An office building in Norton Commons has been awarded LEED Gold certification indicating the building has achieved the second highest level of sustainability as tracked by the United States Green Building Council. Located at 10411 Meeting Street, CMTA Engineering Consultants has been a leader in sustainable design and now has an exemplary building to demonstrate their commitment to green design.
CMTA’s building achieved certification in late October and received 50 LEED points, only two shy of the highest Platinum level. After going through the certification process, CMTA says they have the experience and knowledge to achieve Platinum status on future projects.
Some of the green features of the two-story, 20,000 square foot building include sun shades on the buildings facade, flat fabric thin film solar panels on the building’s white roof (see photo after the click), and Solar Tube interior lighting devices. Solar power is expected to account for 10 to 15 percent of the structure’s annual energy usage. The structure was built with insulated concrete forms (ICFs) in which concrete is poured into insulating Styrofoam forms. Geothermal heating and cooling has been incorporated as well as a custom designed LED lighting scheme, although most of the light used in the building is natural light.
The structure is located near the Norton Commons town center and has been designed to reflect local architecture from the 19th century. Broken into three differentiated components, the building contains three facades reflecting two townhouses and a commercial building and represents the first commercial building in Norton Commons to include sustainable concepts.
CMTA hopes to use the building to test the efficiency and effectiveness of many of the systems installed in the building to create better sustainable buildings in the future.
okay, hang on. so the building is built to meet all these fucking LEED certifications, but what about the fact that it’s so far away from everything and there’s no infrastructure to get the employees there in a sustainable manner????
What exactly is it far from? You?
It appears to me to be walkable for the people in Norton Commons.
How much more sustainable can you be?
Isn’t the concept to enable people to live AND work in the area?
How can they do that without workplaces?
Should they not try to build in a more sustainable fashion?
I wonder how many of the people working in this building live within a short walk? How many can afford to liv within a short walk? How many drive past countless empty buildings on their “reverse commute”. Finally, what’s more green – adapting an existing building with green systems or building a new, styrofoam building in a former corn field?
While the main downfall with Norton Commons might be its greenfield nature, it does promote walkability once within the neighborhood and demonstrates a demand for such development. One challenge always facing such New Urban developments is how to avoid being a standalone walkable enclave. As the city originally grew, the urban pattern established by Norton Commons should grow outside its borders. As it stands, Norton Commons seems to be an oasis in the middle of standard sprawl.
That said, I think Norton Commons should be viewed as a center within the Louisville region like Middletown or Jeffersontown. As has been pointed out, most of the outer county suffers from a disconnectivity problem that we’ll have to address, but at least Norton Commons is showing that walkability is possible and popular.
I think it’s a good point to realize that it’s easy to fall in to the bedroom community trap but it can be avoided with proper planning. It’s important to be able to live near where you work, and that requires, as was pointed out, commercial spaces in residential neighborhoods. Norton Commons is not a cheap neighborhood to live in, with shotgun houses selling for double or triple what they go for in historic neighborhoods, but developers should take this as a note that people are ready for a more urban and walkable lifestyle.
I wouldn’t call this a styrofoam building, it’s really a concrete building built with the same structural system as Legacy Lofts or the new Liberty Green Community Center. The system is solid and provides a great deal of insulation by virtue of its form work.
It’s hard to defend greenfield development when there’s so much opportunity for brownfield or infill development in Louisville, but it’s certainly good to see walkability and sustainability pushed to the fore.
I asked the folks at CMTA about why they located in Norton Commons. They tracked where everyone lived- Norton Commons was more or less in the center.
1. @john There’s also the opposite question: how many residents of Norton Commons live within a short walk of work?
2. That first picture looks so much like an architectural rendering it’s creepy. Come to think of it, it’s even creepier than most renderings, because most renderings depict people.
The building received 50 LEED points, not 49 as reported in the article.
I say kudos for using a good traditional urban form with some density where typically there is none. And that they built the the best standards we currently have. Though it is better to reuse and build closer in to our core, I give them high praise for raising the bar for all new buildings!
Thanks for clarifying the points earned, Carol. I updated the article. I also agree with John as was hinted in my previous response that despite questions that remain about Norton Commons, it’s still laudable that the development and CMTA are looking to participate in a more sustainable and urban way of life. I think in the long term, Norton Commons will expose the benefits of such living patterns to a lot of people who otherwise might not be experiencing town living.
That sound good about LEED from stop Global Warming
I haven’t spent much time at Norton common’s. Is it well connected to the roads around it including multiple entry and exit points? If not I would say that it is part of the problem.
How much did this building cost? and how much of it was MEP?
Just an update – a case study of the CMTA building was just published in the Winter 2011 issue of High Performing Buildings magazine. Here’s a link to the article. http://www.nxtbook.com/nxtbooks/ashrae/hpb_2011winter/#/0