Hello! The project I am working on is a full renovation of a historic building on a University campus. The building has three wings connected by "hyphens" to effectively form an "E" shaped building with two courtyards between the wings. The University is currently working on a LEED campus plan that we anticipate will include the two courtyards. As such, site work pertaining to these courtyards has been removed from our project scope and the only other site work pertains to new utility installation and routing to and from said utilities. On a building such as this, would drawing a site outline around the building's "E" foot print be considered "gerrymandering" or is it better to document the courtyards now and hope that they will not be flagged in the campus LEED Certification process? Would documenting now and then again for the campus plan be considered double dipping for LEED?
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Emily Purcell
Sustainable Design LeadCannonDesign
LEEDuser Expert
372 thumbs up
June 19, 2019 - 1:38 pm
It seems like the best approach is to exclude the courtyards for this project, because they are out of your scope of work and therefore you can't predict design elements like planting, paving materials, shading, etc that would impact LEED achievement. You could draw a boundary around the building itself and include a narrative stating why the courtyards are excluded despite falling into that "land supporting building operations" language in the MPR. The downside, of course, is that you would not be able to document the open space, heat island non-roof, stormwater credits that rely on site area.
That said, it wouldn't be double dipping to claim any site related LEED achievement on this project and on the campus master site. The master site is basically a tool to document campus-wide credits and does not earn certification on its own. It would be double dipping to, for example, claim the courtyards as open space to earn SSc5.2 on your site and then include them in the same calculation for a neighboring building. The campus master site plan, however, would streamline multiple certifications by showing that the credit is met on a larger scale. Most projects would start with the campus master site plan and then separate it into individual project boundaries, but doing it "backwards" is no problem as long as you're representing the sites honestly and adding a clarification narrative for situations that might look odd to a reviewer.