Setting the Gold standard
Rice’s Duncan College earns LEED Gold certification

BY JENNIFER EVANS
Rice News staff

Although Duncan College is only one year old, it is already marking a golden milestone. The five-story, 324-bed residential college recently received Gold certification from the U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC). It is the first newly constructed building at Rice and one of only a handful in Houston to earn Gold, the second-highest rating, from the USGBC’s Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) program.

	Duncan College, the university’s 11th residential college, is the first newly constructed building at Rice to earn Gold certification from the U.S. Green Building Council.

LEED certification is an internationally recognized standard for the design, construction and operation of eco-friendly buildings. It is awarded to projects designed and built to universally accepted criteria for energy efficiency, material conservation, water efficiency, indoor environmental quality and stewardship of resources and sensitivity to their impacts. To be LEED-certified, new buildings must comply with a number of green building standards, and they are awarded points for those they achieve. Buildings are certified in one of four categories, based on the number of points they earn — certified, silver, gold and platinum.

“Rice is proud to be a leader in environmentally sound building practices in Houston and among educational institutions,” President David Leebron said. “We are enormously grateful to Anne and Charles Duncan both for their generosity and vision in supporting the most positive contributions to our environment, such as the LEED Gold certified residential college named in their honor.”

Among the key features that earned Duncan, Rice’s 11th residential college, its Gold certification are:

— Smart controls that shut off room air-conditioners when the windows and doors are opened.

— Motion detectors that turn off lights in unoccupied rooms.

— Natural daylight in all rooms, with energy-efficient windows to let in light but not the heat.

— Thick exterior walls with two layers of brick to provide high thermal mass and reduce energy consumption.

— A green roof with low-maintenance plants that reduce energy needs for heating and cooling, slow the rate and volume of storm water runoff, provide habitat and mitigate temperature increases caused by the urban heat island effect.

— Dual flush toilets, which allow users to select the water volume for each flush.

— Front-loading high-efficiency washing machines that reduce water, energy and detergent use.

— Low-emission interior paints and finishes for improved indoor air quality.

— Innovative use of fly ash and slag waste products in the concrete to provide attractive textures and finishes with significantly lower amounts of greenhouse gases produced during manufacturing.

— Pre-fabricated bathrooms that reduced the generation of on-site construction waste.

— Extensive recycling, from the provision of recycling bins to the diversion of almost 90 percent of all construction waste from the landfill.

— Covered parking for 60 bicycles.

— A classroom finished with green materials and furnishings.

Made possible by a $30 million gift from Anne and Charles Duncan ’47, the college was named in their honor in recognition of their long-standing commitment to both Rice and environmental conservation. Charles was U.S. secretary of energy under President Jimmy Carter and has chaired the Business Coalition for Clean Air. Anne served on the board of the Nature Conservancy of Texas.

In 2006, Rice announced its commitment to constructing all its new buildings to at least a LEED Silver standard.