials by modeling the roof of one of our buildings. Their work provided us with real insights into the energy savings associated with reflective roofs and with roof coatings. A faculty member in Civil and Environmental Engineering recently submitted a grant proposal to use our building energy management system as a test-bed for his research on sensor networks. If he wins the grant, he’ll help us to understand the vulnerabilities in our system, and to anticipate where failure could occur.

We’ll readily admit that we still have much to learn about designing a truly sustainable building. We all do. But the trajectory that we’re on is innovative, creative, and cost effective; completely synergistic with our aggressive growth and goals.

So what’s your baseline? We’ve found that ours is approximately in the range of LEED-certified. With consultants who are skilled in designing buildings that meet our view of quality, we expect our additional cost for the lower tiers of LEED to be nominal and the payback to be significant. For a developer planning a strip shopping center, the baseline will of course be different. However, to the extent that design and construction practices at universities serves as indicators for what’s to come in other sectors, Barbara White Bryson is Associate Vice President of Facilities Engineering and Planning, Rice University and Richard Johnson is the Director of Sustainability. They can be reached, respectively, at BWBryson@rice.edu and rrj@rice.edu.