Foundation Has a Real Handle on Conservation

The bamboo floor in the lobby is striking. The electricity bill will be impressively low. The rainwater cisterns out front are eye-catching, looming like old wooden silos from a farm museum. And those aren’t the only marvels you’ll find at the Chesapeake Bay Foundation’s new waterfront headquarters in Bay Ridge, Md., just outside Annapolis.

But ask the foundation’s facilities director, Chuck Foster, what feature of the two-story building is likely to make the most lasting impression and he’ll direct you to the no-flush toilets, where discharge pipes drop 20 feet to a basement compost heap.

“That’s the one thing visitors will take away with them,” Foster said. “The toilets are different.”

First-timers will be advised to neither look down nor listen as they go about their business. And try not to mind the slight downdraft when you pull open the lid, or think too much about the fellow who has to rake the compost once a week.

It’s all part of making the building the sort of environmentally sensitive place that an idealist might expect from an organization devoted to clean water and conservation. The project has already earned the highest rating yet bestowed by the nonprofit U.S. Green Building Council, racking up 36 points. That’s the maximum possible score, a feat that required meticulous planning for every detail from support beams to drawer pulls, while always stressing the philosophy of “less is more.”

Making a new building “green” begins with the location. You don’t bulldoze a pristine site and, in tearing down an old structure, you don’t let the debris become another mound at the landfill.

The foundation scouted locations for three years, but it was the residents of Bay Ridge, a quiet, tree-lined community, who provided the solution.

Alex McCrary, president of the Bay Ridge Civic Assn., said residents recruited the foundation after learning that a developer was eyeing the 35 wooded acres around the shuttered Bay Ridge Inn as a site for 30 to 60 homes.

Although neighbors have since been a bit shocked at the size of the building rising on their shoreline, McCrary said, they’re pleased that the woods have been saved.

“All that is a real plus,” he said. “And on the recreation side, we received a 2 1/2-acre parcel [from the foundation] for the community pool.”

Next came the demolition of the old inn, or “deconstruction,” as Foster calls it, because most of the debris was recycled. Old concrete, for example, went into new roadbeds.

The foundation had to find the right architect and general contractor, people who wouldn’t balk at one quirky requirement after another, such as getting 51% of the building materials from within a 300-mile radius, thereby reducing fuel consumption.

The SmithGroup, from Washington, designed the building, and was mostly in charge of rounding up materials, such as wood from environmentally managed forests. Some is in the form of “parallel strand lumber,” beams pressed together from chewed-up wood, meaning little of a tree is wasted.

The Bay Foundation did some of its own scavenging, finding a nice load of boards at an old packing plant in Marydel, on the eastern shore of Maryland.

“It was an old field full of barrels,” Foster said. “They were getting ready to burn them all. We heard about it from some skipjack captains who’d been going there to get wood to replace planking [on their boats].”

The pickle barrels from the field provided slats for the facade on the bay side, the sunny side of the building. It’s the perfect material, having been thoroughly, well, pickled.

Cork tiles, finished with beeswax, cover the floors, except in the lobby, where the flooring is made of pressed, shredded bamboo.

One of the quirkier choices involved drawer pulls. The staff came up with the idea of champagne corks, ordering them online from Europe, where the supplier was a bit puzzled when the buyers said to never mind the usual vacuum-packed waterproof packaging. That would have complicated another aspect of “green” construction: recycling all the junk that comes wrapped around the materials.

When outdoor temperatures are favorable, green lights go on inside, signaling workers to open the windows. When it’s too cold or too hot to do that, solar power helps heat and cool the building. Also, air from under ground is pumped into the building from below the frost line, where temperatures remain constant year round.

Lights automatically shut on and off, triggered by heat and motion sensors. And the mostly open floor plan--”You’ll be hired and fired in private,” Foster said, “but besides that you’re in front of God and everybody”--helps keep temperatures within a 2-degree range throughout. Compare that to the 10-degree range in most similar-size buildings.

The result is that the building should use only about a third of the energy used by a conventional building of the same size, about 32,000 square feet of floor space.

Then, finally, there are the bathrooms, with 12 toilets in all, up on the second floor. The downdraft is caused by a fan pumping air into the compost, which serendipitously also cuts down on odors.

Deposits funnel into 14-inch-diameter tubes dropping straight to the basement, where it is up to building manager Roger Perry to rake the stuff once a week with a long tool that looks like a bent pitchfork.

Perry insists it’s not a bad job, and to prove it he scooped out some “starter compost,” no more pungent than garden mulch. He said that’s pretty much what the real thing is like, suitable even for a garden.

All these features and extra attention cost money, of course. Throw in the parking lot and the landscaping--thousands of plantings, all of them native to the region--and the price of construction comes to about $7.2 million, or $199 a square foot. Foundation officials figure the “green” requirements accounted for about $46 per-square-foot.

But Foster estimates you’d end up paying around the same amount for “a polished class-A building that would include tenant improvements. Keep in mind we didn’t spent money on any marble entrances or walnut finishes.”

Further reducing the sting are the lower energy costs, an estimated savings of nearly $50,000 a year.

Not to mention that doing things the “green” way is what the foundation is all about.