The LEED Shade of Green

In The New West magazine

By Richard Martin, 2-11-08

	The Northern Plains Resource Council, a LEED leader in Billings. Photo by David Nolt.

When the U.S. Green Building Council announced in November a program to rate the environmental qualities of new home construction -- one based on the highly successful Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design requirements for commercial buildings -- it marked a watershed of sorts for the two-decade old sustainable building movement.

In the last year, public clamor for more responsible and energy-efficient ways of living, combined with the politics of climate change and the economic reality of soaring energy costs, has ushered the once-staid subject of how we build from the business section to the front page.

A flourishing of supposedly "green" design firms has made low-energy, sustainable building smart, cool and lucrative. The U.S. Green Building Council, the foremost organization for promoting and rating the environmental sensitivity of buildings in North America, says the green building industry was worth $12 billion in 2007 and will top that in 2008, barring full-out recession. In a cratering real estate market, the green sector is the industry's fastest growing piece.

In November planners for Los Angeles approved one of the most ambitious green building programs of any big city in the nation, requiring large new developments to be 15 percent more energy efficient. L.A. is now among more than two dozen big U.S. cities that require new buildings to adhere to the Green Building Council's LEED standards.

Leading the way in this new epoch are architecture and engineering firms in the Mountain West, where small cities are undergoing massive growth. Firms like High Plains Architects of Billings, designers of the renovated headquarters of the Northern Plains Resource Council (which was recently awarded the highest LEED designation) have produced award-winning, energy efficient and graceful buildings, many of them retrofitted historic structures.

The LEED certification (always pronounced "leed") has both tracked and facilitated the green-building surge, providing detailed step-by-step blueprints for developers and builders to follow. It has made the Green Building Council the de facto arbiter of what it means to "go green" in the global warming era -- and with its downtown D.C. headquarters, a powerful lobbying force in state capitols and in Washington.

That's also part of the problem. Even proponents of the LEED system, like Randy Hafer of High Plains Architects and green pioneer Bob Berkebile, one of the drafters of the original LEED standards, acknowledge in private that there's more than a little discontent with the LEED system and USGBC's status. With a host of small, sometimes competing sub-sectors like recycled materials and solar infrastructure, and scores of specialty architects and engineers, the green building industry is complex and diverse, and perhaps inherently resistant to a single arbiter.

Some architects and engineers complain about the money and time involved in obtaining one of the four LEED approval ratings (standard, silver, gold, and platinum), and say prescriptive standards don't always foment true innovation.

What's more, LEED now has competition: a rival rating system known as "Green Globes," promoted by the Portland-based Green Building Initiative, claims to be less expensive and less cumbersome than the LEED process.

	BEFORE: The Northern Resource Council building. Courtesy photo.

In some ways LEED, and the Green Building Council, have become victims of their own success. It took seven years to get to the first 4,000 projects registered and certified, says Tom Hicks, the Green Building Council's vice president for LEED certification. It took just 10 months to get to the second 4,000. That explosion makes the task of maintaining a rigorous and replicable system for rating buildings' environmental effects more and more challenging.

"The Council has a couple of challenges in regard to LEED," says Kath Williams, a Bozeman consultant and immediate past president of the World Green Building Council. "One is the delivery of all these products -- with the tremendous increase in interest, how do you maintain high-quality service when the demand goes up exponentially?"

The ratings themselves are being redefined, and the system is getting streamlined, largely with improvements to the Web-based application tools.

"With over 1,200 projects certified we now have this tremendous amount of information," Hicks says, on "what's working and what's not."

For a glimpse at both the triumphs and the shortcomings of the LEED system, consider two very different buildings: the Story Mill Center in Bozeman and the U.S. General Services Administration tower in San Francisco.

A redevelopment of an 1893 flour mill, the Story Mill Center is an 89-acre complex that will include 1,100 housing units and more than 200,000 square feet of retail and commercial space. It is one of the first projects to earn the new LEED "Neighborhood Development" certification -- which accounts for open space, relationships with nearby structures and so on, as well as individual building characteristics. The Story Mill Center received final approval from the Bozeman City Commission in early December. In approving the project, the commissioners went one better: they included the LEED neighborhood rating as a mandated requirement for the 10-year redevelopment.

That immediately set off alarm bells for many developers around the region.

"My phone started ringing off the hook," Williams says. "People were asking, ‘What does this mean for my development?'"

The problem is that LEED has always been implemented voluntarily. As Williams puts it, "you can't mandate leadership."

	AFTER: The Northern Resource Council building. Photo by David Nolt.

Once governments get in the business of requiring LEED certification, the entire playing field shifts.

LEED approval can add 15 to 20 percent to upfront construction costs, although many of those costs are more than paid back over the life of the structure. Many developers simply don't have those resources.

Then there's the converse problem: some projects are too cutting-edge to fit into the LEED system of points and ratings. That's the case with the new GSA building in San Francisco, which was designed by the avant-garde Southern California firm morphosis.

Equipped with a movable glass façade to ventilate the interior, the translucent, 18-story structure uses sunlight to reduce the energy for lighting by 26 percent. Air conditioning is virtually eliminated: more than 70 percent of the building will be cooled with natural ventilation. Hailed as one of the most radical office building designs in America, the GSA Tower has won an excellence in public-sector design innovation from the real estate association CoreNet. But it can't get LEED certification.

"I wasn't arrogant, but I was confident -- I just assumed we had the platinum rating," says morphosis principal Thom Mayne. "All of a sudden we went through LEED and it wasn't working."

The problem is that several of the morphosis innovations, such as nearly eliminating air conditioning, count for little in the LEED system of ratings.

"Under LEED the points system is equivalent to a blue book test," says Mayne. "It's not asking the architecture and engineering community to be innovative. It's just very prescriptive."

Tom Hicks of the Green Building Council acknowledges that the GSA building posed some special challenges to the LEED system: "We're looking to work with GSA and with Thom's firm in the next few months to better understand that building, and see where the issues are. We want to understand and learn from that, to improve the rating system as we continuously improve LEED."

At any rate, while LEED has been a powerful educational tool, many architects agree that as a design tool it's overly limiting.

"You either operate under that or you don't," as Mayne puts it.

Mayne, a well-known LEED critic who spoke at the Green Building Council's GreenBuild convention in Chicago in early November, supports a performance-driven ranking, based on buildings' energy use.

Making LEED more "place-aware" and more sensitive to energy consumption is a goal of the Council's board of directors, Bob Berkebile says. Two pilot projects are underway to bring that about: the building for the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Bozeman and a new planned community at the South Rim of the Grand Canyon.

"Both of those suggested that while it's a good educational tool, LEED is not very useful as a design tool," Berkebile says.

The system is in a "constant evolutionary process," says Steve Brauneis, a sustainable design consultant at the Rocky Mountain Institute in Boulder, and the willingness of U.S. Green Building Council president Richard Fedrizzi to bring dissenters like Thom Mayne into the discussion bodes well for future adjustments to the LEED ratings. A 2006 program to poll the membership on the system will result in more refinements in early 2008, Hicks says -- including an effort to unify the various LEED classifications (core and shell, commercial, retail, schools, and so on) into one master rating system.

"We're thinking ahead," Hicks says. "There are some things we're doing well, there's some credits we can look to improve, certainly, but there's also ways we want to start to stretch ourselves, to bring in new ideas and new credits."

One goal is to promote "living buildings" that actually produce more energy than they consume.

"We're looking at doing something that moves beyond the notion of ‘less bad,'" says Berkebile, "to creating buildings that are restorative and ultimately regenerative for the environment."

At GreenBuild, in November, the Green Building Council announced the awards in the first "National Living Building" competition. The winner: the Omega Institute for Sustainable Living headquarters in Rhinebeck, New York, designed by BNIM Architects -- Berkebile's firm.