A 1950s-era, 28,295-square-foot paper company warehouse that was previously devoid of windows and openings outside of a loading dock is now the LEED Gold–certified home of the Livestrong Foundation. The concrete tilt-wall building now houses office space, meeting rooms, multipurpose spaces, a gym, open-air courtyard, and parking, and future plans include a community-based cancer-support program. Working within the existing 30,000-square-foot floor plate, the designers opened the façade and roof with north-facing sawtooth clerestories to flood the rectangular box with indirect natural light.
Eighty-eight percent of the demolition waste was reused. Roof decking was salvaged and re-milled to create flexible use enclosures and working neighborhoods within the office interior, while composite beams were reused as benches and furnishings and a demolished concrete tilt-wall was re-cut and used as paving and landscape walls on site. Sixty-six percent of construction waste was diverted from landfill and 28 percent of the remaining non-site-sourced material came from within a 500-mile radius.
A new front porch entry and native courtyard was added as the building’s main entrance and featured precast panels removed from the old building. The design for the primary entry also includes a small water basin. An old loading dock on the west side is now an HC access buffer area and multiuse space with a vine-covered green screen. Insulation was added to the walls and roof and light sensors were installed to control artificial light. Overall, the new facility was designed to use 39.5 percent less operating energy than a comparable office building.
By the numbers:
Building gross floor area: 28,295 square feet
Number of occupants: 62 (plus 800 visitors)
Percent of the building that is daylight: 100
Percent of the building that can be ventilated or cooled with operable windows: Zero
Total water used, indoors and outdoors: 61,132 gallons per year
Calculated annual potable water use: 2.16 gallons per square foot per year
Total energy (MBtu per yr): 1,093 (simulation case)
EPA performance rating: 75
Percent total energy savings: 39
LEED rating: Gold, LEED-NC v.2.2
For more information on each project, including extended slideshows, click on the individual projects in the sidebar at left. To access a database of past Top Ten projects, visit aiatopten.org. ECO-STRUCTURE will be covering the 2011 COTE Top Ten projects in depth in its July/August issue.
