The Greenbuild conference is built around the LEED certification developed by the US Green Building Council, but LEED is for wimps compared to the Living Building Challenge (LBC). A tour of Kendeda Building on Georgia Institute of Technology campus is a great example of the standard’s ambitions and contradictions. It’s also a really lovely building designed by Lord Aeck Sargent and the Miller Hull Partnership, the same firm that designed the other great demonstration of the LBC, the Bullitt Center in Seattle.
The Kendeda Building represents the next step in regenerative design for Georgia Tech and Atlanta, both of which have a well- established record of commitment to sustainability. Funded by a $30 million grant to Georgia Tech from the Kendeda Fund, the project is designed to be a living, learning laboratory, showing what’s possible in the Southeast in order to catalyze even more ambitious green buildings across the region.
The Living Building Challenge is organized around seven ‘petals’, or different aspects of the building, including Place, Water, Energy, Health and Happiness, Materials, Equity, and Beauty.
Place:
It is a beautiful site, surrounded by trees, but LBC buildings cannot be on Greenfield sites. This one was previously a parking lot. “Pedestrian and bicycle mobility are enhanced through the site, with several connections to campus and public transportation.”
Georgia Tech projects that about 120% of the energy needs for The Kendeda Building are being supplied on-site through a renewable energy source: the Photovoltaic (PV) array, which is a key design feature for the building and provides a large shaded porch. The array is 330 kW (DC) and is expected to generate over 450,000 kWh per year. The mechanical systems of the building include radiant heating and cooling throughout most of the building, dedicated outdoor air system (DOAS), and ceiling fans.
My first reaction on seeing the building was that it had the same issue as the Bullitt Center, which didn’t have the roof area to generate enough power, so they negotiated overhangs over the property lines into the road allowance and the park. That’s not the case here; Brian Court notes that, traditionally, Georgian architecture included porches to provide shaded outdoor space and to keep the sun off the building. (Think Tara from Gone with the Wind.) That’s what the solar panels do here.But I have always considered this to be a fundamental problem with the Living Building Challenge, that it doesn’t scale vertically very well, that you run out of roof pretty quickly. It works best on a site like this, with lots of room to make the panels as big as you need.
Note the design of the columns holding up the panels; they are braced like sailboat masts, or as Brian Court noted, tensegrity structures. Without the bracing, those 4-inch diameter columns would have been 12 inches.
Source: https://bit.ly/2Rbx4rc
