Hello,
We have a project with the following site constraints:
The LEED Project Boundary includes 2 new buildings: an office tower, and a small bank building. The office tower is part of the LEED Certification, but the bank building is not. However, because the underground parking takes up the entire site area, we have drawn the LEED Project Boundary at the underground perimeter, which means that, above grade, the small bank building is within the Project Boundary.
The PIf4 LEED Boundary plan clearly shows that the small bank building is excluded from the LEED Certification. However, on the template, we have included the entire site area as the LEED Project Boundary, since that is true underground.
For this particular credit (SSc5.1), the template automatically calculates the amount of open vegetated space as the LEED Project Boundary - the building footprint (in this case we have only accounted for the office tower) x 50%. However, this calculation does not account for the footprint of the small bank building.
Therefore, the question is: how do we account for the footprint of the small bank building which we need to subtract from the LEED Project Boundary in order to arrive at the correct calculation for vegetated space? Should we include that footprint as part of the Building Footprint value (adding it to the office tower)? Or, since the roof of the bank is vegetated with native species, should we include that area as part of the vegetated area (we are achieving SSc2), even though the building itself is excluded from certification?
Thanks for any advice!
April Brown
Sustainable Building ConsultantGreen Bridge Consulting
LEEDuser Expert
41 thumbs up
December 8, 2014 - 1:06 pm
Hi there,
Since the small bank building is not part of your LEED certification, you would exclude the building footprint of the bank in your open space calculations. Simply put, you will exclude any part of the bank building as part of your LEED certification calculations. The tricky part of your approach is that if the bank building ever wanted to pursue certification, technically they're LEED boundaries should not overlap. If the underground parking is shared, another way to approach this is to not include all of the underground parking area, as that's not technically required per the MPR supplemental guidance.