AIA and the Committee on the Environment (COTE) announced this year’s recipients of the COTE Top Ten Awards, the industry’s premier program celebrating sustainable design excellence. Now in their 21st year, the Top Ten Awards highlight projects that exemplify the integration of great design and great performance. Submissions are required to demonstrate how the project aligns with COTE’s rigorous criteria for social, economic, and ecological value.
(Excerpted from AIA.org)
It was recently announced that the R. W. Kern Center has received AIA and the Committee on the Environment’s (COTE) Top Ten Awards. The R. W. Kern Center was designed by Bruner/Cott Architects of Boston, with construction management by Wright Builders. Congratulations to all.
Nothing makes us happier than seeing our friends and allies making headlines for their monumental achievements to sustainability. Bruner/Cott's R.W. Kern Center at Hampshire College has made the 2017 AIA COTE Top Ten Awards, a program that celebrates sustainable design and building excellence. The R.W. Kern Center is pursuing Living Building certification – and making great strides towards it.
The AIA and Committee on the Environment (COTE)'s Top Ten Awards program is now in its 21st year, always highlighting projects that are models for what a great design should hope to achieve. By aligning with COTE's criteria for social, economic, and ecological value, designs can be entered into a competitive pool with only the highest-performing candidates making the list.
The R.W. Kern Center is an archetypal example of what it means to be a sustainable design and pinnacle of excellence. The new 17,000-square-foot campus welcome center was constructed using materials that were chosen to comply with the LBC Red List. The building is designed to supply its own power and water and process waste on-site.
Bruner/Cott has a distinguished 40-year sustainability record and a clear commitment to excellent green building. The firm approaches each project in the context of its community, program, and mission, and looks for ways to maximize projects’ positive impact.
In just a month, you can join us on a free tour of the Hitchcock Center and the R.W. Kern Center!
Friday, August 12 from 2:00 pm to 5:00 pm
893 West Street, Amherst, MA 01002
Register here or below. (It's free, but feel free to donate!)
The Living Building Challenge is the built environment’s most rigorous performance standard. Its goal is to create building projects “that operate as cleanly, beautifully and efficiently as nature’s architecture.” To be certified under the Challenge, projects must meet a series of ambitious performance requirements, including Net Zero energy, and Net Zero waste and water, and avoiding the use of any ‘Red List’ materials.
Bruner/Cott's R.W. Kern Center, an LBC project at Hampshire College in Amherst, MA and the Hitchcock Center (also in Amherst, MA) are new, low-impact flagship buildings. Read about Bruner/Cott, a Silver Sponsor of ours, here!
During the three-hour event, we will spend 90 min at the R.W. Kern Center, then transition to the Hitchcock Center for the remainder of the event. Each site will have a walking tour of the mechanical rooms, floor plan and landscape. The tour will be lead by the builders, designers and Living Building Collaborative members who contributed to the project.
A ribbon-cutting ceremony a week ago marked the opening of the first new building on the Hampshire College campus in nearly three decades. The College has always been committed to community and environmental principles but building best practice has changed over the decades. When the campus was first designed, it was designed as a hub and spoke, with the hub being a large parking lot and the buildings and congreation areas encircling. Today, the campus is transformed to be a walking campus with green open space connecting the built environment.
The College's most recent achievement is the R. W. Kern Center, a Living Building Project. As a Living Building Project, it was designed and built to achieve the most advanced environmentally sound building standard in the world by our professional colleagues (and Chapter sponsoring partners) at Bruner/Cott and built to exacting specificaitons by the Wright Builders team (also a Chapter sponsoring partner!).
The new 17,000-square-foot campus center, the R.W. Kern Center, was constructed using non-toxic materials that were locally sourced whenever possible to reduce the carbon footprint. The building is designed to supply its own power and water and process waste on-site.
College president Jonathan Lash said it is a symbol of the school’s beliefs.
“We want this building to not just be a structure that houses some activities, but a part of who we are and how we teach,” Lash said in an interview.
The new building will house admissions and financial aid. There will be classrooms and a coffee bar.
Hampshire College worked with architects Bruner/Cott of Cambridge, Mass. to design the building with the goal of being certified a “living building” by the International Living Future Institute. There are currently nine such buildings in the world with more awaiting certification or under construction.
The two-story timber beam-and-post building has solar panels on the roof to supply power. There are two 5,500-gallon cisterns that hold rainwater, which is purified for drinking. All the organic waste ends up in large composters.
Kern Center builder Jonathan Wright of Wright Builders in Northampton said the project was “difficult and exacting.”
Wright, a Hampshire College alum, said the most difficult challenge in the project was avoiding the use of any construction materials or chemicals found on a so-called “red list” of about a dozen toxins.
“A building like this, if it was conventional, might have 150 submittals;products you have to bring forward and say this is want we plan. This building has over 800 submittals; everything from the electrical tape to chalks and glues,” explained Wright. ” It is very process intensive.”
With the exception of the heat pumps for the building, which came from Japan, and frames for the window glass that came from Germany, everything else, including the stone veneer and the eastern white cedar shingles were fabricated within 500 kilometers of the construction site, according to Wright.
“That is part of the Living Building Challenge is to source it locally,” said Wright.
All wood that was used was certified by the Forest Stewardship Council or came from salvage. Wright and the college’s Facilities and Grounds office worked to reduce or eliminate construction waste through recycling.
Students were involved in the project from the start. Wesley Evans, a senior majoring in applied design, joined the planning committee for the Kern Center when he was freshman.
“We did not know at the time the level of sustainability the Kern Center would have or the depth and rigger that would go into the planing process,” said Evans. ” What came out of it really is a testament to how involved the community was , how deeply the Hampshire community cares about sustainability and leaving the planet better than we found it.”
Carl Weber, associate director of Facilities and Grounds, said it will be at least a year before the college finds out if the Kern Center achieves the Living Building Challenge standard.
“After a certain amount of time we have to be able to prove we did what we said we would.” said Weber
The Hitchcock Center for the Environment, a nonprofit education center, is constructing a new building on the Hampshire campus that is also designed to meet the Living Building Challenge standard.
We are proud to announce a newly formed partnership with Silver-level sponsor Bruner/Cott Architects and Planners! Bruner/Cott employs a team mentality when tackling its projects. The company works together- -architect and client, architect and contractor — to shape ideas, creating buildings that are a pleasure to experience outside and in. Contractors appreciate Bruner/Cott's technological expertise and team approach. Clients appreciate its informed design, attention to economics and consideration of community. 80% of clients have worked with the company on more than one project.
Managing and operating buildings — a million square feet — the firm understands the balance between capital investment and operating costs. It has first-hand knowledge of the relationship between development, design, operation and maintenance, and skillfully leverages these variables.
Bruner/Cott has a distinguished 40-year sustainability record and clear commitment to excellent green building. The firm maximizes savings by minimizing the energy profile of each site. It designs with an eye towards total energy consumption, from construction through operation. The total energy consumed by a building is the sum of the energy used in its operation (latent energy) and the energy required to make the building (embodied energy) — including the harvesting and shipping of natural resources, manufacturing, transportation, and disposal of materials. Designing sustainably means finding an efficient balance between embodied and latent energy, understanding that latent energy has a far greater impact over time.
Bruner/Cott was working towards “net-zero energy” before it was widely understood as a sustainable concept. As leaders in design for latent efficiencies, the group built early examples of passive solar in 1973 and geothermal in 1978. Its continuing operation of the Rhode Island hydroelectric plant that the company built in 1981 offsets three times of the office building's annual carbon footprint. With little cost premium, the group's buildings achieve aggressive results: 75% energy reductions, 60% water use reductions, and 99% construction waste recycling — all beyond “business as usual.”
Bruner/Cott's sustainable portfolio is impressive– the company has worked on projects such as Hampshire College's Kern Center, which has a ribbon-cutting ceremony we will be attending on April 29th. The Center was built with the goal of becoming only the ninth building certified under the world’s most rigorous green building standard, the Living Building Challenge (LBC): operating net-zero energy, water, and waste; built using materials mainly from local and regional sources; and avoiding toxic “red list” materials, right down to the duct tape allowed on site.
