INNOVATION July-August 2012

One of the four video screens in the atrium, displaying data on the building’s energy and water use, in real-time.

With skylights built into its ceiling, the CIRS auditorium is lit by naturally by daylight and doesn’t require a large supply of supplemental lighting.

buildings into engines of carbon sequestration—by incor- porating more wood construction, more wood elements.” The 58,000 square foot building is estimated to sequester the equivalent of 600 tonnes of CO 2e , greater than the 525 tonnes generated during the manufacturing, transportation and installation of other building materi- als used in construction. A substantial amount of the wood in CIRS is beetle- killed lodgepole pine from BC’s interior. Its role is struc- tural, but its beauty can’t be denied. In the building’s 423- seat auditorium, the arched wood ceiling and wood-pan- elled walls are striking. “The response from people is that they feel more comfortable with wood,” confirms Cayuela, who moved his office into the building last September

was the first university in Canada to adopt a sustainable development policy and one year later, in 1998, to open a sustainability office on campus. But if you’re going to talk the talk, you need to walk the walk. A building that would “not only create a showcase for sustainability and push the envelope for sustainability performance, but also be a centre for research on sustainability” was envisioned early on by Dr John Robinson, the executive director of the UBC Sustainability Initiative, says Alberto Cayuela PEng, Associate Director of the office. By their nature, a building and its occupants create an environmental footprint, usually a negative one; fossil fuels are consumed, greenhouse gasses are produced,

“ Instead of simply trying to make a smaller negative footprint, the thinkers behind CIRS wanted to leave a positive footprint ”

along with about 100 others. Wood has other benefits too; in the auditorium it provides excellent acoustics and it’s a better insulator than other construction materials. Finding the Energy Fix A bigger challenge—one of the biggest for the CIRS team—was finding an energy source that would also result in a check mark on the positive side of the ledger. “We’re not the best solar location in the known world,” notes Blair McCarry PEng, Principal at Perkins+Will. “With all the buildings around you can’t harvest wind, because of all the high trees, all those sorts of things, so we had a challenge.” Looking around the building site one day, McCarry noticed that the Earth and Ocean Sciences

rainwater is diverted to storm sewers, human waste is flushed away to be treated elsewhere. Instead of simply trying to make a smaller negative footprint, the thinkers behind CIRS wanted to leave a positive footprint based on four environmental measures: energy; water; and two types of carbon emissions, embodied and operational. The CIRS team (Perkins+Will, Stantec Consulting, Fast+Epp, Morrison Hershfield, LMDG and PWL Partnership) also wanted the building to be replicable, which meant keeping the cost of construction within the range of other comparable UBC buildings. They first met one of their carbon goals by choos- ing wood as the main building material. “It’s the only material that’s truly renewable, made by the sun, indi- rectly,” says Cayuela. “We think that’s the way of turning

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