Stopping history from repeating itself

Liz Dunn will head the Preservation Green Lab.

The National Trust for Historic Preservation in late March 2009 announced that it had chosen Seattle as the site for a private sector effort to incentivize the rehabilitation of historic buildings with energy-efficient technology.

The Preservation Green Lab, which is partnering with selected cities and states to suggest innovative sustainable development policies for existing buildings and neighborhoods, would also serve as a national clearinghouse for best practices in the green rehabilitation of historic buildings.

Energy codes tend to be prescriptive, making them difficult to implement in historic buildings, says Emily Wadhams, the trust’s vice president for public policy. She says the lab intends to determine ways to increase baseline building efficiencies by 30 percent to 50 percent over current requirements when a rehabilitation or remodel is done, she adds.

“In the building code world…there are alternative approaches instead of one size fits all,” Wadhams says [see “Gleaming the cube,” Sustainable Industries, November 2007].

Liz Dunn, a long-time member of Seattle’s business community and a former principal at Seattle-based Dunn and Hobbs, is leading the lab. With vast experience working on urban mixed-use projects that involves rehabilitating a trio of historic buildings and revitalizing a languishing section of the city's otherwise vibrant Capitol Hill neighborhood, Dunn says she will work with local businesses and building owners on code recommendations and demonstration projects.

With financial support from governments and private enterprise in the six cities where the trust has offices, it hopes to document best practices for modernizing historic buildings that can be implemented anywhere, according to Wadhams. She says the intention is to do one or two demonstration projects in many cities on different types of buildings of different ages, including affordable housing projects, schools, commercial buildings and even some significant modernist architecture.

“A lot of cities are trying to figure out how to stay vibrant, economically sound and grow in ways that are appropriate for that city,” she says. She adds that it’s important to look at the city as a whole, rather than at individual buildings. One way to do this is through energy codes.

Seattle, which awarded the trust a $50,000 grant, will in turn receive guidance for how to best update its energy code for existing buildings. However, the city’s current energy code is one of the oldest in the nation and does not work well for existing and historic buildings, according to Wadhams.

One such structure, the Vance Building, is a 14-story building built in 1929 and renovated in 1998 that is aiming for Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design – Existing Building (LEED-EB) certification from the U.S. Green building Council (USGBC).
The National Trust for Historic Preservation, the National Park Service and other groups have been working since 2006 under the auspices of the Sustainable Preservation Coalition to help the USGBC incorporate historic preservation into the LEED rating system.