NEWS RELEASE

1/15/02

Barbara Palmer, News Service (650) 724-6184; e-mail: barbara.palmer@stanford.edu

New Jasper Ridge Field Station a "green" project from the ground up

When San Diego architect Rob Quigley first considered the hillside at Jasper Ridge Biological Preserve where a new field station is now under construction, his first impulse was that he should design nothing. The oak-dotted hill, part of a 1,200-acre oasis with such rich diversity of plant and animal life that it is included in an international biosphere reserve, seemed sacrosanct. Breaking ground there "could almost be seen as an act of violence," Quigley told a campus audience last spring.

But with more than 60 research projects, classes and public programs being conducted out of a collection of makeshift buildings that included a converted hamburger stand, the need for a field station was beyond overdue, said Philippe Cohen, who became preserve director in 1993. "The first day I walked into Searsville Lab, I thought, 'Come on. This isn't going to cut it.' "

It took a few years longer than Cohen expected, but those deficiencies will vanish when the $5 million, 9,800-square-foot Leslie Shao-ming Sun Field Station opens in March. The new building, named for a former docent, will bring the preserve's labs and programs under one roof, providing scientists, students and staff with lab space, four offices, two classrooms and a kitchen.

And from its floor, poured with concrete made with fly ash, a product of coal combustion, to its photovoltaic-panel-topped roof, the new field station will be the "greenest" building yet constructed by the university.

The outside walls will be sheathed with recycled redwood siding and interior walls will be painted with recycled latex. Sunlight ­ which, as Cohen points out, is the most abundant natural resource in Northern California ­ will provide most of the field station's light and much of the energy to heat the building. The 25 banks of photovoltaic panels, which convert sunlight into electricity, are expected to create a surplus of electricity ­ power that will go back to the grid.

"That's the goal ­ that you'll be able to walk out there to the meter and see it spinning backward," said project architect Catherine Herbst, who flies up to the construction site from Quigley's San Diego office every Tuesday.

Solar collectors on the south wall will gather energy to heat a glycol solution, which in turn will heat water to be piped through small radiators. Eventually, Cohen also hopes to have a "gray water" system to divert water used in sinks and the field station's two showers for reuse. For now, the field station uses tankless water heaters and waterless urinals (which use a trap containing a lightweight solution to seal off waste). "There's nothing going on here that if there's a water usage we didn't try to think about," said Cohen.

As far as air conditioning goes, "it turns out there's a lot of natural ventilation in the world. It's called wind," Herbst said.

"Lost art"

Although the building's design is on the cutting edge of the trend in architectural and engineering circles toward sustainability, "the hysterical thing about it is that the technology is all from the turn of the century," said Herbst. Tanks and cisterns were once commonly used to collect solar energy, she said. "This is probably pretty close to how they used to heat the Stanford barns, I'd guess."

In designing the building, architects relied on what Herbst called "the lost art" of siting. "It's really the biggest dilemma in architecture. You get your most gain out of being really smart about how you site the building. You get the best solar performance and the best daylighting performance. And it all happens in that first move."

In siting the original campus buildings on an east-west axis, Frederick Law Olmsted's plan took similar advantage of the sun, noted campus architect David Neuman. The Main Quad is a classic passive solar design, Neuman said. The arcades shade the buildings from direct radiant heat and the insulating sandstone bricks moderate the temperature of hot and cold air from outside.

One drawback to the old low-tech passive solar systems was that they couldn't be easily controlled, Herbst said. Technologies widely used in the 20th century, like air conditioning and forced air systems, had the advantage of being infinitely controllable, she said. "Now there are electronic technologies that allow you to control the low-tech systems to a higher degree of idiosyncrasy."

Computerized models of the path of the sun also gave architects greater precision in designing the building, she said. Light monitors will be installed on the roof to balance the amount of interior light that shines into the building, "and it's a big deal how the monitors cast shadows on the photovoltaic panels on the roof," Herbst said.

Cohen and architects also did everything they could to make sure construction of the field station altered the landscape as little as possible. The drip lines of all the mature oak trees on the site were fenced off and young oak seedlings were transplanted elsewhere on the preserve. Construction spared the whitened skeleton of a dead oak tree, whose pocked trunk and sculpture-like lines of its bare branches now will serve as a focal point for the entrance. The tree, affectionately known as "Snag," stays until it falls over, said Cohen. "It's a woodpecker acorn granary."

Minimizing materials, maximizing recycling

The building also was engineered to minimize the use of materials. There are no load-bearing walls; wood and steel trusses, augmented with cables, carry the weight of the roof. The footprint of the building actually shrank during the design process, Cohen said, from 12,500 square feet to 9,800 square feet.

Cohen also sought out used materials wherever he could. "Clients are usually horrified when I suggest reusing material," said Quigley. "But Philippe is a great bird dog."

Cohen found some of the redwood siding that will cover the exterior walls at a house renovation in Woodside, and more came from one- and two-story apartments that were demolished at Escondido Village to make way for four-story studio apartment buildings. Volunteers from the student group Stanford Task Force for Sustainable Building assisted in the salvage efforts, campus project engineer Ted Giesing said. "Materials are constantly being made available on campus, because of renovation or construction or tearing down old buildings, that can be put to use," he said.

The building's skylights are recycled from another building, a walk-in cold room was salvaged from a lab on campus, and cabinetry was purchased cut-rate from a biotech firm in Fremont that overbought lab casework, Cohen said. The entrance will be paved with bricks from Jane and Leland Stanford's country home, which was destroyed in the 1906 earthquake. "The bricks came over from Scotland as a ship's ballast. I love that," Cohen said.

"There is so much waste in our society. There's stuff sitting around collecting dust and stuff that goes to landfills that can be diverted and put back to use if you are just willing to do a little bit of legwork," he added.

In all the months of planning, one thing that never came up is exactly what style the new building could be called. When asked, Herbst and Cohen looked at one another and laughed. "I don't know. Cool!" suggested Cohen.

"Usually when people are thinking of a sustainable building, they're thinking, 'Oh, what does that look like?' " said Giesing. "But sustainability is not an architectural style, it's an attitude." It is design that considers both resources and human comfort, he said. "Adding insulation and using higher performance windows will not be as immediately obvious to the layman as, say, photovoltaic panels."

A campus trend

Giesing said he's seen a great change in awareness on campus since he started working here 18 months ago. Attention to sustainability has come from engineering and architecture communities here, and a number of conferences and workshops offering learning opportunities have been held, including a "Greening the Universities" symposium sponsored by Stanford Land and Buildings. An Environmental Stewardship Committee was formed in the spring of 2001 to develop Stanford-specific building guidelines, which will be published soon, he said. "The main concern about sustainability is how much it will cost and what options are available to a given project."

The issue isn't whether you "do sustainability" but whether you ever ask such questions as what alternative materials are available, said Cohen. "If you don't ask those questions, they are being answered by how a building is built, but nobody has made a formal decision about it in any explicit sense."

"When you think about the construction process and the design process, you ask about a billion questions," added Herbst. "What difference does it make if there are 10,000 more?"

In March, when research scientists who do field work at the preserve, along with students, docents and staff, come together at the field station, the new building will provide a "whole bunch of synergistic effects that will exceed all the other benefits," Cohen said. The open, airy building will give scientists the opportunity to run into each other and exchange ideas, he said.

Although Cohen expects the building to be a knockout, "the scenario I'd like to avoid is where everybody who sees the building thinks it's beautiful but everybody who uses it hates it," Cohen said. "If everybody who uses it goes 'Eh, big deal,' but everybody who uses it loves it, as far as I'm concerned, that's what counts."

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By Barbara Palmer