Society of Environmentally Responsible Facilities
This elegant phrase by architect Carl Elefante is bolstered by an important new study, The Greenest Building: Quantifying the Environmental Value of Building Reuse.
National Real Estate Investor opines that the study, commissioned by the National Trust for Historic Preservation’s Preservation Green Lab, empirically shows, “It is unequivocally greener to retrofit an old building than construct a new building, no matter how many high-tech bells and whistles are in the new construction.”
While rummaging through a pile of green building literature, looking for material to write my first blog around SERF’ s mission of Practical Environmental Stewardship ™, I learned of 330 North Wabash’s recent SERF certification. 330 N. Wabash is the last American design of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and is one of Chicago’s finest architectural gems. The owner/manager’s commitment to this goal makes this vital structure an exemplary model of SERF’s mission.
The level of intrusive retrofit that can be performed to green a historic and iconic structure is severely limited. Renovation of any nature must be performed without altering any of its historic features. The management could be forgiven if they didn’t attempt a green renovation given the complexity involved, but they did! Innovation on their part revealed the existence of several affordable, high impact and low intrusive greening strategies.
Get on your way to green.