Phipps Conservatory is a global leader in sustainability and a historical Pittsburgh treasure. evolve’s experience as LEED and Living Building Challenge consultants continues to add knowledge and value to our work every day, and we are thrilled to be able to share this with young designers and the local community.
]]>The historic Roshek Building, centerpiece of downtown Dubuque, Iowa’s sustainable redevelopment, recently received the US Green Building Council’s highest LEED Platinum Certification.
evolveEA, coordinated the project team’s approach that combined sustainable development, green building and historic preservation to galvanize redevelopment in historic downtown Dubuque. Having successfully managed over 30 LEED certifications, The Roshek Building is our first platinum project and also the first platinum certification in the Dubuque—a city increasingly known for its strong commitment to sustainability since 2006.
The first Platinum Historic Rehabilitation project in Iowa, the Roshek Building is the fifth building in Iowa to achieve platinum. Only a handful of Historic Rehabilitation projects in the nation have received Platinum certification, a rare and significant accomplishment.
This project shows how effective public private partnership focused on sustainable redevelopment can dramatically turn around declining small towns and cities…even during a national recession. Over 30 organizations spearheaded by the Roshek Building nonprofit owner Dubuque Initiative, developer contractor Gronen Properties, and major tenant IBM Corporation have demonstrated how sustainable redevelopment can dramatically improve employment opportunities, repair historic town fabric, and reduce our environmental footprint while breathing new life into both a town and the surrounding region.
— evolveEA principal, Marc Mondor AIA, USGBC LEED Faculty
The project leveraged the City of Dubuque’s commitment to sustainability to convince IBM to locate a new Technology Services Delivery Center into the underutilized Roshek Department Store Building. In addition, Dubuque became the first North American demonstration city for IBM’s Smart Cities Initiative. The historic restoration of the nine story tower upgraded the energy efficiency of the building walls, windows, roof and mechanical systems while preserving the character and detailed facade of the landmark structure. Interior spaces were upgraded to maximize daylight, views, thermal comfort, ventilation and the use of healthy green materials. Over 130,00 SF of high quality office space was provided for IBM. In addition 10,000 SF of ground floor commercial space and 63,000 SF of office space, some of which is leased to non-profit and start-up businesses at below market rates, was renovated. The project cost is $45 million and generated 2540 new jobs with an anticipated regional impact of over $1.6 billion in business growth over the first 10 years of operation.
The Roshek Building LEED Platinum Certification demonstrates that sustainable projects pursuing triple bottom line approaches that simultaneously improve economy, equity and environment are succeeding to revitalize our communities, protect our environment and restore our economy.
To learn more about the project, please visit our project pages for The Roshek Building and the IBM Technology Service Center.
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The project shows how effective public private partnership focused on sustainable redevelopment can dramatically turn around declining small towns and cities… even during a national recession. Over 30 organizations spearheaded by the Roshek Building nonprofit owner Dubuque Initiative, developer contractor Gronen Properties, and major tenant IBM Corporation initiated a sustainable redevelopment effort to improve employment opportunities, repair the historic town fabric, and reduce Dubuque’s environmental footprint while breathing new life into both a town and the surrounding region.
The project leveraged the City of Dubuque’s ongoing commitment to sustainability to convince IBM to locate a new Technology Services Delivery Center into the underutilized Roshek Department Store Building. In addition, Dubuque became the first North American demonstration city for IBM’s Smarter Cities Initiative. The historic restoration of the nine story tower, the largest building in Dubuque, upgraded the energy efficiency of the building walls, windows, roof and mechanical systems while preserving the character and detailed facade of the landmark structure. Interior spaces were upgraded to maximize daylight, views, thermal comfort, ventilation and the use of healthy green materials.
Over 130,000 sf of high quality office space was provided for IBM. In addition 10,000 sf of ground floor commercial space and 63,000 sf of office space, some of which is leased to non-profit and start-up businesses at below market rates, was renovated. The project cost is $45 million and generated 2540 new jobs with an anticipated regional impact of over $1.6 billion in business growth over the first 10 years of operation.
evolveEA worked with the project team from early design through occupancy, leading community and business district charrettes, educating the design team about sustainable strategies, developing project goals, adapting green strategies to historic preservation, managing LEED certification, and leading an effort to measure and verify building performance post occupancy.
The project effectively combined historic preservation with LEED certification to:
• Upgrade the energy efficiency of the historic façade while restoring and preserving masonry, stone, metal and wood detailing
• Train the local workforce in historic deconstruction that carefully removes, protects, preserves and reuses original building materials
• Serve as a model for how to sustainably restore Dubuque’s historic downtown millwork district
The Roshek Building LEED Platinum Certification demonstrates that sustainable projects pursuing triple bottom line approaches that simultaneously improve economy, equity and environment are succeeding to revitalize our communities, protect our environment and restore our economy.
The show was nicely designed to fit in the place it was held, a large empty retail space in Pittsburgh’s new East End complex, Bakery Square. For displaying their work, students built their own platforms and tables out of corrugated cardboard and used thin wire lines to hang posters, amounting to a superbly minimalist industrial décor. I appreciated that these details were addressed almost as much as I appreciated the variety of work—industrial design projects like wood furniture, independent study projects like a screen-printed fashion line or building a custom wood-encased portable turntable, video projects, games, and more. But the thing that I felt inclined to investigate was a course called Speak Lab, in which all the students somehow communicated messages related to environmental issues.
Because of evolveEA’s commitment to sustainability and our focus on design, I decided to sit down with the course instructors for some background and invite a few students to present their projects to evolveEA staff one day during lunch. Speak Lab was one of three intensive rotations that design seniors took last semester as part of the program’s new lab format. The focus for this lab was on storytelling, while in Play Lab students explored concepts through quick prototyping, and in Wonder Lab they developed research methods.
Peter Scupelli and Stacie Rohrbach, the instructors for Speak Lab, explained how they came up with the environmental topics that became the subject matter for this lab’s projects: “we collected imagery of unbelievable phenomena, like exploding melons, or water catching on fire—of nature gone awry,” said Stacie. She explained that from this starting point they had a collection of footage that needed to be explained through storytelling. For example, the burning water was a clip taken from the documentary Gasland, which teaches viewers about hydraulic fracturing (“fracking”). Peter and Stacie shared examples like these with the students and challenged them to tell their own stories about nine environmental-themed topics from which they could choose.
Students Nick Abele, Zari Salimnejad, and Erica Stine joined us at our office so we could take a closer look at their Speak Lab projects.
Nick collected data on pollutants from the EPA and envisions a database of Pittsburgh neighborhoods and their air quality.
Zari teaches viewers about the environmental effects of the global dairy and meat industry’s overpopulation of cows through a museum exhibition.
And Erica deals with the problem of E-Waste through an attractive booklet that presents facts and data in a powerful, layered, image-driven format.
Our time spent with the students was inspiring. We see the real-world application of design thinking through our own work, but tomorrow’s professional designers have a lot to teach us when it comes to keeping the process fresh. Collaborating with the School of Design has been a treat and we hope to continue this moving forward.
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