Arb building wins green design award

Posted on 19. Apr, 2010 by David White in Biz/Tech

CHARMAINE KERRIDGE
BIZ/TECH REPORTER

Humber’s Centre for Urban Ecology won an architectural award of excellence for the use of environmental technology elements promoting sustainability in its design.
On May 7, the Ontario Association of Architects will present the award to the architecture firms that collaborated with Humber to design the building located in the arboretum on the North Campus.
A panel of jurors chose the centre because of its environmentally sustainable features and its design aesthetics.
“This one was a real hit,” said Carl Knipfel, chair of the Honours and Awards Task Group. “What everybody loved about it is basically that it is a laboratory of sustainability. At the same time, it is beautiful. It is elegant.”
The design team used environmental technologies such as embedding the building into the earth to create another level of insulation for the centre, triple-glazing windows to make the centre more insulated for heating, using a cistern to conserve water for use on the grounds and creating a “thermal chimney” to promote airflow throughout the building, said Pat Hanson, a partner at Toronto architecture firm, GH3.
GH3, which has also worked with Humber on other projects, was one of three firms chosen to help design the centre.
“We were brought on specifically because we had worked on other sustainability projects,” said Hanson. “We concentrated on using very common sense, low-tech solutions.”
When the centre was built in 2007, the environmental technology incorporated into its design made it just the second of two buildings in the city to receive gold certification in Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design, said Scott Valens, staff architect and associate director of capital development at Humber
“Trying to get gold certification is very difficult. It’s meant to be a demonstration project that shows how all the environmental features can be combined in one building.”
The Canada Green Building Council evaluates and ranks the “green-ness” of a project’s design, construction and day-to-day operating methods as a way to assess gold certification-.
Sustainability was “very much a large issue for this jury and is, I believe, for the architecture profession,” said Knipfel. “This building stands as an example.”