Project: Comcast Technology Center

Size: 1,350,000 ft²

Type: Corporate office

Owner: Comcast and Liberty Property Trust

Architects: Kendall Heaton Associates, Foster + Partners, Gensler, Daroff Design

MEP Engineer: BALA Engineers

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Sustainability consultant: WSP

LEED consultant: Atelier Ten

Project: Harvard University Science and Engineering Complex

Size: 544,000 ft²

Type: Academic building that includes teaching and research labs, classrooms, and a library

Owner: Harvard University (Allston, Massachusetts campus)

Architect: Behnisch Architekten

MEP engineer: Van Zelm Heywood and Shadford Inc.

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Size: 103,000 ft²

Type: Academic building with classrooms, offices, greenhouse, and labs

Owner: Lafayette College, Easton, Pennsylvania

Architect: Payette

MEP engineer: Bard Rao + Athanas Consulting Engineers

Contractor: Turner Construction Co.

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Size: 8 stories, 245,000 ft²

Type: Commercial office with ground-level retail

Architect: Gensler

MEP engineer: MKK Engineers

Contractor: Mortensen

Developer: Beacon Capital Partners

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As you probably know by now, it is possible on a v4 Building Design and Construction (BD+C) project to substitute any v4.1 credit or prerequisite, with no limit on the number of substitutions. If you are having trouble deciding which ones to upgrade, though, here is a handy cheat sheet from Dave Hubka of green building consulting firm Rivion.

The themes of Living Future ’21 were unmistakable: a strong call from leaders in the building professions for allyship around justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion (JEDI).

A few important ways to do this stood out:

The King Open and Cambridge Street Upper School and Community Complex is a big enough deal to warrant its big name.

With net-zero-carbon operations and LEED v4 Platinum certification, the 273,000 ft² project includes multiple schools, a public pool, a public library, lots of open space for the entire community to use, and a variety of social services for families.

USGBC did some spring cleaning last week, and the LEED Materials & Resources category was first on its list. The 2021 Quarter 2 Addenda include some significant updates to requirements for Environmental Product Declarations, Sourcing of Raw Materials, and Materials Ingredients across both BD+C and ID+C v4.1 rating systems—so if you have a project pursuing any of these credits, stop and read this first!

MEP systems contribute to both the initial construction and lifetime embodied carbon footprint of an example office building. This MEP footprint begins at construction and grows over time is due to operations, refrigerant leakage, and replacement.

The Sustainable MEP Leaders group, organized by BuildingGreen, is a group of motivated individuals, representing many of the leading engineering firms in North America, including most of the signatories on this letter. Our teams include tens of thousands of MEP engineers practicing in the US market.

It has been quite a wild ride! As The BuildingGreen Report (formerly Environmental Building News) celebrates its 30th year of publication, we decided to track the growth—and explosion—of the green building movement. We start in 1990 with the founding of AIA’s Committee on the Environment.

Our Editors’ Picks

To celebrate Volume 30 of BuildingGreen's publication this blog features a few of our editors’ favorite pieces.  

February 22, 2021 – President Biden has made a commitment to “Build Back Better” in the wake of COVID-19, the economic crisis, social upheaval, and regulatory rollbacks by the former administration. A growing group of architecture, engineering, and construction (AEC) firms is calling on Biden to also build back greener. He can do this, they say, by adding sustainable building strategies to his climate agenda and environmental justice plans. And he doesn’t need Congress’s help.

If you’re not in the habit of tracking addenda updates, now would be a good time to start.

USGBC surprised a lot of people with its November 9 addenda drop, making profound changes to several credits in the BD+C v4.1 beta. Some of these changes have LEED users breathing a sigh of relief, while others might seem a bit more mysterious. We spoke with USGBC’s Corey Enck, vice president for LEED technical development, about some of the biggest updates.

LEED v4.1 is still in beta. LEED v4 isn’t going anywhere soon. The sunset date for LEED 2009 even got delayed because of the pandemic. For those mired in the details of one of these currently used rating systems, it might seem premature to start thinking about what’s next.

Forget net zero by 2030: it’s not enough, or soon enough, to stop catastrophic climate change.

That’s the message Mahesh Ramanujam, president and CEO of the U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC), had for attendees of Greenbuild 2020. Ramanujam instead set a more ambitious requirement: all new construction will have to achieve net-positive carbon and energy performance by 2025 in order to achieve LEED certification. Existing buildings will have to achieve these same goals by 2050.

Protesters are rising up around the nation in response to our racist legal system. And although the Black Lives Matter movement focuses on police brutality, these protests are helping bring attention to social equity more generally. White people who had never thought about privilege before are soul searching and confronting the ways they themselves are contributing to injustice and violence—and they’re trying to figure out what they can do about it.