EFS Profiles
Green Law Building
Lewis and Clark College
Portland, Oregon
Purpose: Greening the Campus
Please note that the copyright for this profile is retained by the institution.
Lewis and Clark College is in the final stages of construction of a $15-million addition to the Paul L Boley Law Library. The addition will include technology-based infrastructure and 40,000 square feet of additional space. The design firm is Soderstrom Architects, and the general contractor is Hoffman Construction of Oregon.
Soderstrom has received numerous design awards for energy efficiency, including the 1997 American Institute of Architecture Energy Award and the Portland General Electric Earth Smart Program Gold Award for Energy Awareness. For the law library project Soderstrom and Hoffman Construction have adopted the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) Standards published by the U.S. Green Building Council.
Established in 1997, LEED encourages the construction industry to recycle waste and to use recycled materials. Commercial building projects earn points in several categories: building materials, construction waste, management, energy, indoor air quality, landscaping, ozone depletion, recycling, transportation, water conservation, water quality and maintenance.
"One of our design goals was to create a building that interacts with nature," says Jon Wiener, principal architect on the new library from Soderstrom Architects. "The existing buildings have beautiful views of the woods beyond, but they were sealed off from it. The original architecture was based on an intellectual separation between man and nature rather than an expression of their interdependence. We thought this building was an opportunity to show how nature and the built environment are intertwined. "We tried to create an architecture for the library that expresses the natural forces around it, to let them influence the form and visible ways in which the building operates," he says. "The famous architect le Corbusier called his architecture 'a machine for living.' We wanted to create a machine that was shaped by nature. The way in which the wind blows, the angle of the sun, the slope of the hillside all affected our design."
In choosing where to build, Soderstrom looked for the place that would have the least environmental impact. Architects chose the old service area parking lot and designed a three-story building to keep the footprint as small as possible.
o The form of the building is a response to the topography, from the contours of the hillside that the building sits on, to the broad sweeping curve of Terwilliger Boulevard.
o The design includes an "eco-roof" to allow forest plants to grow on the building. It features operable windows throughout and a natural ventilation system.
o State-of-the-art glass keeps as much heat inside the building as possible during the winter and out during the summer. The design calls for sensors that automatically roll down internal window shades and turn down the lights when there is too much daylight.
o A light "scoop" on top of the building will bring daylight into the central stair. The architects designed the reading room ceiling to bounce natural light into the center of the building to reduce the dependence on artificial lighting.
o To promote environmental responsibility contractors are using wood from certified sustainable forests.
o To improve forest habitat, crews will remove ivy and blackberries that choke a healthy forest and will replant the area with new evergreen trees. Contractors are using steel and aluminum of recycled stock, gypsum (for ceilings) that contains old newsprint, carpets from mills with reclamation programs and linoleum that contains linseed oil and wood flour.
o Hoffman Construction Co. is recycling almost all debris created in the construction project. Instead of hauling debris from the excavation site to landfills, contractors are taking it to recycling companies where it becomes topsoil or back-fill material.
o Since beginning work on the project, Hoffman has traveled to the landfill only once. That load contained less than 15 cubic yards of material.
"That is phenomenal considering we've been on the site since July," said Stephanie Coyle, project manager for Hoffman, explaining that Hoffman has recycled the balance of the material in various ways.
o"We have recycled 7,000 cubic yards of asphalt, wood, concrete, rock, dirt and metal; 4,049 board-feet of wood; and 159,000 pounds of brush and stumps," Coyle said. "Moreover, some of the fir trees that were removed to make room for the new building have been milled into dimensional lumber that will be used for the main stairway in the new addition. The College will use another 3,000 board-feet of milled lumber in other ways."
The law school expects to complete the project by spring semester 2002.
This document was last modified on 02/20/2002 10:43:03
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