UB Engineering School looks foward to a green future
New home designed to be Earth-friendly
Published: July 06, 2009, 12:30 am
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The new $61 million building for the University at Buffalo engineering school will provide much more than new classrooms and meeting spaces for students when completed in 2011. It will be one of the most environmentally friendly buildings in the region.
The 130,000-square-foot facility, at the university’s School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, will feature sensors that dim or brighten electric lights depending on the amount of natural light in a room, rain gardens and a green roof that will absorb storm water. The complex will house the school’s electrical engineering and computer science engineering programs, and will free up additional space in the surrounding buildings to expand the school’s other programs.
The building will replace several trailers which once housed the overflow of students in the engineering program.
John Mlade, a research manager in science and technology sustainability for the architecture firm Perkins & Will, said the building will include urinals that use one-eighth of the normal amount of water, and toilets with a “dual flush” system that use varying amounts of water depending on the flush. A highly reflective, white colored roof will reduce the amount of heat absorbed into the building, he said.
The building is set to earn a gold LEED certification from the U. S Green Building Council, the next-to highest green building designation possible. Mlade compared the official designation to the difference between organic and regular tomatoes, and said it helps remove the ambiguity of how green a building really is.
“They are recognized by a third party as being more socially and environmentally responsible,” he said.
He said the State University of New York system sets high environmental standards for many of its new projects.
“They are a very sophisticated client when it comes to sustainable design,” he said.
The program’s expansion comes at an opportune time. Dean Harvey G. Stenger Jr. said there has been discussion of a new building for over 15 years, not long after the trailers were constructed to help with the overflow of students.
“We knew engineering was growing as far back as the early 1990s,” he said.
Stenger said the project was a high priority for President John Simpson upon his arrival in 2004.
“He decided the fields of engineering and medicine should grow and improve and develop new technologies,” he said.
But the timing of the new building makes economic sense too, Stenger said, as engineers are still in demand in the job market.
“More students in engineering means more graduates able to fill the high-tech jobs of the future,” Stenger wrote in an e-mail.
The trailers, which were meant to be temporary when they were built in 1988, were torn down over a year ago to make room for the new building. The classes once held in the trailers have now been temporarily moved to other buildings.
“They really were not the kind of facilities that made sense,” he said.
Stenger said that the new building will include a “clean room” for the development of microtechnologies that cannot be produced if dust or other particles exist.
“You have to remove all the particulates in the air in order to make the tiny devices,” he said.
The building will also feature a wireless communications room, which will research ways to use radio frequencies in faster and more efficent ways, Stenger said.
The building’s auditorium will have the capability of two-way audio and visual communication, so students can interact with a speaker or audience hundreds of miles away.
Stenger said bringing the computer science and engineering program and electrical engineering program under one roof will foster more collaboration within the school. An atrium will increase interaction among students too.
The project is one of several within UB set to meet LEED standards. Robert Shibley, senior adviser to the president for campus planning and design, said the Educational Opportunity Center project downtown, the Ellicott Housing project, the remodeling of the former Acheson Hall (which will become Kapoor Hall) on south campus will all meet either LEED silver or gold environmental standards.
Shibley said the engineering school project fit into the master plan of enlarging the university, making it both cutting-edge and attractive.
“In some ways, it’s the physical embodiment of the ideals of UB 2020,” he said. “The whole of our campus plan is to make it a more supportive environment for teaching, researching and learning.”
bhayden@buffnews.com
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