Posted: December 11, 2007
APPLETON, Wis. – Hoffman, LLC (www.hoffman.net) has long been recognized as a pioneer in green building design. This dedication culminated with the firm’s Northland Pines High School design and construction project in Eagle River, Wis. The project is the first LEED-Gold certified public high school in the United States.
The prestigious environmental designation – awarded by the U.S. Green Building Council in Washington, D.C. (www.usgbc.org) – certifies that the school meets specific and stringent standards for energy and water use, clean indoor air, recycling of building materials and other factors that make the school’s impact gentler on the northwoods environment. Hoffman, an Appleton-based design-build firm, and its subcontractors rewarded the Northland Pines School District’s willingness to strive for higher environmental standards, while still delivering the project at a square-foot cost below industry averages.
“We started working with them from the vision stage,” Paul Hoffman, president of Hoffman, LLC, said of the relationship with the administration and school board members. “We had the end in mind from the first day we talked to them.”
The “end in mind” was to earn silver certification and become the first LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) certified K-12 school of any kind in Wisconsin. They achieved that and went one step further to gold certification, the second highest of four levels awarded by the USGBC.
“It tells us we built the building correctly – we were sensitive to the environment,” School Board President Tom Christensen said. “It means we picked a good company to help us build our building.”
The $28.8 million, 253,000-square-foot high school, serving up to 600 students, opened for the 2006-07 school year. It features an atrium central commons area, naturally lit classrooms, clean air monitoring and water-saving dual flush toilets and waterless urinals. Even the cleaning products were selected based on low fume emissions and non-hazardous chemicals.
The high school was built at a cost of $116 per square foot, 23% below the national median cost of $150 per square foot for high schools built in 2006, according to School Planning and Management magazine’s “2006 Construction Report.”
“The project’s LEED gold certification validates and confirms that it can be done at low or no cost, and it’s one of those right things to do,” Thomas R. Cox, AIA, LEED AP, principal-in-charge for Hoffman, said. “There’s no reason not to do it.”
Hoffman pioneered green design principals in the 1990’s, developing their corporate philosophy into a design process. Total Project Management: Vision Taken to the Power of Green (TPMg) is a process that integrates efficient and cost-effective building solutions that respect the environment while enhancing a building’s quality and value and reducing initial and long-term facility costs.
Cox said the design team discussed the concepts with school district officials early on simply as being good design. ““Everyone saw the higher-level benefit of including these concepts. It just made so much sense to everybody,” he said.
Northland Pines District Administrator Mike Richie said he is very pleased with the project. “It exceeded our expectations, because all along our goal was a silver certification,” he said. “It’s nice to be a front-runner when it comes to having an environmental school.”
Richie said students seem more respectful of the new building and happy to be there, and morale has improved for both staff and students.
Mark Hanson, director of sustainable services for Hoffman, said the dedication to making green building possible and affordable permeates all of the work the company does in the educational, municipal, office, medical and commercial sectors. For more than 10 years, he said, Hoffman has employed energy-saving technology and environmental design concepts, including in building its own headquarters in 1999 – when LEED certification was still a little-known pilot program.
Efficiently designed mechanical and lighting systems, along with higher insulation standards, will provide energy savings of 40 percent over conventional construction but LEED certification goes well beyond energy savings.
Recycled materials constitute nearly 25 percent of the total building material cost for the new high school and an impressive 83 percent of all building wastes were recycled, including those from demolition of the 27-year-old structure it replaced.
A crew of Amish workmen reclaimed large laminated beams and removed and remilled wood flooring that will now enhance other building projects, Jody Andres, project architect for Hoffman, LLC, said. Old brick and mortar were ground up and used in the roadbed and under parking lots.
Northland Pines High School also incorporates:
Paul Hoffman said the company is not a newcomer to the now-fashionable concept of building green. Hoffman, LLC, is dedicated to its philosophy of Total Project Management: Vision Taken to the Power of Green. “It’s part of the fabric of who we are and what we stand for,” he said.
Tom Christensen is happy with the results of that philosophy.
“It’s important to our taxpayers – today and in the future – that we built a building that is energy efficient,” he said. But there’s more to design than efficiency. While the environmental impact is low, Christensen said the new high school is high-impact in another way. “Everyone walks into that building and it’s just: ‘Wow,’” he said.
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