Judy Chess, UC Berkeley

Some of the earliest adopters of green building practices, colleges and universities have produced numerous examples of leadership, innovation and market transformation in the green building sector. Despite shrinking operational budgets and the increasing expense of capital construction, schools have built new green residence halls, student centers, laboratories and classrooms, many of which have garnered media attention and bragging rights, as each school attempts to outdo the others.

The trend is not entirely surprising. The campus setting provides an ideal constituency for green buildings. In an environment where cost-effective project delivery and conservative, risk-adverse approaches to building projects are the norm, green buildings make good business sense for college and university campuses—and offer excellent learning opportunities for students and staff.

Green building projects employ many of the values consistent with higher education facility planning. While some of the technologies and architectural expression in high performance buildings may be innovative, the values inherent in green building projects are often based in good, common sense. Thoughtful decision making, lifecycle consideration, attention to long-term maintenance, and taking a conservative approach to resource consumption are all hallmarks of green building that have been embraced by educational facilities planners for many years.

For example, colleges and universities are accustomed to paying careful attention to the consumption of resource commodities such as energy and water, and most campuses have entire departments charged with assuring the judicious use of space. In terms of design and functionality, green building practices offer a measured way to account for building features that have long-concerned the education sector, such as compact development, flexible and adaptive furniture, spaces that can respond easily to quickly changing academic program needs, and “right-sizing”—not over-sizing—for building mechanical and electrical loads.

The exercise of reviewing projects and evaluating them for environmental performance is nothing new for many colleges and universities. For example, many university planners have long-considered factors that contribute to ‘indoor environmental quality’ as a means to ensure quality learning environments for students and professors. Attention to lifecycle and product durability, now a ‘materials and resource’ issue, reflects a long-standing struggle familiar to all educational facility departments to find the appropriate balance between first-costs and lifecycle costs.

The accountability that goes along with a formal decision-making process, whether through internal review procedures or via third-party certifications such as the U.S. Green Building Council’s Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) program, leads to better building performance as well as a common language that bridges the interests of both capital and operational groups at schools. Moreover, building to a green building standard offers immeasurable benefits to the student body. The higher education sector is fortunate to know its building end-user.