The history of Yale University’s Daniel L. Malone Engineering Center is as much about evolution as it is about innovation. When Yale first contemplated its new engineering research center, the University practiced “green” construction only to the extent that it considered material and resource conservation, energy efficiency, and indoor air quality, says David Spalding, a program manager with Yale’s office of facilities construction and renovation. As the project took shape over the next 10 years, the idea of designing a truly sustainable building took hold.

“Our management was a little cautious and didn’t want us to go out and declare that we were going to build a LEED-certified building,” says Spalding. “We tried to make our decisions driven by life-cycle cost analysis.”

Several years into the design process, with construction just getting underway, Yale became aware of two important facts: The U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC) was gaining international credibility for its LEED standards, and the University was pumping out more greenhouse gas than some third-world countries. Yale created an Office of Sustainability and published a new design standard that included a sustainability section. As construction on Malone came to a close in late 2005, Yale announced a commitment to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to ten percent below 1990 levels by the year 2020, a reduction of 43 percent at the same time square footage would increase by 15 percent.

In January 2006, the University formed a committee called the Sustainable Building Design and Construction Committee charged with recommending a policy to the University on sustainable construction. Focusing on new construction and major renovation, they joined existing committees already doing similar work around transportation, waste management, and energy management.

In September 2006, the U.S. Green Building Council awarded Malone its Gold certification.

“Really, the story of the Malone Center is the story of evolving sustainable building design and construction at Yale University,” says Spalding.

Tough Job on a Tough Site

The design and construction team of this project faced challenges beyond the novelty of their environmental approach and the absence of a clear University commitment to pursuing a LEED rating. The building was intended primarily for laboratory use, yet at the beginning of the design phase there was no clear program or description of the work that would go on there, says Paul Stoller, a director of Atelier Ten, the environmental design consultant on the project. That made flexibility a priority in the design.

“This was a brand new bioengineering research building, and the bioengineering faculty and program was being pieced together as we designed the building,” he says. “We didn’t know if labs would be physical sciences or biological sciences or chemical sciences until well into the design process.”

As the faculty came together, it became apparent that they were balking at the idea of moving into a “green” building.

“A big surprise for all of us was that not only was there no support from the faculty, there was outright hostility,” says Stoller. “The faculty feared that a green building would cost a lot more, and that money would be taken away from their program budgets. They were not advocates of this until the end of the project, when they realized that pursuing high building performance had not come at the expense of their research mission.”

The 63,000-sf, $40 million building contains five floors of laboratory space and offices. A stone-clad face fronts a busy New Haven street, while a glass façade overlooks the heart of the campus and one of its historic streets lined with 19th-century mansions.

Faculty offices line the west façade; graduate student offices are off the main corridor to the northeast. The laboratories run down the heart of the building, ceding priority for daylight to the student offices. The unusual floor plan was necessitated by a tight triangular building lot.

The designers started with a sustainability overview that began with the broad questions of building orientation, configuring labs and offices to takes advantage of daylight, and opening windows onto garden spaces.

Next came a sustainability report that divided green building features for energy, water, air, electricity, and ventilation into three categories: “Basic”—ones that any responsible owner would include, such as well-designed facades, high efficiency lighting, and occupancy sensors; “Better”—which the University didn’t do regularly but acknowledged that it probably should, such as higher efficiency T5 lighting, light shelves on the façade, external shading, and daylight sensors; and state-of-the-art “Best” features, such as renewable energy, many of which were rejected eventually for reasons of geometry, program site, and budget. Much of the analysis involved exploring technologies like heat recovery, which Yale had never before used in a lab building but agreed to employ in Malone.

At the end of the concept process, the University agreed to do everything that was identified as a “better” building method, and keep an open mind regarding the “best” features. That approach served as an internal benchmarking system.

Some of the most innovative work occurred outside the building. For example, a great deal of thought went into issues of storm water runoff and landscaping. The project team did not want to use plantings that would require irrigation, a performance goal supported by the landscape designers’ desire to use native species that could survive without constant watering.

Storm water from this site and two adjacent properties had always flowed to a former canal corridor that bisects the site, which was converted into a linear park as part of the project. The University and the City of New Haven wanted to avoid dumping storm water into a combined sewer in the street because of the adverse environmental impact to the harbor. Instead, the design team maintained the existing use of the canal as a natural rainwater infiltrator, and enhanced it by adding infiltrators under the parking lot. The overflow from the infiltrators now passes over rock beds that were created along a portion of the canal wall, through holes in a series of terraced Corten Steel retaining walls, and is released into a bioswale that runs alongside the canal path.

“We are recharging the groundwater table,” says Stoller “and excess capacity is dealt with by the landscape element itself.”

The building also uses 87 percent less potable water than typical buildings of the same size because of low-flow faucets and the recapture of non-potable water. Researchers require de-ionized water in their labs. The process used to remove the ions—reverse osmosis de-ionization (RODI)—produces wastewater that is considered non-potable according to code. That water is used to flush toilets and for several other non-potable uses.

Construction Manager Plays Key Role

As the design process progressed, it became clear that the Malone design team needed a system to keep track of each design feature and how many LEED credits each was worth. The USGBC offers a standard score card for this purpose, but the team tweaked the tool to account for constantly evolving decisions about “maybe” design alternatives. The principal change was the separation of the “maybe” items into discrete “medium” and “low” probability categories, rather than the single question mark offered on the standard form. This allowed a more accurate forecasting of the probable final rating through a weighting of the point subtotals for each ranking category. This achievement forecast information helped to inspire the team and the University to strive for a higher ranking.

“This gave us more confidence that we would achieve a Silver ranking,” says Stoller, which was the project’s original stretch goal. “When it became clear that Gold was within our reach, it built up momentum to reconsider the ‘maybes.’”

Because the designers remained flexible rather than sticking rigidly to decisions made early in the design phase, they were able to take advantage of emerging technologies, greater availability and lower cost of sustainable materials, and increasing support for sustainable construction.

The construction management company, Whiting-Turner Contracting Company of New Haven, Conn., was in charge of purchasing materials, construction and management practices, and managing the construction documentation LEED requires. Because the company was involved early in preconstruction, it was able to conduct material studies and local market surveys for availability and cost of different materials, especially the sustainable materials, which at the beginning were difficult to find.

Low VOC sealants and adhesives were in the design from the beginning because they represented little cost increase over more traditional products. “Green” paints and carpets were new to the market, so they cost more, but combined, they represented less than one percent of the total project cost. The paints required an extra coat, which increased the price by 50 percent; the carpets represented a 10-percent increase.

The use of highly durable surfaces throughout the building and the installation of polished concrete floors will permit the use of very-low VOC cleaning materials for the life of the building.

Wood was a substantial part of the project because of all the casework in the labs. Initially, Whiting-Turner was told that FSC (Forest Stewardship Council) wood harvested from sustainable forests would represent a 100-percent mark-up because it was so scarce. Rather than reject the idea, the company tracked it as an alternative, and by the time it went out to bid, the mark-up had dropped to just 15 percent because builders were demanding it more often.

To reduce the heat island effect at the roof, the design team selected a white reflective Energy Star roof manufactured by Sarnafil, which represented a 35 percent premium over a basic black EPDM roof, but cost a little less than a built-up roofing system.

The project earned credits for using local and regional materials, despite the fact that the building skin materials were from the Midwest and England, because Whiting-Turner so assiduously tracked every other material used in the project.

Using recycled materials is another LEED criterion, but the University was not willing to pay a premium for it. The team specified and sourced a concrete mix containing recycled fly ash, a byproduct of coal-fired electric power plants. Whiting-Turner also found a drywall made from post-industrial recycled gypsum. As most steel in the United States is recycled, Whiting-Turner tracked and documented every product that contained any steel, down to the anchor clips for the building skin and the rebar in the walls.

Earning waste management credit, too, is more a matter of documentation than changing existing practices. Most waste—including paper, cardboard, metal, wood, and demolition material—is recyclable, and contractors know that recycling it is cheaper than disposal. The Malone project generated 2,800 tons of waste, 90 percent of which was recycled.

The challenge is separating materials as they come off the building. The contractors stockpiled sorted waste briefly until another dumpster could be moved onto the site. The 55 tons of recyclable sheetrock was stacked on pallets and taken by tractor-trailer to a plant in upstate New York.

To improve indoor air quality, the team required all ductwork to be delivered to the site pre-sealed, and required the contractors to seal any open-ended ductwork at the end of each shift. This helped to keep the ducts dry, which prevented the growth of mold and mildew and minimized the amount of dirt and dust that accumulated in the ducts during delivery and staging.

Just as the design team brought the construction manager on board early, the construction manager shared as much information as possible with contractors, in pre-bid meetings, progress meetings, even in foremen’s meetings.

This made the project more cooperative and more price-competitive. The better people understood what the design team was trying to accomplish, the more willing they were to participate.

Whiting-Turner streamlined the documentation process by integrating it into its existing procedures. The submittal log was expanded to identify each material and the requirements to earn the related LEED credits. This system proved useful when it revealed that the “low-flow” sink fixtures they intended to buy were not low-flow enough. The contractor made a no-cost change prior to the fixtures being purchased, rather than placing a costly change order after the wrong ones were installed.

Whiting-Turner also expanded its procurement log into a “materials tracking spreadsheet,” which added information about cost and LEED goals to the standard time and schedule data. This allowed the company to track how the project was performing from design all the way through construction, and identified areas where they could switch materials, such as the concrete mixture.

Lessons Learned

This project succeeded on many levels. Yale was presented with a magnificent engineering facility that complements the traditional university campus and makes good use of a difficult site. The building itself is an environmental success, from the materials and processes used in construction to the sustainability of the facility over the life of the building. And those successes combined set Yale on a course of sustainable building practices.

There were lessons learned that can be employed in future projects, not the least of which was the important role of the construction manager.

“We all learned, especially Atelier Ten, how absolutely vital it is to have a switched-on construction manager looking after all of the materials credits,” says Stoller.

There also are areas where projects could be improved in the future. The offices in the building all are day lit, for example, but the laboratory working spaces are not. This was partly the result of the unusual shape of the site, but also because the issue wasn’t a clear priority in the early planning process, concedes Stoller.

“We all learned that we need to work much harder on the HVAC systems,” he says. “We should have done detailed energy modeling throughout the design. We did sketch modeling in the concept phase and then not again until after the design was done.

“It became clear to all of us during the design, and especially the construction process, that LEED is a good benchmarking tool for laboratory buildings,” concludes Stoller.

By Lisa Wesel

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