from the ground up - The Tyee

How to Design a Building that Restores the EarthUBC’s Centre for Interactive Research on Sustainability aims to set a newNorth American standard by actually benefitting the environment.By Katie HyslopArticle first published on March 28, 2011 by TheTyee.ca.What if a building wasn’t just sustainable, butactually benefitted the environment? It’s a loftygoal, but the University of British Columbia istrying to achieve it with the construction of whatthey believe will be the greenest building in NorthAmerica.Right now, the Centre for Interactive Research onSustainability (CIRS) is a two-story shell of a building:there are no doors, the stairs are rough, andrebar and plywood are the main decor instead ofoffice furniture and potted plants. But by the time it’scompleted this June, CIRS will be more than just astylish campus building: it will meet both the LEEDPlatinum and Living Building Challenge standards,and give back more than its taking in air, water andenergy, upping the productivity and happiness of thepeople who inhabit it.“The aspiration is for a regenerative building, essentiallya building that can live within its footprint,what’s available to it in terms of mass and energy flowon the site or within the site,” says Alberto Cayuela,associate director of UBC’s Sustainability Initiative,which is in charge of the CIRS project.Not just a bunch of hot airCIRS relies on a series of heating systems, including16 geothermal rods, solar hot water and a heaterexchange connected to the adjacent Earth and OceanSciences Building.In a climate where the amount of heating in wintermatches the cooling in summer, geothermal rodsDue to open in June, CIRS is being touted as a ‘regenerative’building.could successfully mine the earth’s cooling and hot airto operate a building like CIRS.But in a place like Vancouver, where the amount ofheat required is three times the cooling, a geothermalsystem runs the risk of taking out too much heat andcooling the earth, causing a system decline over time.To avoid this, CIRS takes as much heat out of theground as it does cool air, and relies on heat exchangerscapturing wasted air from a nearby building towarm up the rest.“(Earth and Ocean Science Building) consumes 1,600megawatt hours a year of steam from the steam plant,and 990 goes through the roof, the fume hoods. Sothat building, by law, that’s 10 air changes in hourin every fume hood, and that’s 990 megawatt hoursthrough the roof,” says John Robinson, executivedirector of the Sustainability Initiative.“We’re taking all of that heat, bringing it into CIRS,we only need 300, we’re giving 600 back to that69