GTF gets LEED Gold
Tuesday, February 7, 2012 at 12:59PM 
This just in. We got the good news today from the United States Green Building Council that the Greater Texas Foundation building has officially received a LEED Gold certification, making it the first LEED building in Bryan, Texas.
When our design team responded to the Greater Texas Foundations’ submittal of qualifications in June of 2009, we approached the project as a collective of small firms coming together around a common set of goals. GTF was clear in it’s desire for a LEED facility, and asked that a full integrated team of designers be formed, not just providing standard architectural services.
The preliminary phase of the project was a pre-design and planning phase, where the architecture, landscape design, and planning members of our team worked with the building committee, board, and staff of GTF to set programmatic goals for the project and establish base planning scenarios. The core of this process was a two-day visioning session and master planning charrette involving our design team and the board and staff of GTF. The work done at this visioning session created the framework that eventually became the project’s master plan and building layout, and the communication directly with all of the personnel of GTF, not just their selected representatives, gave us insight into the inner workings and relationships that would never have surfaced in a standard program. The work product of this preliminary phase was a master plan for the site, which set up the building’s orientation, site circulation, and prairie reserve, and set up standards for future development parcels. We also created an exhaustive program document that established the space needs, quality expectations, and sustainability goals for the project.
The final meeting of our initial phase was a LEED Kickoff meeting attended by all project team members including the client and the contractor. The agenda for this meeting was to lay out specific sustainability goals for the project very early in the design process (prior to schematic design), and to explore design alternatives that would provide ways of economically meeting those goals. Each team member came away tasked with specific responsibilities for design investigations, but exploring the synergies of shared ideas between the typical professional divisions was the underlying reason for the meeting.
Through this integrated process, our team developed strategies for optimizing all of the building systems. These efficiencies resulted in overall reductions in energy consumption, water use, raw materials, and overall impact to the ecology. Additionally, the upfront costs of these building systems were reduced as a result of this process.
While our office generally takes a collaborative design approach for our projects, involving key trades at appropriate stages of the design, this was our first foray into a truly integrated project team starting before the design was initiated and continuing throughout the design and construction process. While at times the conference room seemed crowded, we feel that the success of the design has been significantly amplified by the cross-pollination of disciplines, to the overall betterment of our client and the building.
;)
;)
