Colleges across the country have hundreds, maybe thousands, of buildings as tired as the old George D. Aiken Center, a drab, 40,000-square-foot structure from 1982. Clad in brick, it had worn-out mechanical systems, few windows, and even less insulation.
Buildings like this are now reaching an age where colleges must make critical choices: Should the structures be wiped off campuses and forgotten, their sites given over to glassy, glitzy replacements? Or is it possible to dress up the existing buildings, reusing the materials—and, sustainability advocates add, the embedded energy—of their steel and concrete structures? Even better, can you make these buildings—so sleek when they were new, so dismal now that they have aged—into something enjoyable and efficient by today’s standards?
The University of Vermont took a bet on old Aiken, and the bet seems to have paid off. The new Aiken Center recently reopened after a $13-million renovation that saved the university $7-million compared with the cost of building something brand new. What’s more, the Aiken Center may be one of the greenest buildings on any college campus, making it a fitting home for the university’s Rubenstein School for the Environment and Natural Resources.The building, which was stripped down to its bones and covered in insulation before being reclad in new brick, is estimated to be 65 percent more energy efficient than the old Aiken. But beyond the energy efficiency, the building is a prominent sustainability statement—even in a crunchy town like Burlington, where sustainability resolutions and pronouncements are common.
The Aiken Center sits on the Oval, the university’s welcome mat, and it serves as a gateway for students who cut through the building to get from their residence halls to the heart of campus. Those students will likely glean something from the building’s green design, and the teaching tools within—like Aiken’s dashboard, which tracks its use of steam, electricity, water, and more through 200 sensors throughout the building.
“It’s one of the best projects that I am aware of,” said Mathias Bell, a consultant at the Rocky Mountain Institute, a Colorado research organization that studies energy efficiency. Mr. Bell noted that Aiken’s projected energy use is slightly lower than that of some new buildings recently constructed by the standard-setting National Renewable Energy Laboratory, a research arm of the U.S. Department of Energy.
‘Net-Zero Ready’
University officials estimate that the extra work and materials used to achieve that energy efficiency cost about $380,000 beyond what they would have had to do in any case to reuse the structure. Based on conservative estimates of future energy prices, the investment is expected to pay off in 11 to 13 years. “Businesses go for a much shorter payback” than colleges are willing to accept, Mr. Bell says. “That speaks to an academic institution’s willingness to take a long-term perspective,” as well as the value it places on positioning itself as a leader in sustainability.
The renovation was designed by William Maclay Architects & Planners, a Waitsfield, Vt., firm that has done almost a dozen “net zero” projects—buildings that produce as much energy as they use. Aiken is not one of those projects, Mr. Maclay says, but it is “net-zero ready” should the university add more renewable energy to the site sometime in the future. (University officials already count 17 photovoltaic panels as part of the Aiken project, even though they’re actually at a U.S. Forest Service site two miles away.)
A key debate early in the renovation focused on whether to remove the exterior brick; university administrators were initially skeptical. “Any renovation takes serious thinking, but you also have to think outside of the box,” Mr. Maclay says. “Most building professionals would say, ‘You’re taking off the brick? That’s nuts—it costs way too much.’”
But the architects and the university found that significant sections of brickwork had failed, and removing the brick made it possible to add layers of rigid foam insulation to the concrete structure. Then, before the builders replaced the envelope with new brick from a local manufacturer, a consultant searched for gaps in the insulation that allowed air leaks. The designers also tested the building with a fanlike device to track air leakage and inefficiencies—and they found that the building was one of the tightest in the state.
Removing the brick also allowed for another energy-saving design change: a 50-percent increase in the amount of wall space devoted to windows, which brighten the interior and reduce the need for electrical light. Some of the windows have been outfitted with sensors and devices so they open and close automatically, to conserve energy. In other parts of the building, green and orange lights tell occupants when to open or close windows, based on outside temperatures.
The ventilation system provides fresh air from outside only when carbon-dioxide sensors tell it to, rather than every time the heat or air conditioning comes on. That means the building doesn’t using extra energy to heat or cool outside air when it’s not needed. Mary Watzin, the dean of the Rubenstein School, says that in this year’s mild winter, the heat from occupants, computers, and the sun has sometimes been enough to warm the Aiken Center.
Wood and Water as Decor
A building of that vintage needs significant aesthetic updating, of course, and the designers went for an organic look in Aiken’s most notable spaces. An atrium with an imposing staircase was expanded by bumping out a window wall that originally slanted inward, cramping the space. The stairwell and the walls around it are clad in vertical boards of red oak and cherry, and the boards, which feature knots and other imperfections, were given an uneven finish—a subtle reminder that they were cut from the Jericho Research Forest, a 478-acre parcel owned and operated by the university. Wood trim and some of the furniture in the rest of the building were also produced from Jericho wood, like maple, birch, and Japanese larch. (The larch, which is not a native species, had been planted on the land many years ago to prevent erosion.)
Water is a big part of the building’s aesthetics. The floors, made of terrazzo, tell the story of water cycling through nature: Blue terrazzo streams run through an earthy reddish brown on the lowest floor, while the second floor’s terrazzo is the green of a leafy forest and the top floor’s sky blue completes the cycle. Some interesting features are also functional: A recessed wall on an upper floor reveals five tubes that shuttle water from different parts of the building’s green roof. Water-measuring equipment has been added to one tube, and similar equipment will soon be added to the others, allowing students to experiment with various plants and soils on the green roof to determine which combinations retain the most water and remove the most pollutants.
The most striking aesthetic change is the solarium at the front of the building—a two-story space where low rock walls serve as seating but also surround ponds and planters filled with fish and tropical foliage like banana trees. The solarium also has a window onto a space that is far more industrial, but no less interesting: A bright, sunlit room on a southern corner of the building holds a series of tanks that will make up the building’s “eco-machine,” a system that relies on plants and microbes to clean the sewage and water coming from the building’s toilets. (Since harsh chemical cleaners would kill the microbes in the system, janitors use special ozonated water to clean the bathrooms.)
For now, the sewage is running to the local treatment plant while work on the ecosystem continues. Matt Beam, a recent graduate of the university, designed the wastewater system under the direction of John Todd, a biologist and researcher at the university who developed the eco-machine concept. One day last month, Mr. Beam was working with other students to double-check the snaking PVC pipes running through the various tanks. There are three separate systems—again, for students’ benefit: They’ll be able to experiment with different plants and microbes to find the most effective combinations.
“Three is the minimum you need for statistical reproducibility,” to bring some scholarly rigor to the project, Ms. Watzin said. So far, most of the work that has been done on such “Living Machine” systems has been done ad hoc, she said. “We want to set a bar for optimizing these kinds of systems if they are part of the future.”
Mr. Beam wants to make the system productive and beautiful, too. “Where I am hoping to go with this is channel the energy to produce economically valuable species,” like decorative flowers or fish, he said. He pointed to some tanks about 10 feet off the ground. “I’m hoping for Moonblossoms up top—these great big viney arms, that are segmented like a cactus,” he said. “They have these dinner-plate-sized blossoms that bloom at night.”
