'Set the bar high for LEED 3.0, but make it rational'

Russell Perry, AIA, LEED AP, joined SmithGroup in 2005 to head its corporate sustainability efforts. Previously, he was a founder and 11-year veteran of William McDonough + Partners. He holds architecture degrees from the Universities of Virginia and Michigan and serves on the U.S. Green Building Council committee that wrote the LEED Core & Shell standard.

BD+C: You've been involved with LEED for more than a decade. What has it accomplished?

Russell Perry: In some ways, LEED's been a raging success; in other ways, somewhat less so. Today, for a client or design professional not to be aware of LEED, they'd have to be living under a rock.

But have we moved the market? There's no question that a significant majority of higher education clients consider using LEED at minimum. We're clearly all over the government market. But there are definitely places where we're not making penetration, such as industrial projects. And it's been slow in healthcare.

BD+C: What about the commercial market?

RP: Two years ago, when Jerry Lea [chair of the LEED Core & Shell committee] predicted that LEED Silver would become part of a new definition of Class A, I was staggered. Today, we see examples like 1101 New York Avenue in Washington, where Louis Dreyfus Properties will tell you that the reason they went LEED-CS Gold is that they want to maintain the building's value in the future.

BD+C: What's happening with life cycle assessment and LEED 3.0?

RP: One of the criticisms of LEED has been that we don't have a common metric for measuring the consequences of building decisions. What's the value of saving a gallon of water vs. a Btu of energy? The checklist approach [of LEED] appears very arbitrary; that's a fair criticism.

The suggestion has been made that we've reached a level of maturity where we should be able to work toward this kind of sophistication in the way we calculate consequences and benefits.

My issue with LCA is that we're still a long way from where we can put a single numerical value on any given strategy. We must keep pushing to achieve consensus on LCA, but we shouldn't delay version 3 to do it.

BD+C: So where does that leave LCA?

RP: My partway solution is a bioregional calculus. In any one location, there are going to be issues that are more important than in others. Where I live, in Charlottesville, Va., we have 38 inches of rain a year, but no storage capacity due to our topography. So saving water here is huge, whereas habitat restoration would be less crucial here than in, say, the California Coastal Sage Chaparral. So let's weight the points to make LEED responsive to local conditions.

BD+C: You see the Green Guide for Health Care (www.gghc.org) as a model for LEED 3.0, don't you?

RP: The [GGHC developers] started from a materials perspective having to do with human health. Then it became a green building design and operations tool that tackled persistent toxins and heavy metals in construction. They ended up hitting stuff that we had in the original LEED-NC pilot drafts, like measurement of water use. We wound up awarding points for saving water, but not for actually measuring water use.

The GGHC goes into a more sophisticated approach for biophilia, such as views of nature, as well as having buildings that are positive for circadian rhythms, for 24/7 businesses. As for material toxicity, there are those who say that the IAQ sections of LEED are based on 15-year-old science. GGHC goes into material toxicity head on, and that's brave.

BD+C: What about carbon imbalance and its relationship to LEED?

RP: The science has been coming on so fast, and it looks like we're going to have the political will to do something [about carbon imbalance]. LEED should be taking a more aggressive position on carbon imbalance, but I'm concerned that we may lose market share as we do. LEED-CS is just getting up to speed. To move the prerequisite up to where a significant number of candidates say that they can't come up with market justification, I worry about that.

BD+C: So, what should be done?

RP: What I want to do is normalize it. We have to say every Btu saved is one unit of carbon saved. We know that first 20% of energy savings is the cheapest to save; after that, the cost of onsite strategies becomes more and more expensive, and you hit a point where it's cheaper to buy green power than to go to an energy-efficiency strategy.

This strategy says, Do whatever you have to do save carbon, but set the bar high and let the market choose how it's going to meet those carbon metrics. Normalize it so that people can make rational decisions between energy efficiency, on-site renewables, and green power. That's not dumbing it down, because that raises the bar.