Going Green

On December 11, approximately 115 librarians, architects, and planners convened at the Chicago Public Library's (CPL) Harold Washington Center for LJ's second Design Institute (DI). Through a daylong series of green-themed presentations, panels, and breakout sessions, they conferred on the latest developments, options, strategies, concerns, and solutions relating to sustainable design. Beyond the practical, participants came away not only “inspired to make their library buildings green,” noted LJ's Francine Fialkoff, who organized the program, but to use their libraries “to model best practices, to be incubators for energy efficiency, and to educate their communities.”

Helping to frame the day's discussions and provide a larger context for libraries' role in implementing sustainable thinking and practice communitywide were Mary A. Dempsey, commissioner, CPL; Erin Lavin Cabonargi, then director of planning and design, now executive director, Public Building Commission, Chicago; and luncheon speaker Sadhu Johnston, Chicago's chief environmental officer.

Following two panels, “The Case for Sustainable Design” and “Green Without 'or with' LEED,” attendees took part in one of six breakout sessions revolving around design “challenges” submitted in advance by librarians in the planning, prebond, renovating, or early building stages. Challenges ranged from one library's relocation to a Food Lion grocery store to another's bid to become the first green library in its state. Breakout leaders—architects from David Milling Architects; PSA-Dewberry; Meyer, Scherer & Rockcastle; Tappé Associates; Burnidge Cassell Associates; and Browning Day Mullins Dierdorf Architects—were charged with incorporating green design into the discussion. Each firm's principals supplied floor plans, photographs, and other materials to illustrate their ideas and suggestions. (See p. 10–15 for full coverage.)

These architect sponsors, together with our host sponsor, CPL, and three vendor sponsors—3M Library Systems, Agati, and Universal Air Lift—helped make the event possible. LJ is grateful for their involvement and commitment to advancing the discussion of green library design.

“If you're planning a library in the next 25 years, you have to think green,” said Bill Brown, associate partner, Browning Day Mullins Dierdorf Architects (BDMDA), early in the seminar. LJ wanted the 2007 DI to go beyond merely arguing for green design to a point where participants rolled up their sleeves and talked seriously about green options.

There was no better place to get that discussion going than Chicago, where, by mandate, all new public buildings must achieve at least Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) Silver status and all public or private projects benefiting from city assistance must either be completed under sustainable construction guidelines or have a green roof (the Public Building Commission currently has about 70 projects in either the planning, design, or construction phase). Certainly no other city can claim profit from sales of the honey produced by bees on the 38,000 square foot green roof of its City Hall.

Similarly, what better host library than CPL? Since Commissioner Dempsey's 1995 launch of an aggressive rebuilding campaign, some 70 percent of the library's 79 branches have been replaced or rehabilitated. Of these, seven are LEED-certified, as will be all its future branches (two are currently in the process of attaining certification).

Several panel speakers acknowledged existing hurdles to sustainable design: the learning curve is high, it's tough making a case to city departments and planners, and everyone's got some sort of regional issue. But a library, insisted Carole Medal, Gail Borden PL District, Elgin, IL, can be the leader. And a good place to start, suggested Josie Parker, director, Ann Arbor District Library (AADL), MI, is to designate whomever on your staff is most impassioned about the environment, be it a carpooler or an avid recycler, to make the argument.

Parker has had a hand in AADL's building program since becoming director in 2001, assisting in the opening of two green branches as well as a third to make its appearance this summer. She assured library attendees that they need not be intimidated by the learning curve, saying that, these days, architects are excited by green design and, provided you find the right ones, so are contractors. “When the three key groups involved in a project are excited”—the architectural firm, the construction company, and the library—“you get carried along with it, they help you, they will not let you fail, they keep you informed and they teach you,” she said.

“Without germination, cultivation,” said Lavin Cabonargi, “you can't harvest a building that educates the people it's for.” Panel participants repeatedly touched on the responsibility libraries have to teach their patrons about sustainability. “It's not just enough to build the building and now you've been a good steward of the earth,” said Gail Borden's Medal, “you've got to educate your public.”

As Johnston later said, “get [library] visitors thinking about ways they can integrate [green measures] into their daily lives,” offering as examples water conservation, reusable tote bags, and energy-efficient light bulbs.

In the green-minded spirit of working with what you've already got—one of the seminar's overarching themes—Ann Arbor's Parker, a panel moderator, proposed that a green building in and of itself can serve as “a public demonstration of how things do and can work.” Denelle Wrightson, director of library architecture at PSA-Dewberry, further cited libraries she's seen conscientiously extend green education into their collections, as well as, in one case (Rosemary Garfoot PL, Cross Plains, WI), through a public-access monitor demonstrating the facility's energy use in real time.

Indeed, said David Milling, president, David Milling Architects (DMA), libraries should not just be getting their communities involved but leveraging that involvement to maximize effort and minimize cost. “If the community is at the table and part of the process and helping to develop the concept,” he said, “they're also the people paying for it, the key stakeholders.”

Perhaps the greatest upshot of leveraging community involvement, said Parker, is that once you make that connection with the public, once you bring the community into the conversation, sustainable measures can become “the normal part of what we do; nothing different, nothing extra, just what we do.”

The second panel's discussion revolved around the merits and drawbacks of LEED certification. “You can have a sustainable initiative and a lighting goal in mind,” said Jeffrey Hoover, library design director at Tappé Associates, but without the follow-through the LEED certification process affords, “you can wind up with a light fixture that doesn't meet your sustainable goals just by sleight of hand—and you wouldn't know it.” LEED certification, as Hoover sees it, is a good means of keeping on point during a project, regardless of time- or budget-related pressures. “There are just a million temptations to ease up a bit because we really need a little more contingency money,” he said by way of example, “and going for certification keeps you honest, whether you like it or not.”

On the other end of that argument, the Public Building Commission's Lavin Cabonargi later encouraged those hesitant to try for LEED certification to “think outside the LEED box,” assuring them it is perfectly fine to consider using LEED “only as a framework.”

Panelist Eve Tallman, director, Mesa County Libraries, CO, said she, for one, opted to bypass the LEED process at Grand County PL in Moab, UT (her last post, where she led the library to win LJ's Best Small Library in America award in 2007) because it was too expensive. To save further on building costs, she contacted her local utility company: “They'll coach you through what items they actually pay you to install,” she said.

Sean Wagner, head of sustainable design and building technology at Meyer, Scherer & Rockcastle (MS&R), put the cost of LEED building commissioning at between 65¢ and $130 per square foot, depending on project size. Reducing energy costs, he said, is “the best money you can spend”; he suggested librarians follow Tallman and look to their utility companies for rebates and incentives.

LEED or no, cost was a topic repeatedly broached during the day. Most of the panelists, like BDMDA's Brown, underscored the long-term savings. “I have never expanded a budget for green,” he said, emphasizing that “any green building can save money.” Case in point: PSA-Dewberry's Wrightson estimated that the Dallas Police Department's LEED-certified headquarters has saved the city more than $246,000 in energy costs annually since its 2003 completion.

Librarian panelists more often acknowledged trepidation relating to cost even as they, too, underscored the long-term payoffs sustainable additions could bring. “Yes, the up-front cost is more,” said Gail Borden's Medal, “but the operating cost will be less.” In Ann Arbor's case, Parker reported that the library lowered operating costs “by looking at how the building functions,” but this, too, came at a price: square footage had to be significantly cut.

“The most sustainable building,” said BDMDA's Brown, “is one that already exists.” In following up on the notion of adaptive reuse of an existing structure—a logical extension of the green movement's tenets to recycle, repurpose, and reuse—many in the audience were curious about green measures that wouldn't involve an entire overhaul.

MS&R's Wagner suggested librarians look immediately to windows, to lights. Some other points proposed: heating and cooling systems, daylighting and glazing, Low-E glass that lets the light in but keeps the heat out, and regionally appropriate materials.

Phasing in green changes of any kind, everyone agreed, positively impacts all aspects of the library—and beyond. As Ann Arbor's Parker said earlier, once her library began to evaluate the building in terms of sustainability and efficiency, it also started to evaluate all functions in that context, including staff and operations. And Carolyn Anthony, director, Skokie PL, IL, further noted that the library can serve as “a demonstration project that makes green measures attractive.”

Several panelists advised librarians to document results for any kind of green measures and to use positive results to further advantage. DMA's recent work on the Harper Woods PL, Michigan's first LEED-certified (Silver) public library, for example, has led to 30 percent energy cost savings—“now I have something to present in arguing for [more] green,” DMA's Milling said. BDMDA's Brown added that he's found green buildings to be “fund magnets.”

Going beyond funding, MS&R's Wagner stressed that quantifying cost effectiveness is a shortsighted way of measuring impact, and he discouraged getting too wrapped up in the concept of payback. “There's no payback for low-VOC (volatile organic compounds) paint, except maybe hospital bills for fewer cancers, but you'll never measure something like that,” he said. “So payback is great when it applies, but that's only one yardstick.” Wagner insisted it is time for librarians to start thinking about “how to design the best possible buildings, not just for their communities and themselves but for future generations.” MS&R is one of a number of firms that have adopted “the 2030 Challenge,” meaning that every building it designs from now on will be at least 50 percent more energy efficient than typical buildings and that, by 2030, all its buildings will be carbon neutral.

“Maybe you're not able to install photovoltaics” or solar panels, PSA-Dewberry's Wrightson told the crowd, “but you can plan for it.” BDMDA's Brown concurred: libraries built today should be built with the future in mind, approaching any architectural change with the intent of making it “futureproof: hyperflexible and internally reorganizable.” But for all this talk of the future as a dire but distant consideration, there was an undeniable sense in the room that the future is coming much sooner. “Right now, sustainable design is an option,” said Richard McCarthy, principal of Burnidge Cassell Associates. “I don't think it's going to be like that for very long.”