North America’s greenest building?
Will CIRS be North America’s greenest building? The question makes me cringe a little, for two reasons. First, “green” is too narrow a word, in my view, to describe the CIRS building. And second, whatever is the right word, it’s a moving target. Every week a new green building is announced and the performance standards keep improving.
What we can say is that when it opens, and if it performs according to its design, CIRS will be the most sustainable building that we know of anywhere. That really means four things.
1. CIRS is designed to be a regenerative building.
CIRS goes beyond what I think of as the old environmental agenda (doing less bad). For example, CIRS will be net positive on energy, carbon emissions, water quality and structural carbon. Adding a 60,000 square foot building to the campus will reduce campus energy use, reduce campus carbon emissions, improve the quality of the water flowing through our site and sequester more carbon in the building structure than all the carbon emitted in building and eventually decommissioning CIRS.
2. We want to treat the people working in CIRS not as occupants but as inhabitants.
Occupants are passive recipients of buildings systems; inhabitants have a sense of place in and engagement with the building. We will ask inhabitants to sign a sustainability charter, committing them to working towards the sustainability goals of the building, in return for very high air quality, individual control over ventilation and real-time feedback on building performance at the workstation level, day lighting throughout the building, and ability to vote on the control strategies of the building.
3. All the human and technological systems in CIRS will be studied throughout the life of the building with a view to continuous improvement.
The technological systems are designed as plug-and-play systems that can be replaced as technology improves. On the human side, we will measure the health, productivity and happiness of everyone in the building, with a goal of improvement over time.
4. We will build CIRS at a construction cost comparable to other buildings of the same type that are not as sustainable.
We estimate we’ll be within 8 per cent of the construction cost of a LEED Gold building of the same type. LEED Gold is the minimum performance standard for new public sector building in British Columbia. And we plan to work with our private and public sector partners to develop commercialization strategies for the design, operational and technological aspects of the building.
Putting it all together, we think of sustainable buildings as having three characteristics: they must be indeed be green, which means outstanding environmental performance. They must be humane, improving human quality of life. And they must be smart, which to us means cost-effective and adaptive. We are very interested in what others think of this approach.