From its inception, the Leslie Sun Field Station, a 10,000-sf outpost on a University-owned biological preserve, had great incentive to be a green building. Sustainability elements include a flexible, open floorplan to accommodate future changes in science programs; photovoltaic panels for solar heating; salvaged bricks, redwood siding, and casework; a cistern that captures rainwater for irrigation; and certified lumber.

The field station also illustrates why the University is following its own guidelines rather than LEED™ criteria. According to Laura Goldstein, project manager with the Department of Project Management at Stanford University Lands and Buildings, the building design takes advantage of its natural setting to make most artificial light unnecessary during daytime hours. However, green building dictates prescribe occupancy sensors to turn on lights as people travel through an area.

"The formal standards assume people need lights, but there is so much daylight that we chose to use switches, not sensors," says Goldstein. "This is an example of how the SSG enable us to find the right solution for the exact problem."

Concurrent with the guideline development, the then in-progress Lokey Chemistry and Biology Lab received several mechanical upgrades to make it more energy efficient, most notably the installation of an advanced building management system to regulate air flows in the labs, which have a very high concentration of fume hoods.

"We were apprehensive in the beginning that the building would be an energy hog," says Goldstein, "but we've found that, with the management system, it uses the same amount of power as some of our 20- and 30-year-old lab buildings with a much lower hood density."

Other techniques include the use of rejected DI water to cool the autoclave condensate and a closed-loop chilled water system in the fume hoods to cool reactions (rather than process water, which simply goes down the drain).

The scope of technology deployed throughout Stanford's Lucas Center for Magnetic Resonance Spectroscopy and Imaging is unprecedented. "This building has every component of technical science in it that we could find," says Goldstein. "We have built nothing like it before." Its most salient sustainability feature is undoubtedly an underground location, which allows Stanford to maintain existing landscapes and parking areas while relying on a large courtyard to deliver daylight to occupied spaces.

In addition, all building systems incorporate premium efficiency motors for precise regulation of energy-consuming resources like air, chilled water, and heating water. Casework is made of certified wood, and fly ash is an ingredient in the concrete. Enlarging the courtyard to bring in more natural light was one change made during design.

"We wanted to give the space a better quality for the users," said Goldstein, adding, "We also considered the use of photovoltaics here but we couldn't get it to pencil out."

As for the future, the SSG are playing an integral part in the development and design of eight new science facilities planned for the next 15 years, including a new, four-building Science and Engineering Quadrangle (SEQ2) whose appearance will conform to the school's original aesthetics despite its much higher density.

With one of the new SEQ2 structures an Environment and Energy building, sustainability is an obvious priority. A chief accomplishment so far has been a space audit that whittled the eight buildings’ overall square footage down by 24 percent, from a requested 1.3 million to 990,000.

"That is real square feet that we will not be building," notes Jack Cleary, director of Stanford's Department of Project Management.

Other measures currently under consideration range from the choice of exterior skin to surpassing already stringent energy consumption standards by up to 60 percent, to life cycle cost analyses of major site features of the quad in the master plan, such as a cistern to collect rainwater and piping excess chiller water from the central plant for irrigation.

NZS

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