6. Build for the future.

Buildings account for 30 percent of the world's raw material consumption and 25 percent of its timber harvest. They account for 16 percent of the world's fresh water withdrawal and 40 percent of its energy consumption. In American history, buildings have been designed to protect people from the elements. These days, they also need to be designed to protect nature from people, and their consumption of resources in constructing and operating our architectural structures.

We teach Environmental Studies to St. Olaf students in many of the academic buildings on the St. Olaf campus. But we also teach environmental lessons with all of the buildings on campus. As David Orr suggests in Earth in Mind , "academic architecture is a kind of crystallized pedagogy and that buildings have their own hidden curriculum that teaches as effectively as any course taught in them." ¹

Historically, St. Olaf's architects and builders have not used the language of ecological design, but they've provided the college with a strong foundation anyway. When buildings are designed ecologically, they utilize local materials. They're adapted to site, and built to be adaptable. They're functional; they're energy efficient; and they're designed to last.

Old Main. photo by Lauren Anderson '06

Old Main is a good example of green building without green design. Built in 1878, it's still in use. Constructed from regionally manufactured "Milwaukee brick," it reduced the resources needed to move materials to the site. Its large sash windows provide daylighting and a 19th-century form of air conditioning. Originally, Old Main housed every function of the college—student and faculty housing, library, classrooms, cafeteria, chapel, and administrative office. Now it houses the college's foreign language departments. The building isn't as efficient as some modern buildings, but it has been retrofitted with storm windows and insulation that weren't in the original plan.

Holland Hall, the first building in the Norman Gothic style, was St. Olaf's first science building; it also housed administrative offices. The building was intended to embody the ideals of St. Olaf; Professor Carl Mellby considered the Gothic structure a potent teacher. The massive walls and buttresses suggested, he said, "the permanence and the power of the religious and intellectual ideas which it is to shelter." The repetition of ascending lines spoke of "the upward reach of the search for truth and beauty and the deep seated striving of the human mind and heart for an ideal lying far above things commonplace and material." The constant variation in form and line pointed to "the richness and variety of human thinking and human experience, as well as to the endless resources of the world, spiritual and material, to which we are heirs." With a solid limestone façade, the building has also embodied environmental principles of durability, adaptability, functionality and effectiveness. But somehow, in their enthusiasm for gorgeous Gothic windows, the planners forgot to think about screens or storm windows, so there are seasons of the year when natural ventilation is a problem. ²

The current Science Center stands on the site of Old Mohn Hall, thus maintaining the architectural footprint of the college. But it was built in the late 1960s, before the energy crises of the last 40 years, and it has virtually no insulation to moderate Minnesota's weather extremes. Legend has it that if you put a poster on an outside wall, you double the R-value of its insulation. Even this building, though, was designed to be adaptable, and it will serve the college in a new (and hopefully more efficient) form after the new Science Complex is constructed.

Buntrock Commons

Starting with Buntrock Commons, the college has been more intentional about ecological design and green building. Planners tried to mesh the human purposes of the building with the larger patterns and flows of the natural world. They wanted a building that served the needs of the campus for food and recreation and student services and meeting spaces, and they wanted a building that made people feel good doing what they need to do. Consulting widely with the community, they designed for good light and visual connections with the outdoors. Most corridors, for example, are on outside walls, or daylit at either end—or both. They planned generous spaces, with both open areas (like the Crossroads) and conversational nooks and crannies. They used natural materials—wood and stone in particular—to achieve a warm sense of place and permanence. And they integrated the traditional design vocabulary of the campus into a fully modern building. As David Orr says, it's architecture as pedagogy.

Imagining the environmental impacts of the building, the architects and planners considered full life-cycle analysis to make decisions about design. All St. Olaf construction projects get a thorough energy analysis, even before schematic design. We consider energy sourcing, use and conservation, life-cycle costs of control devices, payback cycles and more. We also consider simple questions like insulation, so that the Commons contains its heat and cooling longer than it might otherwise. Similar questions are considered in choosing materials. The limestone in the buildings is a campus tradition. Many of the wood materials came from sustainably managed forests, and much of the Commons casework is made from native Minnesota poplar. High-finish woods in public spaces came from plantations, or from a hurricane damage program. The concrete contains a manufactured aggregate that includes recycled fly ash that's a waste product of coal-fired electrical generating stations.

Green design manifests itself, too, in the smaller details of the building. The slate roof, for example, provides an aesthetic echo of Boe Chapel and Rolvaag Library. But it also has a 100-year life expectancy, and it needs virtually no upkeep. Likewise, the slate flooring in the Buntrock Crossroads will last a very long time, and the floors can be washed without any chemical treatments and they require virtually no repair or replacement costs. The skylights in the Crossroads offer the aesthetic advantages of natural light, but they also reduce demand for electricity. In other areas of the building, recyclable InterfaceT carpet tiles make it possible to replace stained and soiled tiles without replacing a whole carpet. And when tiles need to be replaced, they can be returned to the factory for re-manufacturing

Current facilities planning guidelines have codified and extended these design principles so that St. Olaf is poised to be a national leader in efficient, responsible and inspiring green building.

The new Science Complex, for example, promises to be a Minnesota landmark of ecological design. In October 2003, the Board of Regents approved a campaign to raise money for a new Science Complex. In 2004, the Kresge Foundation awarded a $78,000 grant to the college for planning an environmentally sensitive structure. If everything goes as planned, it will be the first of a new generation of green buildings at St. Olaf.

¹ David Orr, Earth in Mind , p. 113.

²Ibid.