BRC earns LEED Gold rating

Gold is a symbol of good health, so it is appropriate that gold is now associated with Rice’s BioScience Research Collaborative (BRC), an innovative space where scientists and educators from Rice and other Texas Medical Center institutions work together to perform leading research that benefits human medicine and health.

The U.S. Green Building Council recently awarded the BRC Gold certification from the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) program.

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 can receive one of four ratings — Certified, Silver, Gold or Platinum — based on the number of points they earn.

Among the key features that earned the BRC its Gold rating are an innovative air-quality monitoring system that enables significant energy savings in cooling and heating the laboratories and a vegetative green roof that will reduce storm water runoff and energy consumption. Additionally, the condensate water produced by the air-handling units is captured and piped to the South Utility Plant for use in the cooling towers. The BRC also employs an energy recovery process that exchanges the energy in air that is normally lost in exhaust and uses it to precondition the incoming air from outside. The process saves energy by precooling and dehumidifying the air in the summer and by humidifying and preheating the air in the winter.

“One of the greatest attributes of the design of the BRC is that it is a ‘tunable’ building in terms of its heating, ventilation and air conditioning systems (HVAC) as well as its lighting control system,” said Michael Smith, director of operations at the BRC. “Through vigilant monitoring and manipulation of the these control systems by both BRC and Facilities, Engineering and Planning staff, we can virtually ‘tune’ those systems to best suit the operational needs of the occupants while at the same time wring out the maximum possible amount of energy savings.”

Moreover, during construction of the BRC, 38 percent of the materials used were composed from recycled sources, and approximately 86 percent of all waste generated in the facility’s construction was recycled; this resulted in almost 9,300 cubic yards of material being diverted from the landfill — enough to fill a volume the size of the Allen Center midway up to the third floor.

The BRC joins the Oshman Engineering Design Kitchen and McMurtry and Duncan colleges in earning Gold, the second-highest LEED rating.

Formally opened in 2010, the 477,000-square-foot BRC is equipped for cutting-edge laboratory, theoretical and computational investigations, and features 10 floors of research labs, shared core facilities, classrooms, meeting rooms, and an auditorium. It is designed to eventually accommodate a microfluidic and microfabrication facility.

Besides Rice, occupants of the BRC include the Cancer Prevention and Research Institute of Texas, the Clinical Trials Network of Texas, the Gulf Coast Consortia, the National Space Biomedical Research Institute, the Institute of Biosciences and Bioengineering, BioHouston and, in the near future, the Houston Area Translational Research Consortium and the Center for Theoretical Biological Physics.