Montreal — Here at the Society for College and University Planning’s annual conference, designers from Moseley Architects took a close (and, some might argue, courageous) look at the performance of some of the buildings they had designed for Virginia universities under the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design program. The buildings were, for the most part, successes — with some interesting caveats.

The Moseley designers, Bryna Dunn and George Nasis, presented data on buildings at the College of William and Mary, Longwood University, Old Dominion University, and the University of Mary Washington. The building at Longwood was the highest-rated structure of the bunch, having attained LEED gold. In each case, Ms. Dunn and Mr. Nasis examined how the buildings had performed compared with the LEED projections for their performance, performance...