EFS Profiles
The Adam Joseph Lewis Center for Environmental Studies
Oberlin College
Oberlin, Ohio
Purpose: Greening the Campus, Curriculum Change
Please note that the copyright for this profile is retained by the institution.
In the following articles, Donella Meadows, adjunct professor of environmental studies at Dartmouth College, and William McDonough, Dean of the School of Architecture at University of Virginia, discuss how "A Building Can Be a Teacher." The exciting lesson they teach us is that the proper design of our built environment, based on the idea that we learn from everything around us, can teach us a sense of place and responsibility.
A Building Can be a Teacher
by Donella Meadows
David Orr, head of the environmental studies program at Oberlin College, understands that young people learn from everything they do and everything around them. Even buildings. So he started thinking about the structure in which he conducts his classes. "It is a building with lots of squareness and straight lines," he wrote in a recent article in the journal Conservation Biology. "How it is cooled, heated, and lighted and at what cost to the world is an utter mystery to its occupants. It offers no clue about the origins of the materials used to build it."
The building flatly contradicts the lessons Orr is trying to get across. "First, it tells its users that locality is unimportant. There is nothing whatsoever that reflects its place in northeast Ohio in what had once been a vast forested wetland. Second, because it uses energy wastefully, the building tells its users that energy is cheap and abundant and can be squandered with no thought for the morrow. Third, nowhere do students learn about the materials used in its construction or who was downwind or downstream from the wells, mines, forests, and manufacturing facilities where those materials originated or where they eventually will be discarded."
"The lesson learned is mindlessness," Orr concludes. "Try as one might to teach that we are implicated in the larger enterprise of life, standard architectural design mostly conveys other lessons. There is no apparent connection in this or any other building on campus to the larger set of issues having to do with climate change, biotic impoverishment, and the unraveling of the fabric of life on Earth. Students begin to suspect that those issues are unreal, or that they are unsolvable in any practical way, or that they occur somewhere else."
David Orr decided that he wanted to teach in a building that did not undo his curriculum. Being a great teacher, he involved his students in the quest. In 1992 he organized a class to plan a new environmental studies center at Oberlin. The students worked with a dozen architects, visited all kinds of buildings, read the literature, considered retrofitting an old building, and finally drew up design criteria for a new one.
They are tough criteria. The building has to:
- discharge wastewater at least as pure as the water it takes in.
- generate more electricity than it uses.
- incorporate no material known to cause cancer, birth defects, hormone disruption, or other hazards.
- use energy and materials with great efficiency.
- use products and materials grown or manufactured sustainably.
- be surrounded with landscape that promotes biological diversity.
- meet rigorous requirements for full-cost accounting.
Then Oberlin got a new president. Orr, students, and architects did some inspiring presentations, and finally they were given permission to go forward, under some almost impossible conditions. They must complete the design and permitting within two years. They must raise all the money from donors with no previous connection to Oberlin.
They did it. Orr turned the process into even more learning. Some 250 students, faculty and townspeople participated in 13 brainstorming sessions. A committee, which included students, sifted through applications from 26 architects. They put together a team of the nation's best green designers, including architect William McDonough, energy consultants Amory Lovins and Bill Browning, and wastewater experts John Todd and Michael Shaw. Ground will be broken this coming spring.
The roof will be covered by a new kind of photovoltaic panel, which does not use toxic metals and which will power the building and feed electricity into the grid. Sewage and other wastewater will flow through a "living machine," a greenhouse-covered, slow-moving river full of bacteria, algae, snails, fish, and all sorts of plants, which will purify the water just as a living stream does. The super-efficient windows will block heat loss as if they were well-insulated walls. Even north-facing windows will bring in a net gain of radiated heat on sunny winter days. Around the building will be a restored wetland and forest, gardens and orchards. In the entrance hall will be data panels, displaying the building's energy use, water use, and emissions of greenhouse gases. The generation of students who were lucky enough to be around during the design of this building will never forget it. Generations to come will never stop learning from it.
Oberlin College Environmental Studies Center
by William McDonough + Partners
At its most fundamental level, the Environmental Studies Center at Oberlin College will be a place of wonder and beauty which celebrates the interaction of human and natural environments. Because we believe that people would rather send their day outdoors, the design of the ESC building blurs the distinction between indoors and outdoors. Indoor spaces are filed with daylight, and are naturally ventilated. The light-filled, two-story atrium provides the campus with a winter garden -- an interior meeting place, warmed by the sun, for gatherings throughout the year.
The building's disposition of spaces will come from an integration of natural energy flows and the building's energy needs, as well as its use as a teaching and public space. The atrium will be the primary organizing feature. It will act as a public square, where people feel welcome to gather formally or informally. Daylighting and natural ventilation will enhance the feeling of an "outdoor room," and the atrium's role as the building's physical and social center.
To take advantage of daylight and heat gain, major public rooms such as workspaces and classrooms will face south and west. The northern side of the building will be shielded from prevailing winds by an earth berm. Higher up the north facade, a substantial clerestory across the length of the building will take advantage of the consistency and lack of glare of the northern light. To the east, the entry to the auditorium will be a brightly daylight, south facing extension of the building's main corridor that will also provide visual access to the pond outside. The Living Machine, the natural wastewater treatment facility, will have both southern and eastern exposures to daylight.
The roof shape will unite important energy and design considerations. Its rising curve will enhance the effectiveness of the photovoltaic panels by tilting them toward the sun, even as it substantially enhances daylighting and convective air flow though the north-facing clerestory. Broad eaves, particularly on the south, will shade the interior from the direct summer sun, while also upholding an architectural tradition of the Oberlin campus. The lower level of the northern roof will be covered with grass to provide fast absorption and slow release of storm water. This system has the additional advantage of providing thermal and acoustical insulation.
As a replicable model of ecological design, the ESC project seeks to demonstrate how "state of the art" thinking can be applied to "state of the shelf" materials and building systems. "State of the shelf" refers to a range of products that are readily available. Throughout the design process, the design team has been mindful of how even the most advanced systems ultimately must serve the needs of the occupants of the building.
The building systems designed for the ESC demonstrate how nature's principle that "waste equals food" can be successfully adapted towards manufacturing processes and building materials. These man-made systems, as products of service, are designed to be sent back to the manufacturer for continuous disassembly and reuse. The manufacturer continues to own the product, since Oberlin College is only interested in the services provided by the product. The result is that the useful life of the ESC is extended, because it is designed to be adaptive to changes in building systems over time, without compromising the building's performance or the comfort of it inhabitants.
The ESC mechanical system is the result of extensive computer modeling of the building's energy performance. Conceptually, the mechanical system is based upon a strategy of reducing and balancing the simultaneous heating and cooling loads within the building, primarily during spring and autumn. This design results directly from the specifics of the local climate, the building's orientation and layout of spaces, and the ESC program requirements for fresh air and daylighting to all spaces. As a result, heat pumps transfer heat from the south side of the building to the north side, as the demand necessitates. The heat pumps are coupled with geothermal wells, allowing the building to extract heating and cooling from the stable temperatures below the earth's surface.
Features and Innovations
The innovative integration of these systems in the roof and wall treatments will make a place for emerging technologies and values of sustainable agriculture that is appropriate to the established architectural traditions of Oberlin College.
Adam Joseph Lewis Center Needs "Fine Tuning"?
OBERLIN, OH - Following five years of design and construction, the dedication
this past fall of the Adam Joseph Lewis Center for Environmental Studies
at Oberlin College marked the completion of the first stage in the center's
life. But according to Clayton Koppes, acting president of Oberlin College,
the project is a process that will develop over time rather than a finished
product. The building, while still in a fine-tuning state, has not met
the energy performance projections of its original operating model (see
"The Ecology of Design," EDC March/April 2000).?
"While we can be proud of what's been accomplished, there is more
to do," said David Orr, professor and chair of the Environmental
Studies Program at Oberlin College. "The solar electric system is
now being installed and - based on the commissioning report - we are planning
to make modifications that will improve energy performance."
The designers are also documenting the ways in which the building differs
from the original plans due to changes made during construction. Using
this information, they will reportedly recalculate the building's optimal
energy performance levels.?
From the March/April 2001 issue of Environmental Design and Construction (www.edcmag.com)
For additional information:
Center for Environmental Studies
The article "A Building Can be a Teacher" by Donella Meadows is excerpted with permission from the October 20, 1997 edition of the "The Global Citizen."
© 2005 Second Nature, Inc.
