[Second in a two-part series]

“The coolest building on the planet”, as one expert calls it, is slated for a proposed new university complex focused on sustainability in Vancouver (see Friday’s Tyee story).

That bold goal caps a decade-long trend. Many of BC’s most green buildings have been built not in the province’s downtowns, but on its college campuses. And more such projects are underway from Victoria to Vancouver to the Okanagan.

The flashiest, marquee showpiece for academia’s sustainable building technologies will be the Centre for Interactive Research on Sustainability (CIRS). To be completed by early 2007 at the Great Northern Way Campus near False Creak, CIRS is meant to lead the way in green design.

According to Dr. John Robinson, the University of British Columbia professor leading the project, CIRS has the technology to be one of the first in North America achieve the highest standard in green buildings. Robinson is aiming for a Platinum Rating in the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) Green Building Rating System, first created by the U.S. Green Building Council. LEED rates buildings based on design, construction and operation with criteria such as energy savings and recycled and non-toxic material content.

Still in its planning and funding stages, the CIRS project already has the involvement of the City of Vancouver and B.C. Hydro. “When you get concrete and tangible about sustainability, people get excited,” said Robinson, a professor in UBC’s Sustainable Development Research Institute. “I think that [CIRS] is the coolest building on the planet, by far.”

Commitment to high standards

However, CIRS is only one of several LEED-standard buildings in BC’s academic institutions. Three major players—UBC, Simon Fraser University and the University of Victoria–have all pledged to construct any new buildings according to LEED Silver standards. According to Sarah Webb, Sustainability Coordinator with the University of Victoria, the LEED program is just common sense for longstanding academic institutions. “There is I think a heightened awareness and recognition of the importance of environmental sustainability,” Webb told The Tyee. “LEED is a great tool. It’s really being cognizant of what materials you are using and how you are using them...what is the impact of the building going to be.”

The province’s universities’ commitment to sustainability coincided with the provincial government’s 2002 commitment to doubling the province’s medicine school grads by 2009. Following the announcement, the University of Victoria constructed a $12-million dollar, 4,400 square metre Medical Services Services Building to LEED Silver standards. The building is one of less than 30 in the country now registered with the Canadian Green Building Council.

Beginning in 2002, the construction was carefully organized with every piece of garbage sorted for recycling and a truck rinsing area to remove possibly harmful sediment from departing construction vehicles. Opened in 2004, the Medical Services Building is partly made of recycled materials and houses shower facilities to encourage bicycle commuting to campus. There are plans for a surrounding landscape of native plants that will not require permanent irrigation or pest control.

According to Webb, LEED can transform the building industry because construction companies and workers learn new skills when they build by such high environmental standards. The university’s students also toured and observed the construction process over the course of two years.

Cutting edge technology

At the University of British Columbia, several greener facilities going up include the new Irving K. Barber Learning Centre, the Computer Sciences (CICSR) Building and the Aquatic Ecosystem Research Laboratory that will house the UBC Fisheries Centre. The Aquatic Lab is registered as a LEED building, but in keeping with the university’s pledge to be sustainable, all construction is being undertaken with ecological standards in mind. The new buildings are located near or along the university’s bustling Main Mall, with ample walkways, coffee shops and stores.

Nearing completion, the Irving K. Barber building is an odd juxtaposition of old and new that is impressively appealing. The modernistic, glass-walled building sits attached to the university’s stonewalled main library, one of the first original buildings on the campus in 1925.

According to construction workers on the Irving K. Barber site, working on the building is really no different than working on any other building. One noted that the materials are different and the processes can be longer but they just handle it as all part of job. The building will have ample natural lighting and is using an alternative glue for the roofing, instead of tar.

Two of the most technologically-advanced buildings on campus, and possibly in the country, are the recently-completed Kaiser building for Electrical Engineering and the ICICS Computer Science Building (where scaffolding has yet to come down). Both use a “slab” system for heating and cooling that is generated by water lines cast into the building’s slab. The system uses as little as 20 per cent of the energy usually required to heat and cool a building.

According to Ruth Abramson, communications manager with the UBC Campus Sustainability Office, not all new buildings on campus will be registered with the Canada Green Building because of the high cost of registered status (registering can cost upwards of ten thousand dollars). But many campus planners think that LEED is not necessary for efficient, ecological planning.

“LEED has been sort of an addition in terms of design but essentially the university has been designing its buildings to be sustainable for years now, before LEED came into the picture,” said Graeme Silvera, project manager with the UBC Properties Trust.

Pioneering efforts

UBC was the first in Canada to announce its commitment to a more sustainable campus back in 1999. In 2002, the university also ran the country’s largest energy and water retrofit program, saving millions of dollars in costs each year by upgrading facility lighting and reducing water consumption. .

But the university was definitely not alone in the field. Both SFU and Uvic also run similar retrofit programs. UVic. also runs the LEED-Existing Building program, to find means of renovating existing classrooms and buildings to higher environmental standards.

Back in April 1995, Lee Gavel, Simon Fraser University’s director of campus planning and development, participated in a study with UBC Professor Dr. Ray Cole that created guidelines for colleges and universities to build more sustainable facilities.

In the previous year, SFU also built the West Mall complex–which Gavel sees as a landmark in green building. The complex used a large ice plant in its basement in combination with an existing pool in an adjacent building to balance heating and cooling needs.

“If somebody were doing that today, they would be trumpeting it all over the place,” said Gavel. “Anytime you made a decision about air conditioning, or any of the electrical equipment there was always an attitude that is what you would call ‘green’ today.”

Shift in views

More than ten years ago, proposals for sustainable building on campus were likely to meet resistance by the university’s authorities, says Freda Pagani, now head of UBC Campus Sustainability.

“People thought building a green building was building ... out of garbage and that wasn’t appropriate for the campus,” said Pagani. “People said you are taking us back to the stone age, we know how to do better than that.”

But Pagani’s persistent advocating led to the construction of the C.K. Choi building, opened in 1996. The building is made from over 50 percent recycled material and features composting toilets. The effluent from the toilets is worm composted then filtered to irrigate the surrounding landscape. Touring groups from as far off as Japan and Hawaii now come to UBC to see the C.K. Choi building. Since its opening, Pagani has been named fellow of the Royal Architecture Institute of Canada.

Now, one of Pagani’s favourite buildings on campus is the Life Sciences Centre, a stunningly designed, LEED certified facility that was also part of the province’s $134 million dollar plan to double the number of medical school grads. The LSC cost $172 million, built with a large contribution from the province as well as the Canada Foundation for Innovation, the Centre for Blood Research and Bayer Inc.

“Life Sciences is a huge lab building and for it be designed as a green building, that’s a big achievement,” said Pagani. Despite its many labs using high-tech electrical equipment, the Centre achieved LEED Silver certification. The building will save about $200,000 in energy costs each year (due to the ample natural lighting and other amenities like heat recovery units on exhaust systems).

Opened in 2004 and built in under three years, the Centre appears luxurious rather than economical. It has two enormous atria with pod-like lights hanging from a sky-lit ceiling, surrounded by slatted wooden walls and sleek stylish benches.

Campus housing the new challenge

But a perhaps bigger achievement remains for universities: to foster green building design and construction in residential developments–both on and off campus. A few Lower Mainland proponents of sustainability–such as architects Lynn Coady and Peter Busby–have become household names. But their philosophies are not yet widely applied in homes and residences.

“LEED really isn’t a tool right now that is used a lot in the residential market, it’s very much an institutional-commercial type of philosophy” said Silvera of UBC’s Properties Trust. “But the building that goes on in Vancouver is residential. So you are really not having much of an impact unless you get LEED to translate to the residential and the developer.”

UBC is trying to do that by encouraging developers to build housing suites and condos along a stricter line of LEED standards. New residential developments on campus already automatically get points in the LEED system for being in multi-use community close to public transit. The university requires that developers achieve the rating by other means. But so far, the developers have yet to mirror the cutting-edge design and innovative technology of the campus’ teaching facilities.

Meanwhile, UBC has plans to create a “university town” on campus that would attract a diverse range of residents and businesses. Three architectural firms are competing for the job, with sustainable development as one of the judging criteria. SFU and the Great Northern Way Campus share the same goal of creating livelier communities on campuses with cultural attractions.

The much anticipated privately owned UniverCity www.univercity.ca development on Burnaby Mountain near SFU achieved LEED certification for its Cornerstone building, housing administrative offices for the development. But the residential buildings, which were opened to residents in the fall of 2004, are not LEED-standardized. A spokesperson for one the three developers, Millenium University Homes Ltd. Corporation, told The Tyee the condos and suites were built with “green in mind.” Millenium took a few measures in building “green” such as avoiding the use of formaldehyde in any building materials and by stapling carpets, instead of using toxic glue.

‘Ours forever’

But, while developers earn a few brownie points for more careful approaches to building, universities will likely continue to be leaders in the area of sustainable technologies and pioneering building design. As centres of innovative thinking they also have the benefit of being long-standing institutions set somewhat apart of the real estate market.

“The thing that makes a big difference is we have professional managers of the construction of our buildings who take very long views,” said Gavel of SFU. “They are not just in it to develop a building and sell it to either the individual unit owners or to another real estate manager. Our buildings are ours forever so we have to be conscious of the strategies we take.”

Read Part 1: Slated for Vancouver: The Ultimate 'Sustainability' Lab

Caroline Dobuzinskis is a Vancouver journalist and contributor to The Tyee.