OK, so we’ve all gotten used to those coffin-shaped median planters that brim with tulips and trees and have caused their share of traffic accidents.
Now, the “Green Mayor” is taking his Johnny Appleseed compulsion to new lengths, far beyond the City Hall rooftop garden that was supposed to make us associate the color green with something other than unmarked bills stuffed into envelopes.
On Saturday, he cut the ribbon for the Chicago Center for Green Technology, a 50-year-old West Side factory/office structure that has been recycled into a public building that experts are calling the first of its kind in the nation.
The people who work for Mayor Richard M. Daley liken the $5.4 million renovation to one of those futuristic “concept” cars you see at the Auto Show. Except this is no gas-guzzler.
It’s jam-packed with the latest “green” accessories, from energy-generating solar panels that will provide 20 percent of the building’s electricity to an elevator that runs on canola oil instead of ground-polluting hydraulic oil.
There are bouncy floors made from recycled rubber tires (37 percent of the building is composed of recycled materials). You’ll also find windows that don’t let in a lot of heat and are thus expected to keep down air-conditioning bills, even a light-colored, heat-reflecting parking lot that’s made from renewable pine tar.
Stunned greenies expect to see this sort of stuff in crunchy Granola states like California or Oregon, not in a blue-collar burg where pollution from the steel mills once made Lake Michigan turn red.
“Many people don’t immediately think of Chicago as being in the forefront of solar energy and green buildings,” says Christine Ervin, executive director of the U.S. Green Building Council, a private, non-profit, construction industry group that promotes energy-conserving architecture. “I think this facility is going to turn that impression around.”
The project marks the latest example of a trend that has seen U. S. cities join the green design movement, which has taken off in Europe with high-profile examples like the 57-story Commerzbank tower in Frankfurt (dubbed “the Green Giant”).
A shining example
Located at 445 N. Sacramento Blvd., about 3 1/2 miles west of downtown, and designed by Chicago architect Douglas Farr, the Center for Green Technology is, city officials contend, the most visible effort yet in Daley’s seemingly unlikely strategy to make Chicago “the greenest city in America.”
“It’s like a concept car. Let’s see what the future can look like,” says William Abolt, the city’s management chief and former director of the Department of Environment (DOE), the city agency that helped make the center blossom.
The future, it turns out, doesn’t come cheap.
It cost an extra $1 million, or about 20 percent of the $5.4 million renovation budget, to make the building an environmental showcase, says David Reynolds, the deputy DOE commissioner who spearheaded the project.
Reynolds says he can’t predict when the project might generate enough savings to let the city recoup that money. But it seems like it could take years, even taking into account Farr’s forecast that the structure will raise productivity and save nearly $30,000 a year in energy costs.
The center has three tenants under its solar-paneled, vegetation-covered roof: Greencorps Chicago, a 7-year-old city program that trains low-income people to do landscaping; Spire Corp., a private concern that makes solar panels, including the ones atop the building; and a small office of the DOE.
Other cities have built green buildings, for example libraries, but never before, say knowledgeable sources, has a municipal government combined energy-conscious architecture with tenants who are promoting energy conservation.
“It’s the combination of those things that makes [the center] so unique,” says Ervin.
The center doesn’t look sexy, the “concept car” analogy notwithstanding. There are no voluptuous curves, no sculpted walls of glass — just a two-story, T-shaped structure with beige brick and boxy proportions, the epitome of Plain Jane modernism circa 1952 (it was built as an addition to what was then a giant Kraft Foods plant next door.)
But that’s all right with the 44-year-old Farr, a rising star in the national anti-sprawl movement. He thinks it’s counterproductive to build dazzling new “green” buildings in the suburbs because, since they are miles from public transportation, they force workers to drive mile after energy-wasting mile.
“Clearly, for a built-out city like ours, rehab is the name of the game,” Farr says.
Besides, Farr has dressed up the building with some subtle flourishes, like a wood trellis that will cut down on the amount of solar heat gain in the building’s west-facing, glass-enclosed lobby. The trellis is made from salvaged wood.
Just to the south, there’s a storm-water retention pond to control flooding. It is adorned with curving gravel pathways and a mock prairie stream that pays homage to the great turn-of-the-century Chicago landscape designer Jens Jensen.
All of this represents a sea change from six years ago, when the building was home to a so-called recycling company that had turned the 17-acre site into a dump, with mounds of road and building debris that rose 70 feet.
The city went to court to shut the company down and then took over the property, spending $9 million to cart away the mess and clean up the site. But when it tried to market the property, it found no takers.
By chance, the environmental committee of the Chicago chapter of the American Institute of Architects was urging the city to put up a green building to test emerging theories of energy-saving design.
Perfect timing
Meanwhile, the city had plenty of cash for such a project because Commonwealth Edison Co., after failing to sufficiently improve its electricity infrastructure, agreed in 1999 to contribute $100 million to a fund for energy conservation.
Thus, with Daley’s backing, the Chicago Center for Green Technology was born. (The ComEd money also has allowed the city to pay for the City Hall rooftop garden, as well as solar panels on the Field Museum, the Notebaert Nature Museum and the Art Institute of Chicago.)
Today, the center is surrounded by features like a sloping front parking lot that lets rainwater drain into a swale that leads to the retention pond, the lowest point on the site. Every fourth parking space is devoted to a tree instead of an asphalt parking space to prevent “the urban heat island” effect that contributes to harmful ozone.
Within the building, the architect’s most visible move was to carve out a towering, airy stairwell that is open to the lobby, accomplished by breaking through walls along the stairwell and inserting pyramid-shaped skylights at the top. The skylights, whose openings were kept small, don’t let in much heat, but draw in lots of light because of the sloping walls beneath them.
To be sure, there was some straying from green dogma. In the lobby, for example, Farr created a wall of windows that reveals a spectacular view of the downtown skyline. A canopy will lessen the anticipated heat gain from the expanse of glass.
“This is a drop-dead view. We’re in Chicago. You can’t not do this,” the architect says.
Despite such lapses, Farr expects that the Center for Green Technology will become the third building in the nation to achieve the Green Building Council’s coveted “1.0 Platinum Rating,” awarded only to those buildings that meet the most exacting energy standards.
The broader import of meeting such standards — and providing models for other public and private buildings — is clear.
Operating buildings in the U.S. accounts for 36 percent of the nation’s energy use and 30 percent of its greenhouse gas emissions, according to the Green Building Council. Some green gurus sound apocalyptic about what will happen if we don’t make our buildings more energy-efficient.
“Our present systems of design have created a world that grows far beyond the capacity of the environment to sustain life in the future,” said William McDonough, the Charlottesville, Va.-based designer who is considered the premier green architect in the U.S., in a 1993 speech in New York City.
Maybe that’s why Wired Magazine dubbed him “the Prophet of Bloom.”
