Built to Last
May 1, 2009 12:00 PM, By Mike Kennedy (mkennedy@asumag.com)
Early proponents of sustainable-design strategies provided facilities that are fulfilling their promise to save energy and improve education.
Green comeback
On May 4, 2007, a tornado wiped out most of the small city of Greensburg, Kan., including its three school facilities. As the town dug itself out and formulated recovery plans, the immediate concern for school officials was finding temporary space so that the schools could reopen after the summer recess.
But in considering how to rebuild schools for the long term, town leaders wanted to take advantage of the opportunity the disaster had provided them. They could provide future generations with education facilities that would help the city recover and maybe even thrive for years to come.
"Some people wanted to rebuild quickly and get back," says Casey Cassias, an architect with BNIM in Kansas City, Mo. "But Darin Headrick, the superintendent, said, 'If we just put back what we had before, we'll continue to slide.'"So the community took the city's name to heart and decided that the new Greensburg would be built using green design concepts. Kathleen Sebelius, the governor of Kansas at the time, asked BNIM architect Bob Berkebile, a longtime advocate of sustainable design and an early leader in the U.S. Green Building Council, to help Greensburg rebuild. BNIM was selected to develop a master plan for rebuilding Greensburg, and the city council decided that all public buildings larger than 4,000 square feet would aim for LEED Platinum certification.
BNIM typically does not work in the K-12 field, but once the community became strongly committed to pursuing green design, school officials decided they wanted to work with someone whose commitment to green matched theirs. So BNIM is designing the new K-12 campus.
"Their attitude is, 'If it takes an extra year to do the proper thing, we'll do it,'" says Cassias.
The new school will be a combined K-12 campus to take advantage of density and cut down on redundancies. The site is on the city's Main Street, so that the campus can serve as an anchor for the Greensburg community, says Cassias.
Among the sustainable elements in the design: a layout along an east-west axis to minimize glare and take advantage of southwest breezes; geothermal power; daylighting and a lighting control system; wind power; use of reclaimed and regional materials; water-efficient landscaping, and retention of water so it can be used for irrigation.
"No water leaves the site," says Cassias.
The architect adds that the school will use only 25 percent of the energy a comparable school would consume. Wind power will provide 50 percent of the school's energy, and more efficient energy use from sustainable practices such as geothermal power and daylighting accounts for the rest of the energy savings.
Some sustainable elements of the school design, such as green roofs, have fallen by the wayside for now because the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) approves funding only for restoring facilities to what they were before the tornado struck.
The school is scheduled to be completed in 2010. ATS&R, a Minneapolis design firm, is assisting BNIM on education planning for the campus.
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