The Greenest Building in the World Was a Casino Resort
Nineteen stories in this archive touch sustainability, and the interesting ones are not about certification. They are about the incentive that paid for it.
A casino is an energy problem before it is anything else: it runs around the clock, it is mechanically ventilated to an unusual standard, it is lit continuously, and much of it has no windows. That makes it an odd candidate for green building — and, for exactly the same reasons, an unusually rewarding one.
The claim the archive makes
The industry roundtable in The Brave New World of Design and Construction reports a project as the largest green building in the world to date, and a recent recipient of the U.S Green Building Council's Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design Silver Certification.
The same panel sets out the argument in the flattest possible terms: Environmental initiatives are responsible, marketable, appropriate and sustainable
, and LEED certification is viewed as a benchmark of achievement in healthful environment and responsible use of resources.
Note the second adjective in that list. Marketable. That is where the casino case differs from the office case.
Who actually drove it
Not the designers. Building an Industry records the pressure coming from the owner: And I have to say MGM really got us focused on that.
The same story describes the CityCenter requirement — achieving an LEED (Leadership in Energy & Environmental Design) Gold certificate for the project
— and what it became: the biggest LEED Gold program in the history of the United States.
And then the part that explains why it stuck. The contractor's conclusion: That has allowed us to look at a lot of other opportunities that have that same requirement, and be uniquely qualified for that work because it is a unique process you go through in getting LEED certification.
Certification turned into a qualification, and a qualification into a market position.
The incentive maths, stated once and precisely
The single most concrete figure in the archive on this subject is in Powerful Incentive: To secure the incentives, JBA Trusted Advisors helped design a building that would exceed the requirements of the California Green Building Standards Code, Title 24, by 15.6 percent.
That sentence is the whole model. Performance is not measured against a moral standard; it is measured against a code baseline, by a stated margin, because a utility or a jurisdiction pays for the margin. The design work is therefore an optimisation against a threshold — which is a very different brief from "make it green".
Where the energy actually is
The archive's practitioners are consistent about the levers, and they are unglamorous:
- Lighting. The single biggest change in casino energy is the LED conversion, and it happened for reasons that had nothing to do with carbon — see when the lamp got small. The Technology Revolution lists
lighting products to sustainable finish materials
among the things technology changed. - Air. Ventilation rates on a smoking floor are a permanent energy load, which is why smoke-free conversion is also an energy story. See designing the smoke-free floor.
- Envelope and orientation. Heart of the City quotes the aim plainly —
We tried to make it as energy-efficient as possible
— in the context of designing to the site. - Mechanical, plumbing and electrical as a designed system. Building an Enterprise notes that
the MPE design is energy-efficient to minimize the impact to the environment.
It became a service line, then a brand
Two markers of institutionalisation appear in the archive. First, credentials: Bergman Walls & Associates' 2008 profile already lists partners as AIA LEED AP
, and describes a resort designed for Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) Certification
while still under construction. Second, named programmes: in The Technology Revolution, HBG Design describes its HBGreen initiative
as a framework to engage and inform our clients about sustainability and introduce key concepts that can help their facilities perform better and more efficiently
, adding that encouraging energy-efficient practices is not something we just "add on" to a project to make everyone feel good.
What to ask on a real project
- Which code baseline, and what margin above it? The number is the deliverable.
- Is there an incentive attached, and who administers it? That sets the documentation burden and the programme.
- Is certification required by the owner, the lender or the jurisdiction? Each wants different evidence.
- Does the operating model — hours, ventilation, lighting levels — match the modelled one? On a 24-hour building the gap between model and operation is where savings are lost.
The archive's full coverage of the subject is collected at Design Index: sustainability and LEED, and the money side at what a casino project cost actually includes.