Engineering design facility wins coveted LEED Gold designation

BY DWIGHT DANIELS

Special to Rice News

The Oshman Engineering Design Kitchen at Rice has become the first renovated building on campus to win the prestigious U.S. Green Building Council’s Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) Gold rating.

The kitchen, better known as the OEDK, provides a world-class venue for undergraduate engineering design projects. The facility is a result of a renovation, led by Stern and Bucek Architects, of the building that was once the university’s central kitchen. It was designed and retrofitted using the very latest in green and sustainable engineering practices.

	The Oshman Engineering Design Kitchen at Rice has become the first renovated building on campus to win the prestigious U.S. Green Building Council’s Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design Gold rating.

”Everyone associated with Rice — from engineering students and faculty to donors and alumni — can be excited about this distinction for the OEDK,” said Sallie Keller, the William and Stephanie Sick Dean of the George R. Brown School of Engineering. ”It’s wonderful to have our students learning the principles of design and engineering in such a well-engineered and sustainable facility.”

LEED certification is the national yardstick on requiring the adoption of the very latest in ”green” building practices, said Associate Dean Bart Sinclair, who helped plan the project. By winning the gold rating, the facility has achieved the second-highest level awarded from the building council.

”Achieving this rating is no small feat considering that the renovation had to meet the same standards within the LEED framework as any other newly designed project,” Sinclair said.

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The 12,000-square-foot building features state-of-the-art education space, including a large classroom, a machine shop, a wet lab, a computational lab, rooms for a 3-D printer, PC milling machine and laser cutter, a plotter and copy room, conference rooms, office space and a student lounge.

Among the features of the kitchen is an energy-saving, vegetated roof. Not only does the roof reduce energy use, it prevents runoff and flooding and lowers outdoor temperatures around the building. The rooftop, in effect, will become an individual ecosystem that supports birds and other native animals and insects.

Already, the OEDK has been the design venue for Rice students working on highly ingenious projects. Students have won national competitions for various projects, including award-winning bioengineering designs that may lead to patented products and incorporations.

”The most significant sustainable design decision for this project was in the concept of creating a high-value educational space from an under-used facility instead of tearing it down and rebuilding onsite or constructing something new elsewhere,” said Richard Johnson, director of sustainability at Rice. ”That notion of reducing consumption and waste permeated throughout the project.”

Johnson noted that almost half of the materials used in the renovation (by cost) were composed from recycled sources, and 66 percent of the construction and demolition waste was recycled. In addition, he added, the OEDK will use 19 percent less energy and 31 percent less water than if it had been built to typical codes and standards. ”The big lesson here is that you don’t need to build something new to create a high-performing green facility,” Johnson said.

The renovated kitchen was made possible entirely by philanthropic contributions, including a lead gift from Rice alumnus and trustee M. Kenneth Oshman ’62 and his wife, Barbara, as well as assistance from several alumni and donors. National Instruments also made a major corporate gift to Rice for a large area of the design kitchen that is used for assembling projects — the National Instruments Design, Prototype and Deploy Lab.

More on the OEDK’s mission and achievements can be found at http://oedk.rice.edu.

— Dwight Daniels is a science writer at the George R. Brown School of Engineering at Rice.