BIF and LEED

3/3/15

                Tuesday’s tour was around BIF, which stands for Business Institutional Facility. When you first enter the building, you walk into a huge, open space. On one side, there is a wall of glass, with a large, curved overhang from the roof. The space is large and impressive, serving as the central hub of the building. Also on the first floor, is a plaque, telling all those who enter that BIF was, in 2009, LEED Platinum certified. It was on this topic of “green architecture” and sustainability that our tour was focused around.

                There were three kinds of sustainability that we discussed: material, water, and energy. When picking materials to make a building, one must consider the embodied energy of certain materials. Embodied energy is the sum of all the energy needed to produce and move a certain material. Therefore, you want to look for a material that is locally sourced and cheap to manufacture. Water sustainability is a very important topic, especially with today’s high demand for fresh water. When a building is erected, water doesn’t absorb into the ground, it runs to rivers, where it leaves the system, as it gets flushed out to the ocean. In order to combat the leaving water, a building must try to slow the water. Energy sustainability is the most heard of kind, as it is well publicized due to its connection with global warming, etc. A building should try to use the lowest amount of energy as possible, as it is more cost efficient. It could also try to produce energy, using solar panels or wind turbines, to have a net energy of zero.

                To maximize the sustainability of a building is to make it a very “green” building, or a building that harms the environment the least. A way to get this certified is to go through LEED, Leadership in Energy & Environmental Design, which makes sure you building is environmentally friendly. BIF had a high enough number of points to qualify for platinum certification.

                There are flaws with the LEED program. While it does encourage greener buildings, it also encourages certain things that could be harmful to a building, if executed improperly. For example, BIF has solar panels above the auditorium, which gets it points in the LEED program. However, they are anchored through a water-tight membrane below the exterior room, making them not entirely water-tight. This leaves the roof open to water damage in the future and possibly costing much more than the energy saved due to the panels. There are also bike change rooms, to get the LEED points for the bike racks that are locked to most people. These rooms take up space and cost a fair amount to build and, yet, they are not needed. This means that there was a large waste of resources to build these unused rooms, for the LEED points.

                While the LEED initiative is a very positive one that encourages good habits in designing buildings, it could be argued that there could be a more way efficient way to become certified as a green building, without certain frivolities that are detrimental to a building. Overall, though, BIF was a very impressive building and a huge step in the right direction when it comes to green architecture.