Although It won’t surprise anyone that a team of Lord, Aeck & Sargent and Gould Evans Associates would create a beautiful and fitting home for Arizona State University Global Institute of Sustainability and the newly formed, transdiciplinary School of Sustainability in Tempe, that the architects did so through transformation of a 1960s nursing school is turning heads. The former 49,000-square-foot structure with cavernous hallways is now bright and open, and shooting for LEED® Silver certification from the U.S. Green Building Council. The building is anticipated to save 18.7 percent on energy use and 50.3 percent on water use compared with the original building’s baseline use. Among its multiple energy strategies are six 24/7 wind turbines mounted on the roof’s eastern edge and powered by thermal updrafts. The building boasts new fenestration and suncreens, and perhaps most innovative in terms of adding light and promoting interaction was the removal of brick on the northeast and southeast corners of the top two floors so former dark corner offices are now informal, windowed meeting areas. The building also makes use of a wide variety of water-saving strategies and recycled content products. Still to come is a 24-kilowatt photovoltaic solar array, part of a campus-wide plan of arrays that eventually will provide 7.4 megawatts of power, the largest such array in the United States. (Photo © 2008 Mark Boisclair.)