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March 13, 2009, 11:28 AM ET
Kroon Hall, at Yale U., Strives for Carbon Neutrality
Kroon Hall, the home of Yale U.‘s forestry and environmental programs, was built to let in sunlight and capture its energy. (Photos by Peter Otis/Yale U.)
Yale Environment 360 currently features an article about Kroon Hall at Yale University, the home of the Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies. The article discusses the green elements of the building and the “elusive goal” of designing a carbon-neutral building, or “net-zero building.”
“Kroon is … a reminder of what even some of the best hearts and minds in the sustainable design movement cannot yet achieve,” writes Richard Conniff. “For a ‘green premium’ unofficially estimated at about 5.7 percent of construction cost, the Kroon design team managed to reduce projected energy use and emissions by 61 percent below the levels for a comparable building of conventional design. The biggest savings came not from sexy new technologies but from figuring out how to make the design function like an old-fashioned cathedral, with a slender profile for maximum daylighting, an east-west orientation for greater solar gain on the long southern exposure, careful use of shading, and plenty of stone and concrete to store thermal energy. A solar photovoltaic array and geothermal wells will supply much of the remaining energy load. ‘We got damned close to carbon neutral,’ boasted a construction manager who initially scoffed at the whole idea of green design.”
Sixty-one percent below conventional design is great, but is that really “damned close”? In any case, what is interesting about this design, as Mr. Conniff points out here, is the return to more traditional design methods that rely on passive systems, like orienting the building on its site and using concrete for thermal mass. After abandoning those methods for decades in the 20th century, architects are increasingly returning to these ancient techniques — updated, of course, for modern times.
The building was designed by Hopkins Architects, the British firm led by Michael Hopkins, who is something of a star architect. But as we argued in a Chronicle article last year, starchitecture of the future should put less value on the name of the architect and more on how well the buildings work with the environment. —Scott Carlson
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