LEED HC project with a basement-connected CUP building

James Chueh

LEEDuser Basic Member

69 thumbs up

January 18, 2012

We are doing a HC project that has two visually separate buildings, main clinic building and a CUP building, but these two buildings' basements are connected. We are thinking using DES Guidance Performance Option 2 to obtain higher energy scores. The mechanical rooms and control room are in CUP building's above-grade floors, its basement is a part of the main building's clinical space. However, we are not sure if we want to certify the CUP buildings. Are we allow to exclude CUP building from the LEED boundary, but still include its basement? Because it seems that in DES Guidance it allows CUP building not to be certified. Please help, cheers.

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Emily Catacchio

Sustainability Specialist

Wight and Company

LEEDuser Basic Member

415 thumbs up

Sat, 02/18/2012 - 19:27

Generally, the DES Guidance does not require that you certify the building where the the mechanical rooms are. So I do not think this is a DES Guidance issue. However, to the connected basements may pose an MPR #2 issues. I do not have experience with a building which uses space, essentially, under another non-certified building (if I'm understanding you correctly).
I would recommend contacting GBCI to find out if the connected basement puts the project in danger of not meeting MPR#2 assuming you won't be certifying the CUP building.

Scott Bowman

LEED Fellow

Integrated Design + Energy Advisors, LLC

LEEDuser Expert

377 thumbs up

Mon, 02/20/2012 - 16:58

I think that Emily is right on with investigating the MPR. This seems more of a question of project boundary than DES. We recently were involved in a large project (which ultimately got Platinum) that had an adjacent parking ramp that housed the central plant for the building. That structure is not LEED certified, so we treated the project as being served by a DES. So having a division such as that can work. Note that we were fully modeling the plant and the plant was fully commissioned as part of the project (and was under v2.2 as well).