New student residences at Emory U.: Don’t drink the blue water. (Ayers Saint Gross image)

Atlanta and Greenville, S.C. — New buildings at both Emory University and Furman University will feature new building technologies — technologies that in some cases defy building conventions.

A new student residence at Emory, which is designed by Ayers Saint Gross and is shooting for a gold rating in the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design program, has a number of green features. But one that designers and university officials really had to work for was a graywater system that will collect rainwater, store it in a cistern, then pump it through the building as water to flush the toilets.

Such systems have been used in other settings, but this installation is the first of its kind in Atlanta, and building officials in the city were nervous about recycling reclaimed water, even as toilet water. They made the university dye the water blue, as a warning to building occupants. (Folks at Emory joke that if you’re smart enough to get into the university, one would think that you wouldn’t be the type to drink out of the toilet.) Water pipes for the reclaimed water are also colored blue, to warn plumbers who might want to tap into a water line for a drinking fountain.

Furman University is close to finishing a $60-million renovation of the Charles H. Townes Center for Science, a 1950s structure about 600 feet long. The project is designed for a silver LEED certification, but may get gold.

Architects and facilities officials found that the floor-to-floor heights and attic spaces were too short to accommodate modern conventional ductwork. So the designers looked abroad, in Europe, and found “chilled beam” technology that could cool the air, save energy, and use less space. The chilled beams are part of an assembly that combines small ducts and lights, along with a cooling coil, that runs along the ceiling in rooms. Hot, humid rises toward the coil, where it is pre-cooled, then that cooled air is blown back down by jets on the ducts.

Overall, the energy savings from the chilled beams amount to about 30 percent. David Shi, president of Furman, says there were concerns that water would condense on and drip from the chilled beams in the humid South Carolina air, but so far there have been no problems.

The Townes Center will also feature unusual curved solar panels, which will generate both electricity and hot water. And the building will pump its wastewater through a “living machine,” which uses nutrient-loving wetland plants and ultraviolet light to remove contaminants. —Scott Carlson