Going green: for the first green, soon-to-be-LEED-certified law school in the country, details matter - Facilities/Construction

University Business, June, 2003 by Jeff Morris

When it comes to green construction, few may have more intimate knowledge of the process than the planners, architects, and building-committee members who oversaw the recent construction of the nation's first "green" law school, the new University of Denver College of Law. Ironically, the construction initiative came about more by happenstance than by plan.

The College of Law may have opened its doors in 1892, but in fact was never part of University of Denver's main campus, located instead within DU's Park Hill campus (which was acquired from the Colorado Women's College in 1989). Then, in March 2000, international culinary and hospitality educator Johnson & Wales University purchased a 13-acre portion of the Park Hill campus for its fifth U.S. location, which it occupied in the fall of that year. That December, when Johnson & Wales announced it wanted to purchase the remainder of the 26-acre campus, including the buildings that housed the College of Law, DU saw an ideal opportunity to build a new College of Law facility, relocated to the university's main University Park campus in downtown Denver. It wasn't long, however, before DU administrators asked themselves, "Why not an environmentally responsible structure?" After all, the DU law school houses a prominent environmental law practice, and is headquarters to Earthlaw, a nonprofit environmental law organization (www.earthlaw.org).

George "Rock" Pring, professor of Environmental Law (and one of five faculty members who would be on the building design committee), soon saw a bigger opportunity. When another DU professor asked him whether the school would construct a "green" building (one that would protect all aspects of the environment, including the health and safety of building inhabitants), Pring did some research. "I got excited about the idea of building the nation's first green law school," he remembers. "And when I shared the idea with Law School Dean Mary Ricketson and DU Chancellor Daniel Ritchie, they were equally excited. By the time we went out into the market to interview architects, the whole university community was behind the concept." As it happened, indoor air quality, especially, had been a major focus for everyone involved. "A lot of us have worked in buildings that have SBS--sick building syndrome," confides Pring.

But, "because Johnson & Wales wanted to purchase the property immediately, time was of the essence," recalls Patrick Johnson of Denver-based H&L Architecture Ltd. (www.hlarch.com) which was hired in December 2000 to get the law school into a new, green facility by July 2003--a tight 32 months later. "A project of this size would normally require about 18 months of design work and 30 months of construction," explains Johnson. H&L then quickly brought in Shepley Bulfinch Richardson and Abbott (www.sbra.com), a Boston-based firm with a considerable track record designing law schools and libraries, and its signature exterior designer, Geoffrey Freeman.

Taking the LEED

Pring immediately pushed for a LEED-certified building. LEED--Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design--is a rating and certification system developed by the U.S. Green Building Council (www.usgbc.org), whose green construction standards--the first independent, national standards of their kind--were released six months after H&L was hired. Project applicants for LEED certification accumulate points for various green attributes, although many projects use LEED certification simply as a reference, without incurring the costs of the application and documentation process. "The beauty of LEED," says Pring, "is that USGBC is a practical, professional organization, putting together known architectural design and safety standards that are doable now. It's not Star Wars stuff, but the way buildings should have been built for years." (For LEED certification, 26 of 50 specified standards must be met; DU is planning to meet 30.)

H&L next recommended that Boulder's ENSAR Group (www.ensargroup.com), whose principal architect, Greg Franta, helped write many green building standards, be brought in to serve as energy efficiency consultants. ENSAR quickly educated H&L about LEED standards and underlying issues, and became part of the design team.

The state-of-the-art facility project (now slated to open in August, just slightly off its original target date) thus includes proactive design for indoor air quality through superior ventilation; a smoking ban; a carbon monoxide monitoring system; low-emitting paints, carpets, and composite wood products; and indoor chemical and pollutant controls.

Seeing the Green ($) in Green

"Getting buy-in from DU's chancellor, Daniel Ritchie, was never a problem," says Johnson. "He immediately saw the value in a green building." Even local contractors were quickly won over. "The assumption is that there will be resistance to doing things a new way," Pring asserts. "But in this case, not only Patrick Johnson, but also several of the suppliers and contractors have since become LEED-certified. Let's not forget: This is a 200,000-square-foot, four-story building. It's a big project, and it's a feather in their cap to be able to say they were involved."