Design > The House of Very Green Gables

Most LEED-certified buildings in the United States have been designed and constructed with the goal of greener building in mind. To do so is not that much more expensive than traditional construction, and we’re sure those investors are quite happy with their decision—not to mention the employees who are breathing healthier air and enjoying more comfortable and natural lighting.

In the thickly built up cities of the Northeast, where tearing down a building might pit you against any number of Historic Conservation Societies, building new can be difficult to achieve. Pittsburgh is one city that’s been actively overcoming this obstacle for years, with four LEED-certified historic buildings (and another eight which are de facto “green” but that were not constructed with LEED in mind). The city was a fitting home for the ground-breaking 2006 Historic Properties National Summit, the first conference on a national level to formally address the incorporation of sustainability into the preservation of historic buildings, and to attempt to address the technical issues (in codes and technique) inherent in reconciling the two very different fields.

City planners in Cambridge, Massachusetts, faced some tough choices when the Cambridge City Hall Annex, which was built over 130 years ago, needed rehabilitation. The choices they made in the end earned them an award from the Massachusetts Historic Commission. The Annex is now the oldest building with Gold-level LEED certification in the country.

Without destroying the building’s integrity or aesthetic appeal, astonishing changes have been made: three wells provide the thermal energy for a ground source heat pump to do all the heating and cooling; a light well brings sunlight between levels, a welcome feature especially in New England winters; a grant-funded solar array, not visible from the street in keeping with the local historic authority’s demands, supplies about ten percent of the building’s electricity needs; even the beautifully mullioned windows are now double-glazed to minimize heat gain and loss.

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