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LEED
(Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design)
2007
NCSHPO Annual Meeting Squaretable Discussion
At the 2007
NCSHPO Annual Meeting, the SHPOs participated in a squaretable
discussion on LEED. The abstract for the discussion:
In the past ten years, the sustainable
design movement has begun to codify a formal approach for establishing
and evaluating what makes a building “green.” There
are now several methods that attempt to measure sustainable
design, and the one having the biggest impact in our country
is an evaluation tool known as the LEED Green Building Rating
System (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) developed
by the United States Green Building Council (USGBC). At least
three states California,
Washington and New
Mexico have Governor Executive Orders promoting LEED Standard
buildings, including older and historic buildings.
(NOTE: There are twelve states that
have green building Executive Orders. Click here
for those states as well as a summary of Executive Order.)
At the NCSHPO Board of Directors meeting
on October 31, 2006, the Board decided, as part of its 2007
NCSHPO Work Plan “to broaden and build relationships with
‘industry’ and other organization and associations,
with an emphasis on the USCGB and LEED Standards.” This
squaretable will explore past initiatives, current practices
and future considerations to develop a joint NCSHPO policy on
sustainability, LEED standards, and historic preservation.
The following information was written
by Wayne Donaldson, the California SHPO, and Kak Slick, the New
Mexico SHPO, prior to the 2007 NCSHPO Annual Meeting squaretable
disucssion.
Background
Older and historic buildings comprise more
than half of the existing buildings in the United States and the
retention and reuse of these buildings preserves the materials,
embodied energy, and human capital already expended in their construction.
The recycling of buildings is one of the most beneficial “green”
practices, and stresses the importance and value of historic preservation
in the overall promotion of sustainability. The accepted definition
of sustainability from the U.N. World Commission on Environment
and Development’s 1987 report, “Our Common Future”
is that sustainability involves “meeting the needs of the
present without compromising the ability of future generations
to meet their own needs.” The intersection of sustainable
design and historic preservation would seem a natural alliance.
Mike Jackson, in his essay “Building
a Culture that Sustains Design” (APT Bulletin, Vol.
36, No. 4, 2005, p. 2) builds a case for this natural alliance:
“Both approaches are concerned with the built environment
and its relationship to the natural one. Sustainable design and
historic preservation need to find their common ground, identify
any potential conflicts, and develop complementary programs.”
In the past ten years, the sustainable design
movement has begun to codify a formal approach for establishing
and evaluating what makes a building “green.” There
are now several methods that attempt to measure sustainable design,
and the one having the biggest impact in our country is an evaluation
tool known as the LEED Green Building Rating System (Leadership
in Energy and Environmental Design) developed by the United States
Green Building Council (USGBC).
The historic preservation community applauds
these developments, but has had concerns that these standardized
tools are lacking in how they address historic properties. Specifically,
these standards overlook the impact of projects on cultural value;
do not effectively consider the performance, longer service lives
and embodied energy of historic materials and assemblies; and
are overly focused on current or future technologies, neglecting
how past experience helps to determine sustainable performance.
This realization has caused several national
organizations, which create preservation policy and best practices,
to join together. The National Trust for Historic Preservation
is coordinating the activities of a national coalition to develop
a joint strategy for making historic preservation a more viable
option within green building. The organizations currently involved
are the American Institute of Architects (AIA), the Association
for Preservation Technology International (APT), the National
Park Service (NPS) and the National Trust for Historic Preservation
(NTHP). An initial priority for the group is to affect how preservation
is treated in green rating systems, notably the LEED system. This
coalition has reached out to USGBC to become more involved in
the development and revision of LEED products and to advise on
the development of guidelines for historic buildings. The leadership
of these organizations met with USGBC leadership in early March
2007. Additionally, the group plans to develop a joint policy
position on sustainability and historic preservation. The coalition,
which was created a year ago, is now expanding its membership
and has invited participation from NCSHPO and GSA.
Overview
The dialogue between historic preservation
and green building advocates has been promoted at a variety of
conferences, symposia and workshops in the past five years helping
to define both the inherent conflicts and synergy of the two design
approaches. APT established a Technical Committee on Sustainable
Preservation in 2004 and held a seminal symposium in Halifax in
2005 (The Sustainable Heritage Conservation Symposium) which was
attended by representatives from both the historic preservation
and green building communities, resulting in a statement of purpose
and an action plan which were published in a special
issue of the APT Bulletin in late 2005. The national coalition
has been using this publication as a guideline for their policy
efforts. Workshops throughout the country such as those held in
Seattle, Riverside, California, the annual EcoBuild Federal Summits
in Washington, DC, and an invited Department of Energy symposium
this past December 2006, to name but a few, have furthered the
dialogue.
During the National Trust for Historic Preservation
Conference in Pittsburgh, PA, November 1 – 5, 2006, several
tours, workshops, and meetings were held to encourage the “greening”
of historic properties. A special session, the Greening of Historic
Properties National Summit, was also held on October 30, 2006
prior to the Conference, and a working draft White Paper titled
"Pinpointing
Strategies and Tactics for Integrating Green Building Technologies
into Historic Structures" was distributed on November
8, 2006.
While the Summit was a valuable experience
for attendees, “The White Paper”, as it is currently
written, does not appropriately reflect the positive outcome and
discussions of that session. APT, the National Trust and the National
Park Service (click here
for the National Park Service's response) have all registered
their concerns about the discrepancies in the paper and it is
their hope that the White Paper will be adjusted to focus on the
results described in the last four pages of that paper so that
it too can help to move the dialogue forward.
Next Steps
At the NCSHPO Board of Directors meeting
on October 31, 2006, the Board decided to explore NCSHPOs participation
in the greening of historic buildings, and broaden our relationships
with the USGBC and the National Trust for Historic Preservation
in their efforts towards better representing historic preservation
methods in LEED products or, at the very least, to support the
integration of LEED principles into historic buildings.
All of these efforts encourage the integration
of historic buildings into the green building movement by promoting
a better representation into the LEED rating system. Throughout
the country, there are anecdotal reports from designers, architects,
and consultants who note that their clients are demanding that
LEED standards be followed, even if certification is not obtained,
for older and historic building rehabilitations.
The LEED rating system includes a variety
of products and tools. The most widely used product for historic
preservation, rehabilitation and restoration projects is LEED
NC (New Construction). While there is a LEED for Existing Buildings
it is actually a system designed as a maintenance tool which encourages
maximizing operational efficiency while minimizing environmental
impacts. It provides a recognized, performance-based benchmark
for building owners and caretakers to measure operations, improvements
and maintenance on a constant scale. LEED for Existing Buildings
is a road map for delivering economically profitable, environmentally
responsible, healthy, productive places to live and work but it
is not an effective tool for construction projects.
The LEED rating system provides points for
projects which, when added, become a rating system that identifies
the level of sustainability a project will reach – from
Certified, to Silver, Gold and ultimately Platinum. When combined
with the Federal
Historic Rehabilitation Tax Credit Program and using the Secretary
of the Interior’s Standards for the Rehabilitation of Historic
Properties (Standards), the LEED principles can become an
added bonus towards the historic preservation movement, insure
the conservation of historic properties, and make good economic
sense while promoting sound environmental stewardship.
Under the USGBC guidelines, however, mandated
energy efficiency standards, and state-of-the-art building, environmental,
and life safety control systems can prove challenging to historic
fabric. Integrating new materials and technologies, including
electrical, HVAC, electronic and fiber optic cabling, new energy-efficient
windows and exterior wall insulation can appear to be at odds
with the Standards by un-informed practitioners lacking the experience
to broaden the interpretation of the LEED criteria. Obviously,
LEED-focused technology principles can provide significant challenges
and may bring green building advocates into direct conflict with
accepted historic preservation principles, largely because of
a lack of education on the part of designers and owners. In addition,
historic buildings and their existing low energy designed systems
(e.g. prismatic glass, reflective tin ceilings, and durable materials
such as marble) are not given equitable points in the scoring
system as noted under the LEED Existing Building grading system.
To address these issues, there needs to
be input from the NCSHPO to encourage larger scale discussions
and guidelines for the integration of historic preservation principles
and green building guidelines. Awareness of the multiple organizations
and agencies participating in these common efforts would benefit
each SHPO and their office staff when dealing with LEED historic
building candidates. The development of the LEED program appears
to have similar global potential impacts to historic properties
as earlier energy-loss conservation principles, Americans with
Disabilities Act, Toxic Substances Act, various seismic and structural
strengthening ordinances and similar compliance programs that
are continuing to affect historic buildings and structures. The
LEED program being much broader than buildings, over the last
few years, has garnered wide support from public and private concerns
at large.
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