by Thomas C. Palmer Jr., September 6, 2004
Kristen Galfetti's small glass office at the new Genzyme Corp. headquarters in Cambridge has two doors. One allows access from the hall, and the other opens onto a four-foot-wide walkway on the building's perimeter.
An exterior glass curtain wall keeps Galfetti, Genzyme's director of investor relations, safely in that narrow "loggia" space on the 10th floor and provides a great view of Boston — but it does much more. The building's glass shell has computer-controlled blinds and louvers, part of a system that keeps Genzyme's 900 employees warm in the winter and cool in the summer.
Genzyme Center is a state-of-the-art "green" building.
"We don't use electricity for any of the heating or cooling in the building," Bo Piela, director of public relations for Genzyme, said recently while conducting a tour of the building, which has become something of a shrine to a rapidly growing sector of environmentalists.
Genzyme even pipes in waste steam from a neighboring power-generating plant, to supplement both heating and cooling systems. The building has been open for 10 months, and it is projected to use a third less water than conventionally constructed buildings, and cut electricity costs to 40 percent of what they would be for a normal building of the same size.
With environmental awareness increasing, the price and difficulty of obtaining new energy rising, and the cost of making buildings energy-efficient dropping, the number of developers and communities embarking on green projects is exploding.
By one measure, Massachusetts ranks sixth among US states. It has 63 buildings that are registered with the US Green Building Council, a nonprofit coalition of building-industry representatives that promotes environmental development and certifies buildings if they meet strict standards.
While only a decade ago most people thought green was just a paint option, today the term signifies an industry coming into the mainstream. The numbers tell the story:
Products and services for so-called green buildings amounted to $5.8 billion in 2003, an increase of a third over the previous year.
Nationwide there are 126 building projects certified by the council as being green, up from 38 two years ago. As of this month, 1,636 project managers have taken at least the first step to apply for certification.
The Green Building Council's membership has grown by 10 times in the last four years, to almost 5,000.
And cities like Boston and Chicago are competing to become known as the "greenest" in the country.
Mayor Thomas M. Menino last year put together a task force to guide the city's development toward that title, starting with the private sector. "Chicago is a green-building leader," said Menino. "Our aim is to become a leader as well. If there's competition, that would be a contest that everyone would win."
Concentrating on renewable energies, public health, and reusing contaminated locations, the Mayor's Green Building Task Force is expected to release a set of recommendations this fall that will increase attention to environmental efficiency. Some cities, like Chicago and Seattle, began with their public spaces.
"We will start with the private sector, which is where the buildings are," said Joy Conway, director of policy and public affairs for LivingCities, a community development group, and chairwoman of the mayor's task force.
Likely among the recommendations: accelerated approval of projects that are on the green track, a significant change given Boston's notoriously balky development permitting process.
Buildings come in all shades of green, some fitted with expensive solar panels that generate power, some simply placed with the angle of the sun in mind and designed with windows that open, so that expensive fossil fuels are not consumed to do what the earth's natural forces would do anyway.
"The costs of going green range from zero to 'the sky's the limit,' if you're doing a Manulife or Genzyme," said John Dalzell, a senior architect in the urban design department of the Boston Redevelopment Authority.
Manulife Financial Corp.'s new North American headquarters building, at D and Congress streets on the South Boston waterfront, is Boston's trophy green tower. The 14-story building has a "double skin" of glass, creating an exterior loggia space similar to Genzyme's, and a landscaped rooftop that provides insulation and captures rainwater runoff.
Genzyme's building, at 500 Kendall St. in Cambridge, was designed with a goal of winning the highest rating in the Green Building Council's certification process. But executives also wanted it to be a magnet for quality employees.
"It helps them sell themselves," said Conway. "It says, 'This is our culture, this is our belief.' " Some studies have shown green buildings even enhance employee productivity.
The Genzyme building is so ambitious, in fact, that specialists who promote the energy efficiency it epitomizes sometimes avoid citing it as an example. "That's on the high end of the spectrum," said Richard E. Tinsman, director of a green-buildings program at the Massachusetts Technology Collaborative.
With a 12-story atrium that uses mirrors to draw in natural light, rainwater recycling, 800 operable windows, waterless urinals, and low-emission paints and carpet, the $140 million building cost about 16 percent more than a conventional one would. It is a model of energy efficiency."It's great to have, but we're not going to do heliotropic mirrors on the roof of housing developments," said John Dalzell, a senior architect with the Boston Redevelopment Authority.
A more practical example of what can be accomplished in most new construction is a US Environmental Protection Agency lab building in Chelmsford, which opened in 2001. "That was the state's first green building," Tinsman said. Costs attributable to making the building more environmentally friendly were put at less than 2 percent.
There is considerable debate about how much more "building green" costs than building conventionally, but much of it has to do with definitions. How much insulation would be installed, for example, even if a building weren't designed and built as green — and what is the incremental cost of putting more in? Advocates point to a 2003 study done for California's Sustainable Building Task Force that determined an initial investment of 2 percent of construction costs in green design results in a lifetime utilities-cost saving of 10 times that.
Locally, they point to projects less technologically complex than Genzyme or Manulife, including: Cambridge's City Hall Annex, whose renovation included photovoltaic panels on the roof that produce 28 kilowatts of electricity; Maverick Gardens, an affordable housing project in East Boston that boasts a solar hot-water system; and Somerville's Michael E. Capuano Early Childhood Center, with not only skylights and solar power but also a small wind turbine as a demonstration element.
The Massachusetts Technology Collaborative issues grants to developers for green buildings, focuses on renewable energy by pushing them to exceed the state's energy code by at least 20 percent, and has 16 schools so far in its program to promote efficiency in educational buildings. Fifteen states have programs pushing the green envelope, and there are green buildings in all 50 states.
Europe is more advanced. Genzyme's architect was Behnisch, Behnisch & Partner of Germany, and lighting was designed by Bartenbach LichtLabor Gmbh of Austria. In flower-producing countries like the Netherlands, "They had this 'greenhouse' technology a long time ago," said Kim Archer, who works in Genzyme's global planning and facilities development office.
Some 40,000 sensors in the Genzyme building monitor conditions inside and out, and take into consideration the normal human activities at various times of day, to keep the climate right.
At 11:02 a.m. on a recent sunny day, Archer was standing near the top of the 12-story atrium, describing the building's 18 indoor gardens with soil-moisture monitors, when suddenly it began to get brighter in an adjacent employee dining area. "The building-management system is raising the blinds," Archer said. "I didn't see the light change much. It may be just because we're headed to lunch."
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