Yale Bulletin and Calendar

February 18, 2005|Volume 33, Number 19

Architect chosen for Yale's new 'green' building

A British architect has been selected to design a new environmentally sustainable home for the School of Forestry & Environmental Studies (F&ES).

"The new 'green' building will set a new standard for sustainable design, construction and operations at Yale and beyond," says President Richard C. Levin. "It will be a first-rate facility for a world-class institution."

London-based Hopkins Architects was selected from 24 architectural firms around the world to design the $27 million building, which is scheduled for completion in 2008.

Assisting in the building's design and construction will be Connecticut-based Centerbrook Architects & Planners; Arup, an engineering firm with offices in Europe and the United States; and Atelier Ten, an environmental design and building services engineering firm with offices in London and New York.

F&ES dean James Gustav ("Gus") Speth notes, "It will be Yale's most green building, a symbol of the school's ideals and values, and a powerful expression in beautiful form of our relationship to the environment. It will be an inspirational and instructional model of sustainable design." P> The 50,006-square-foot building, which will be named after Yale alumnus Richard Kroon, will promote energy efficiency and be climate neutral, producing as much energy as it consumes. It will also minimize pollution and use waste as a resource; incorporate natural lighting and ventilation; use recycled, recyclable, sustainably harvested and manufactured and non-toxic building materials; and meet the "platinum" standard in the LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) Green Building Rating System.

"Hopkins is one of only a few firms in the world that combines the two dimensions of sustainability -- low-impact design, which minimizes adverse effects on the natural environment like carbon emissions, waste and pollution; and positive environmental design, which maximizes the physical and mental health and productivity of people by connecting them to the natural environment through a built environment," says Stephen Kellert, the Tweedy/Ordway Professor of Social Ecology and chair of the F&ES building committee.

The Kroon building will have classrooms, a library, faculty offices, administrative offices and the Carl and Emily Knobloch Environmental Center. The latter will be a gathering place for students and faculty across the university, a major site for conferences, public lectures and receptions, and a destination for distinguished visitors from across the country and around the world. The building will be part of Science Hill, a 32-acre slice of the northern campus where Yale has undertaken an ambitious effort to redevelop the physical and biological sciences. The project also will be connected to the redevelopment of Sachem's Wood, a major campus open space adjacent to Sage Hall, the main administrative building for F&ES.

Hopkins Architects, one of the largest architectural firms in the United Kingdom, has been recognized in numerous design awards, including the Royal Institute of British Architects' Royal Gold Medal in 1995 and a knighthood for Michael Hopkins. It is currently designing a 70,000-square-foot applied research and development building at Northern Arizona University, which will be the centerpiece of a $100 million green redevelopment of the main campus.

Centerbrook, established in 1975 and located in a renovated factory on the Falls River in the village of Centerbrook, has designed over 143 major projects on 50 different campuses across the United States. The firm designed the six-story, 22,000-square-foot Yale Child Study Center, and is designing an athletic center on Quinnipiac University's new 230-acre Sherman Avenue campus in Hamden.

Arup has worked on projects such as the California Academy of Sciences, the Plant Sciences Building in Missouri and the High Museum in Atlanta. It provided structural, mechanical, electrical and plumbing engineering services for a new 427,000-square-foot central library that occupies a full city block in downtown Seattle. Arup also designed an airport terminal at Chongqing Jiangbei International Airport, which has the capacity to serve 7 million passengers a year and is considered a gateway to China's western provinces.

Atelier Ten, which will be the sustainability consultant to the architect, has helped guide the new Yale engineering research building on the corner of Trumbull and Prospect streets in New Haven, and is an environmental design consultant for One Pennsylvania Plaza, a 950-foot skyscraper in Philadelphia, which will be the city's tallest building and its first green high-rise.

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