GSA Establishes New Office of High-Performance Green Buildings
Agency looks to bolster integrated practice, life-cycle measurement to reduce energy consumption

by Tracy Ostroff
Contributing Editor

How does . . . the federal government respond to legislation to reduce fossil fuel consumption in new buildings and major renovations by 55 percent?

Summary: The U.S. General Services Administration (GSA) is looking to life-cycle measurements and integrated practice to meet new federal targets for sustainable design and energy reduction. The stringent goals, established by Congress through the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007, require the agency to ensure that all new federal buildings and major renovations are designed to reduce fuel consumption by 55 percent over a typical building of the same type and size.

In addition to setting the targets, the legislation called on GSA to establish an Office of High-Performance Green Buildings to find ways to meet the targets; review current methods for reducing energy used to light, heat, and cool federal buildings; and develop a process to ensure that any energy conservation measures for major building renovations use the most energy-efficient designs, systems, and equipment. The law also requires the agency to ensure that all leases are in buildings that have earned the Energy Star level. This newly created office will work in conjunction with the Department of Energy’s office that will have the same responsibility for commercial buildings.

Kevin Kampschroer, the acting head of the new office, calls the targets a “daunting new responsibility” and says the ambitious mandate, “encourages us to continue to expand work with all of our offices in a concerted way. It establishes a formal structure with clear goals. We will be looking more at operations and maintenance and moving from just sustainable design to sustainable performance over the entire lifecycle of the building.”

Kampschroer, who previously was GSA’s director of expert services and led GSA’s efforts in sustainable design, adds: “We’ll look at each of the provisions and today’s technology and, with creativity and perhaps some money, work to get to the 55 percent target.” The effort is in line with the “2030 challenge picked up by the AIA,” and other programs to reduce energy consumption.

Focusing on integrated practice
Kampschroer says GSA is looking at every single design in the pipeline to see if it makes sense to revisit the project. The agency also will review its existing inventory. “When you have an overall reduction target, you have to do everything you can to help achieve the targets in the portfolio as a whole.”

He emphasizes: “Architects will be seeing from the federal government a more concentrated effort to require an integrated team that can deliver a building that performs over time. If you are going to do business with the federal government, you are going to have to have all these things in your arsenal.”

Key to meeting energy reduction targets, Kampschroer says, is integrated design, where all the parties participate from the beginning of the design progress. “Integrated practice makes better buildings.” There cannot be “silos of decision making – for example, the mechanical engineer needs to be present when the architect is making decisions about the building envelope or the site hydrology, for instance. It is well known in management circles that the collective decision is almost always superior to the individual decision.”

This perhaps gives architects new responsibility in the design process. “Architect as integrator is a role that may have been diminished in the modern world, and it needs to come back,” Kampschroer says.

The agency will “also start making decisions from a different perspective,” he says, “making the business case for green design. Every project will have a reasonable budget and energy reduction targets.”

Moving markets
Kampschroer notes that the legislation marks the first time Congress has talked about specific targets for a specific energy source. With hundreds of cities enacting some form of building code, he says, the market for products and technologies that help integrated teams get to more sustainable design is growing.

The law is intended, as much as possible, to get the federal government in agreement about how to lighten its global footprint. Government can be nimble when it comes to sustainable design, he says, and points to a LEED-rated federal prison as an example. “The implication is that the federal government can impact the market.”

GSA has been formally working toward sustainable design since 1999, Kampschroer says, and many years informally before that.

Kampschroer says his first steps will be to gather information about what different agencies are doing in these areas and disseminating information to the “thousands of project managers making individual decisions,” giving them the tools and knowledge they need to build on efforts to green federal buildings. Kampschroer is also focusing efforts on making sure GSA’s programs are integrated with the codes and standards setting bodies across the country.

GSA officials are pleased that the new office resides in their domain (physically across the street from the AIA headquarters) because “it’s our business to know federal buildings, and we know them very well. In all other agencies construction is ancillary to other functions,” Kampschroer says.