May 20, 2004

Design center a model green building

Ford Motor Company Engineering Design Center features several advances in energy conservation, temperature control, environmental impact

By Megan Fellman

The Ford Motor Company Engineering Design Center under construction on Sheridan Road has been designed to be an innovative and environmentally sustainable building that will use about 20 percent less energy than one built to conventional high-quality construction standards.

Construction is underway on the Ford Motor Company Engineering Design Center, located south of Tech on Sheridan Road.

Located just south of the Technological Institute, the six-story, 84,000-square-foot building will be the focal point for the Robert R. McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science’s initiatives in design education, including the Engineering Design and Communications program for first-year undergraduates.

Early in the design process for the center, McCormick School Dean John Birge and the building committee established leadership in environmental sustainability as an objective for the $30 million facility to complement McCormick’s unique curriculum in engineering design.

“We want to build the most environmentally sustainable structure we can,” said Birge, “not only because conserving energy is the right thing to do, but because we want the building itself to be an important educational resource for our students, allowing them to see the positive aspects of a green building in an urban setting.”

To keep energy costs down, the building’s design will provide natural daylight to more than 75 percent of the building’s interior spaces, which is notable considering that two of the six floors are below ground. In addition, an automated solar tracking system throughout the building will close window shades in the face of direct sunlight and open shades in areas facing away from the sun. An innovative raised-floor system will provide more precise temperature control at the individual-occupant level, resulting in more efficient heating and cooling of interior spaces.

On the exterior, a number of measures are being taken to minimize the building’s impact on the surrounding environment:

• A light-reflective roof will reduce the “heat island” effect of the building on the site.

• Exterior lighting will light the ground and not the surrounding sky, reducing urban light pollution near the Dearborn Observatory.

• A specially integrated retention basin, located beneath the building, will capture rainfall that will be used to water the building’s surrounding landscape and the historic Shakespeare Garden to the east. Any excess will be returned directly to ground water rather than to the city sewer system.

The University engaged a team of experts in environmentally sustainable building design from the Rocky Mountain Institute in Snowmass, Colo., to review design constraints and recommend specific measures that could be implemented to achieve certification from the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design. In addition, the building committee worked closely with The Garden Club of Evanston, whose members are the Shakespeare Garden’s caretakers.

The Ford building will house McCormick programs currently occupying leased space off campus. In addition to EDC, these programs include the Institute for Design Engineering and Applications; the department of computer science; the Master of Management and Manufactur-ing graduate program, which is run jointly by McCormick and the Kellogg School of Management; and the department of civil and environmental engineering’s Infrastructure Technology Institute.