- Posted by: Adele Park
- Category: Architecture, LEED
New Stanford Environmental Science Building Uses Its Own Standards, Not LEED’s
The first building in a new Stanford University Science and Engineering quadrangle, aka. Y2E2, was designed to the university’s own Stanford Performance Criteria for High Performance Buildings. Essentially, the new standards provide outlines of sustainable priorities and opportunities at key points in the process. It also ensures you to make sound, responsible decisions that make good financial sense.
According to LEED standards, the new building is referred to “LEED platinum equivalent.” The down side is that, in order to make space for Y2E2, Stanford has demolished their existing 60 year old Physics Building, where the first medical use of radiation came out and numerous discoveries took place. So here’s the question. Without doubt, Stanford has succeeded in constructing a sustainable building. However, was this project really sustainable in terms of new construction versus renovation? Or was the old building not worth renovating anyway?
For more info visit www.boora.com, The Stanford Daily
on March 3rd, 2008 at 11:48 pm
You make an interesting point with that “LEED Platinum equivalent” reference. We should always question claims such as “LEED Certifiable” or “LEED Compliant” or “LEED Equivalent.” Why? Well, it could be that the building is the equivalent of LEED Platinum in terms of greenness, but if it is that green, why reference the standard (and not certify under the standard). Why not just say it’s super green and it does x and y? Not to take anything away from the building, but it’s confusing to the market and a disservice to the LEED mark.
Also, I’m not familiar with the project background, but the demolition could have caused trouble in the Sustainable Sites area of LEED. I’m not sure, though.
Otherwise, I understand it’s quite innovative and uses 50% less energy and 90% less water than a comparable building. That’s impressive.
on March 4th, 2008 at 12:30 am
The reason why they refer to LEED is because Stanford’s own system is not commonly known and people don’t know what to reference to. I personally think it’s a great system regardless how successful the standards turn out to be, considering the fact that they are making an effort to create standards that are more practical and useful, but also that they aren’t just accepting LEED as a check list but critically thinking how it may actually help them to be sustainable. Just to quickly point out the reasoning behind creating their own standards is because LEED is not suitable for universities and is rather targeted for office buildings is what universities such as Stanford or Yale claim to be. Also they do not deal with transportation programs or storm water management.
As far as I know, demolishing the building shouldn’t be a problem because the project would be considered New Construction instead of LEED for Existing Buildings, where it limits you on how much you can take away from an existing building to get an extra point.
My point of asking whether this project is sustainable or not is that this could have been a green renovation project instead of a new construction. There are numerous ways to achieve efficiency in a building but why demolish? Maybe they do have good reasoning behind this. But what happened to the construction waste? I’m not certain of. The new building may perform with high efficiency but how does it make such a great sustainable project when you tore down a whole building to build another one on top of it?
on September 16th, 2008 at 3:00 am
An Environmental Impact Assessment is an assessment of the likely human environmental health impact, risk to ecological health, and changes to nature’s services that a project may have.Atmospheric dispersion modeling is the mathematical simulation of how air pollutants disperse in the ambient atmosphere.