Texas Spurs Green Movement
Lone Star steam powers sustainable building trend

With more than half of the world’s 500 largest firms saying they want to build and occupy sustainable facilities, and nearly 100 projects in Texas registered with the U.S. Green Building Council, it’s clear that the green-building trend is here to stay in the Lone Star State.

by Eileen Schwartz

As the old cliché goes, “It ain’t bragging if it’s true.”

That being the case, Texas has every right to boast about its role as a major player in the green-building movement that’s grown from a blip on the radar of the U.S. building industry in the beginning of the decade to a widely recognized practice that will shape the future of how people live, work and build.

The green-building movement, in fact, got a major boost in the state’s capital.

The Wal-Mart store also boasts an on-site windmill pond that generates wind energy. (Photos courtesy of Wal-Mart.)

In June 2000 Austin called for LEED certification of all public projects larger than 5,000 sq ft. Seattle did so in February of that year. But the Austin Green Building Program “was the first green building program in the world,” says Gail Vittori, co-founder and co-director of the Center for Maximum Potential Building Systems, a non-profit sustainable planning and design firm in Austin.

“Those two cities [Seattle and Austin] are always considered the first adopters of LEED,” says Caitlin Bennett, a spokesperson for the U.S. Green Building Council.

In 1989 Vittori and CMPBS co-founder and co-director Pliny Fisk III were asked to help develop ideas for what eventually became the city of Austin’s Green Building Program.

“So the city of Austin had already laid out the ground work [by the early 1990s] for how you begin to think much more comprehensibly about building, about flows of resources, about connecting to place, and I think it is broadly recognized as the catalyst for what we see playing out now in cities and states and countries around the world,” Vittori says.

She adds that the program was the only one from the U.S. to be recognized at the 1992 U.N. Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, “and it is in my mind what put green building on the map as a policy frame-work tool that was in many ways the catalyst for the USGBC getting going in 1993.”

Several other Texas cities have adopted ordinances calling for LEED specifications on public buildings of a certain size. Others offer green-building incentives. Texas also has three local chapters of the U.S. Green Building Council – North Texas, Houston and Central Texas.

In January 2003 Dallas issued a resolution requiring all city-owned buildings larger than 10,000 sq ft to have a minimum LEED certification level of silver. The North Texas city of Frisco began using LEED on capital projects in 2004. “Our goal is to have all public buildings LEED certified,” says Jeff Witt, comprehensive and environmental administrator for the city of Frisco.

While Houston currently has no particular green requirements, it has passed a resolution in favor of applying the LEED rating system to all city-owned projects. “This is setting a great example for other builders and developers in the city who we hope will jump on the bandwagon,” says Julie Hendricks, architect with Houston-based architecture firm Kirksey.

As one of the state’s leading sustainable building design firms, Kirksey was the architect for the city’s first LEED-certified (silver) commercial building, a headquarters completed in 2003 for general contractor SpawGlass.

Wal-Mart’s experimental store in McKinney, one of two experimental stores in the country. Solar panels supplement power needs at Wal-Mart’s experimental store in McKinney. (Photos courtesy of Wal-Mart.)

The city of McKinney, in the Dallas-Fort Worth area, streamlines its building approval processes and provides flexibility for green builders. “As a result, we have been able to work with several high-profile companies such as Wal-Mart and Toyota to do green buildings,” says John Kessel, the city’s executive director of development services. “Businesses that want to do the right thing environmentally don’t want to get caught up in red tape – they want to move through the process as quickly as if they were building a conventional building.”

Many city officials agree that the benefits of green building outweigh any added cost.

Jill Jordan, Dallas assistant city manager, says a good green architect can design a building so that there is no added cost for the green components. “The green components eliminate the need for other components or substitute for them at the same costs,” she says.

An inexperienced green architect or a “super” green building such as a LEED platinum building may cost more upfront than conventional designs, “but typically the city sees a payback in five or fewer years for the added expense,” Jordan adds.

Houston invests an additional 2 percent in up-front project costs for LEED-certified projects.

“We expect a return, in the form of operation and maintenance savings, within 10 years maximum,” says Wendy Teas Heger, chief of design and construction with the city’s building services department.

Whether the goal is to save on costs or to just do the right thing, the green-building trend is firmly rooted in Texas. Nearly 100 projects statewide are registered with the USGBC.

Among those, are some recently completed, precedent-setting projects that are, to quote another cliché, “LEED-ing the way” for the future of green-building.

Houston 
The new headquarters of general contracting firm Satterfield & Pontikes,  completed in November 2006, illustrates a bold new concept in constructing green buildings using virtual design technology.

The recently completed Satterfield & Pontikes headquarters in Houston illustrates a bold new concept in constructing green buildings using Building Information Modeling technology. (Photo © Jud Photography.)

Owner George Pontikes who is also the general contractor, initiated and encouraged the integration of a virtual building process.

Pontikes says he learned a lot about the owners’ point of view while serving on the AEOC Productivity Committee of the Construction Users Roundtable. “A lot of time was spent on discussing what a better building is,” Pontikes adds. “We wanted to build sustainable buildings. ‘Better’ was a definition created in that meaning.”

After more than a year of meetings across the country, Pontikes says he told the members of the committee he would borrow the money to fund a new headquarters and test some of the processes they had been working on, which included a virtually designed and constructed building, or BIM.

“I needed a new building anyway,” he says.

The three-story, 65,000-sq-ft. building  recently won the prestigious AIA Building Information Modeling award. The award, under the category “inspirational pilot projects demonstrating new ways forward,” fittingly reflects Pontikes’ philosophies.

“I have always believed in technology to improve the processes in our industry,” he says. “I felt like if we were going to build utilizing BIM, then we had to do it seeking LEED certification.” To do so was “just better and more responsible” he adds.

“BIM is inherently green,” says Brian Malarkey, eco-services consultant for Kirksey, architects for the project. “Being able to more accurately document materials for purchasing allows for more efficient material usage. Efficiencies in the schedule reduce the construction time, therefore reducing energy and transportation costs.”

Pontikes says that when he first told colleagues of his building plans, he compared himself to the 1950s cartoon character George Jetson. “That didn’t mean too much to the Generation Xers,” he says.

“When I said, ‘We’re going to go out here and build a sustainable, ecologically, sensitive project, we are going to build it using virtual design and construction. We are not going to bid out to subcontractors. We are going to select architects and engineers based on their capabilities and platform compatibility and we will build it cheaper, faster and of better quality.’

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“I had folks at the AIA/AGC annual meeting say to me, ‘Don’t tell me this building didn’t cost $200 a ft.’ And I said, ‘It didn’t cost $200 a ft or anywhere near it.’ They still didn’t believe it. They said, ‘Show me the job cost.’”

The construction cost was $8 million.

Among the time- and cost-saving elements of the project was the significant fact that the mechanical contractors, Houston-based TDIndustries, had zero requests for information.

“Zero RFIs is unheard of,” says Rich Creveling, consultant for Satterfield & Pontikes.

While the technology certainly made the project the success it is, Pontikes points out that it is not about the software or hardware. “It is about process and corroboration and the people that drive that,” he says.

North Texas 
What can be green about a car dealership?

Plenty, according to Trelaine Mapp, project manager with the Dallas office of Turner Construction Co., the general contractor for the recently completed Pat Lobb Toyota in McKinney, the first green auto dealership in the nation.

The nation’s first green auto dealership, Patt Lobb Toyota, built by Turner Construction in the North Texas city of McKinney. (Photos courtesy of Turner.)

Mapp says that a portion of the building has a green wall-a Boston ivy that grows up the wall and helps absorb heat from the sun. “This will keep the building much cooler, reducing the energy usage,” he adds.

Another unique aspect is the building’s 8,660-gallon water cistern, Mapp says, which captures water from condensation produced from the building’s rooftop and AC units inside the building. It also captures rain and the collected water is used to irrigate the entire site.

The recycled water is used in the car wash, too. “The water that washes the cars is recollected using a sand interceptor,” Mapp says. “Once that water falls into the interceptor, it’s filtered into a three-tank cycling process and reused to wash cars.”

The system saves more than 66% of the water normally lost in a car wash, Mapp says.

“And that’s huge and unique. Imagine if a lot of dealerships did that, how much money they would save on just water usage?”

The white membrane roof will helps the dealership reduce energy use. (Photos courtesy of Turner.)

Mapp credits the city of McKinney for contributing “enormously” to the team’s efforts in getting the job done.

“The city is realizing the importance of environmentally friendly facilities. It is way ahead of the curve in understanding that having an environmentally friendly facility within the city was a major factor in having Toyota and Pat Lobb bring the facility into the city.”

The city’s green-building savvy also helped it become the site of Wal-Mart’s first “experimental” store. A second such store recently opened in Aurora, Colo.

“Wal-Mart Corp. had a positive relationship with the city already,” development services executive director Kessel says.  “They approached us and asked if we were interested in working with them on an experimental store and we agreed on the front end to partner with them.”

Wal-Mart officials say the goal for both experimental stores is to “reduce the amount of energy and natural resources required to operate and maintain the stores, reduce the amount of raw materials needed to construct the facility, and substitute, when appropriate, renewable materials.”

Central Texas

Renderings show the entrance and “backyard” of the future Ronald McDonald House Charities of Austin & Central Texas adjacent to the new Dell Children’s Medical Center of Central Texas. (Images courtesy of Eckols & Associates.)

 The nearly completed $200 million Dell Children’s Medical Center of Central Texas set a high bar for all other projects on the site.

The medical center is the anchor tenant for development of the 32 acres of the former Austin Mueller airport and is set to become the nation’s first hospital to achieve platinum LEED certification.

One of the projects inspired by Dell is Ronald McDonald House. General contractor The Beck Group of Dallas is aiming for completion and start of operation in April. The facility is also aiming for the platinum LEED.

“We leased the property to Ronald McDonald House,” says Alan Bell, network construction manager for Seton Healthcare Network, owner of the new children’s hospital. “In the lease, we required that they also have a LEED certified building. It’s a contractual requirement with us and Ronald McDonald House.”

Eckols & Associates of Austin designed the four-story, 28,500-sq-ft Ronald McDonald House on behalf of Charities of Austin and Central Texas with the goal of creating a soothing and welcoming environment to serve Central Texas families visiting the nearby Children’s Medical Center.

Renderings show the entrance and “backyard” of the future Ronald McDonald House Charities of Austin & Central Texas adjacent to the new Dell Children’s Medical Center of Central Texas. (Images courtesy of Eckols & Associates.)

Drought-tolerant landscape plantings, using harvested rainwater, will reduce the dependency on an irrigation system. The facility will use a minimum of 30% less water than conventional multi-housing buildings due to such innovations as low-flow plumbing fixtures and ultra-efficient showerheads, says Don Eckols, project architect for Eckols & Associates.

Other unique aspects include an integrated array of photovoltaic/solar panels to reduce the building’s energy consumption at peak loading carbon dioxide sensors, which will ensure that fresh air is supplied to each building area as needed.