The architect-of-record is meeting with board members of the Collaborative for High Performance Schools (CHPS) at the Cesar Chavez Education Center in Oakland, Calif. Sitting in an elementary school classroom, the group discusses CHPS’s guidelines for sustainable design, and how the facility measures up.
Talk flows freely around a circular table. Do the building’s users understand the facility? Is the casework going to hold up over time? The pale linoleum reflects light well, but will it highlight scuff marks? Is it the fans or coils that are compromising the boiler system’s performance? Did we pay too much for the recycled tiles in the restrooms?
Working with the Division of the State Architect, the California Energy Commission, and local utilities, CHPS (pronounced "chips") is trying to improve school planning and energy efficiency through incentive programs and training. The $20 million Chavez Education Center is the latest step in the process.
The 95,000-square-foot school serves 600 students in pre-school through grade five, and features sensors that automatically adjust artificial light in response to natural daylight. Other components include a high-efficiency heating and ventilation system, complex acoustic assemblies, non-toxic materials, and recycled products.
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PROJECT DATA Cesar Chavez Education Center Type: Pre-School to Fifth Grade/Community Center |
Sustainability also calls for well-sited facilities that play an important role in their community, and Chavez is now the primary community center in this large, urban neighborhood. Chavez will also serve as one of several demonstration schools, exemplifying high-performance to school officials and designers throughout the state in the effort to build other schools like it.
Sustainable Products
Billions of dollars in bond money are funneling into California’s construction pipeline. Major districts in Los Angeles, San Francisco, and San Diego have embraced the CHPS criteria, which are based on studies confirming the relationship between a school’s physical condition and improved attendance and test scores.
A CHPS high-performance school must win at least 28 out of 81 points on a scorecard. The first new school built in the Oakland Unified School District in more than 30 years, the Chavez Center earned 38 points, a victory for an urban school district in severe financial and administrative turmoil. The district went through four superintendents over the short life of the project, culminating in a takeover by the state in 2003.
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| Guidelines from the Collaborative for High Performance Schools call for a minimum ceiling height at 10 feet for classrooms, aiding daylighting strategies. In this classroom, the non-toxic linoleum flooring is pale in color, adding to an effect of diffuse light without glare. In addition, a stepped lighting system detects daylight and automatically adjusts, shutting off three rows of electric lights row-by-row. |
A succession of four district project managers created periods of transition in which architects had no owner representative to consult. Among the many difficulties this situation presented was the task of familiarizing district officials with the many new sustainable products on the market.
Even under the best circumstances, getting schools to embrace new products is a challenge, according to Alice Sung, AIA, LEED, who served as project director for VBN Architects. "Many sustainable products haven’t been time-tested in public schools for 20 years, but they won’t be unless somebody takes that leap of faith," says Sung.
Working with VBN project manager George Williams, AIA, Sung’s design team was able to include varied environmentally-friendly products, though many had to be cut out of the project. Issues of cost, availability, and sustainability were weighed in an ongoing assessment that often relied on partial information.
California’s Division of the State Architect (DSA) is responding to this dilemma. By 2005, the DSA expects to launch an online database of Environmentally Preferable Products (EPP) to help steer school projects through a new market in sustainable products.
"We’re not just listing the qualities of the product, but also the performance over its life, to give designers and maintenance folks a much-needed tool," says State Architect of California Steve Castellanos, FAIA, also the CHPS chair.
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Rubber floors in the gym buffer sound, as do baffles hung from the open-truss ceiling. |
On the facility tour, Sung leads Castellanos and other CHPS board members through naturally-ventilated, daylighted corridors. The sustainable products used here keep this facility free of that "new-building smell," an unofficial standard of sustainability.
"New-building smell is things like benzene and formaldehyde, things that aren’t healthy," says Charles Eley, FAIA, PE, noting the CHPS 1350 program precisely measures a product’s chemical emissions.
Sung, who recently left VBN to start her own firm, Greenbank Associates, points to natural daylighting as a success. "There are a lot of schools out there that have lots of windows and skylights at any orientation and without proper shading, but that’s not natural daylighting in the high-performance sense," Sung says. "Natural daylighting in the CHPS sense means a maximization of evenly-spread, diffuse light, without heat gain."
To maximize natural daylight, CHPS guidelines prescribe classroom heights of at least 10 feet, and Chavez meets this standard. VBN also called for railed openings in the floors of the second level to provide light wells to corridors below.
In the classrooms, direct-lighting sensors are tied to a stepped electrical lighting system. Stepped, or "tiered," lighting automatically turns off rows of lights in accordance with the amount of daylight in a room. In contrast to dimmed lighting systems, which decrease light from all fixtures at once, stepped systems responds to daylight fixture-by-fixture.
According to Sung, research has yet to establish if one system is superior. But one pitfall she knew to avoid was an overactive system. "Calibration of the sensor cells for the dimming ballasts is so sensitive that if a cloud or plane passes, the lights go up and down and up and down," says Sung. "It’s good to have a stepped or dimmed system that is also timed. The time may be 10 or 15 minutes, so it can handle a plane or a cloud and not trigger."
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PRODUCT DATA Construction Materials Ceilings: Armstrong Carpet and Flooring Carpet: Collin & Aikman Physical Education Equipment Basketball Backstops: American Athletic Miscellaneous Cabinets: Medite II; Sierra Pine |
Oakland’s location in the mild and breezy San Francisco Bay Area provides ideal conditions for natural ventilation through operable windows. Air quality suffers when rooms are sealed for air conditioning, and Chavez operates largely without A/C, the exceptions being the gym, library, computer labs, and computer closets.
In addition, occupancy sensors are tied to the individual heating and ventilation units. Such energy-efficient features are the result of not just smart design, but also smart planning and the backing of many organizations. Bringing a commissioning agent into the project early in the design process is always critical, Sung and Eley say.
"Commissioning, like it is commonly used with ships, means performing a methodical check to make sure each system, each piece of equipment, each control is working as it was intended to work and is achieving the goal of the project," explains Eley.
PG&E, the local investor-owned utility, provided $55,000 to hire a commissioning agent, who will follow through to make sure users and staff understand the sustainable building systems. The school district earned a one-time incentive of $20,000 from PG&E for exceeding the state’s energy code minimums by 20 percent. The California Energy Commission also provided $250,000 to support this exemplar of energy-efficiency.
Guidelines Met
On one side of Chavez Center is a busy thoroughfare, on the other elevated tracks carrying electric commuter trains. Construction managers from GKK/McCarthy prepared an old Montgomery Wards site made difficult to access by the urban conditions. The city of Oakland provided the site in exchange for community use.
"As part of the agreement with the city, Chavez was to be used as a joint-use facility, so the gym is oversized and built to be used for community basketball and also for community use," says Steve Fernandes, project manager for McCarthy Building Co. A kitchen and community dining area off the gym are dedicated for community use, and the spacious playing fields to be laid out this summer are also part of this agreement.
Noise from the thoroughfare and rapid-transit trains also presented an acoustics challenge. CHPS guidelines require classrooms to have a minimum occupied noise level and maximum reverberation level, but Chavez required more intensive acoustic treatments. Dampening sound in the center’s classrooms are double-glazed, 1-1/2 inch thick windows with an air space. The ceiling on the second floor has two layers of gypsum board with acoustic tile.
"We paid particular attention to the floor-ceiling assembly on the first floor," says Sung. "The floor-ceiling assembly is 1-3/4-inch gyp over plywood, with the acoustic tile overhung on resilient channels. Underneath the second floor is the acoustic membrane."
Also of interest are the individual restrooms in the classrooms and corridors. Preliminary design meetings with staff indicated communal restrooms were a source of poor sanitation and a security problem. Oakland’s teachers traced everything from the abuse of restroom passes to occasional gang activity back to communal restrooms.
Having individual toilets in the classrooms allows teachers to identify students with poor restroom habits. Teachers won’t have to leave class to track down students on extended trips to the restroom, and the nearby toilets are a convenience to the teachers themselves.
The school’s bay windows give every classroom a distinctive feel and provide convenient break-out areas. The five-sided classrooms are also paired to share a flexible space in between. These areas can be used for interim storage for special projects, individual testing, or a preparation room for teachers. "It gives you that singular space that you don’t get in a box classroom," says Sung.
Outside, the facility is a stimulating piece of architecture that marks Chavez as a community resource. Brightly colored-but not so bright as to overwhelm a block filled with older structures-the facility also boasts a clock tower announcing the entrance. The tower is also a clever architectural cloak for an access elevator shaft that needed to rise 12 feet above the facility.
"In every respect, Cesar Chavez seems to be incredibly well connected to the neighborhoods that it serves. And that is also a sustainable goal," says Castellanos. "What seems to be a successful school so far will be borne out through the continuing research and the case study that will come out in months to come."
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On the Web The Cesar Chavez Education Center project involved numerous organizations dedicated to energy efficiency and sustainable schools, many offering useful resources online. Collaborative for High Performance Schools Environmental Products Database Heschong Mahone Group Savings By Design Bright Schools |