ESF to break ground on environmental gateway building in Fall 2010
As new construction projects continue to develop all over campus, the State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry is planning a sustainable energy building.
The new ESF gateway building will house undergraduate admissions, a dining facility, exhibition space and a new bookstore. Building designers should be picked this month, and ESF is hoping to break ground in the fall of 2010, said Brian Boothroyd, assistant director of facilities at ESF.
‘We’re hoping it becomes like the identifying icon for the campus,’ Boothroyd said. ‘When you look at our campus, it’s hard to tell where the entrance to it is, and we’re hoping this will be that and that it will exemplify things concerning sustainability that we hope to teach students.’
The 40,000 square foot building will be at the southwest corner of Forestry Drive and Campus Drive on what is now Moon parking lot, Boothroyd said.
ESF President Cornelius Murphy said the goal is for the building to have zero net energy consumption meaning it could power buildings around it. A number of conservation measures would go into this, he said, including photovoltaic roofing, use of solar heating and combined heat and power units. The result would be the highest Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design Green building rating.
Murphy said the LEED building will be one of the first of its kind in the region.
‘There is no building, to my knowledge, in New York State that actually produces more energy than it consumes,’ Murphy said. ‘It will be a very unusual building, and I think it will set a standard in terms of what buildings of the future can do.’
Murphy said that with the building’s sustainable energy, it would wind up being a kind of ‘living laboratory’ for students.
Currently, a few buildings on ESF’s campus have energy-friendly components, including Walters Hall, but none include as many sustainable plans as the gateway building.
The $28.3 million building is being funded in part by New York Sen. John DeFrancisco, of the 50th district, and the Central New York delegation, according to the ESF Web site.
Boothroyd said the increase in conference space will greatly benefit the ESF Outreach Office, which hosts about 220 local, state, national and international programs a year and faces limited on-campus facilities.
The exhibition facilities will house the Roosevelt Wildlfe collection, a public display of more than 15,000 wildlife specimens the college has collected since 1919. It will also provide needed space for student projects.
‘Currently we don’t have a lot of exhibition space so student projects will go up, have a brief stay and then have to come right down,’ Boothroyd said.
The new bookstore will replace the one currently in Marshall Hall, which Boothroyd said is about the size of a 15-foot classroom and ‘hidden away’ from students.
The building ‘will allow us to showcase both technology that’s developed on campus and it will allow us to more efficiently provide outreach to the school and the greater community,’ Murphy said.
Published on February 17, 2009 at 12:00 pm
