If those ubiquitous green signs touting Syracuse as a “sustainable community” have you confused, here’s a historical example of sustainability: The Syracuse Center of Excellence, under construction at Almond and East Washington streets, stands at the former site of the L.C. Smith typewriter factory. In 1902, Smith, in need of engineers, approached Syracuse University Chancellor James R. Day, asking what it would take for SU to start a mechanical engineering program. Day responded with $75,000 (something like $30 million in today’s dollars). So Smith paid up, and SU built Smith Hall and opened the L.C. Smith College of Applied Science.
But wait, there’s more. Ed Bogucz, executive director of the Syracuse CoE, wanted to teach mechanical engineering at SU because Carrier Corporation was, then, headquartered here. “This was like coming to Mecca for me,” he says, sitting in his office inside the construction trailer in the shadow of the enormous building. “This is the site where L.C. Smith made typewriters, so maybe if it hadn’t been for L.C. Smith, SU wouldn’t have a college of engineering and I wouldn’t have come to Syracuse University, and I wouldn’t be leading this initiative. This is an example of sustainability over multiple generations.”
“The visibility of the location became a significant element of the decision:”
Executive director Ed Bogucz stands on the rooftop of the Syracuse
Center of Excellence, which will be covered with plants to provide
thermal insulation, rainwater retention and a connection to nature.
Below is a model of the CoE; Bogucz expects the real thing to be complete by autumn. MICHAEL DAVIS PHOTOS
Further, it’s fitting that the Syracuse CoE stands 40 yards from where the Erie Canal once flowed. Remember, the canal was the engineering marvel of its day, and the engineers who designed it were housed in the Weighlock Building, home today of the Erie Canal Museum, 318 Erie Blvd. E. “That’s one of the reasons this region has a cluster of environmental engineering firms,” Bogucz says. “It goes back to the canal.”
But Syracuse as a sustainable community goes all the way back to 1142, when the Iroquois Confederacy was formed along the shores of Onondaga Lake. At the time, the leaders of the five independent nations were instructed that every decision they made had to take into consideration seven generations hence. “This idea of thinking of the impact of any act that you do on the seventh generation into the future, that’s green. That’s the definition of green,” Bogucz explains.
And that is the real deal, not some trumped-up version of sustainability that a certain retail establishment along Onondaga Lake is pretending to be. Clearly, Onondaga Lake is key to the green story in Syracuse (and not only because it’s a Superfund site), but it’s not because of a megamall, which doesn’t even have a safe way for pedestrians to approach the structure or bike racks for non-polluting traffic. Green, schmeen! The real action is taking place at a brownfield site that was created when the old Midtown Plaza imploded in February 1999.
“When Gov. Pataki came in June 2002 to announce the creation of the Syracuse Center of Excellence, he stood in front of a drawing of the building located on Syracuse University’s South Campus,” says Bogucz. “But for 18 months, in a series of conversations between the university and the governor’s office, other sites became worthy of consideration. The governor’s staff came to see this site as being very attractive. The visibility of the location became a significant element of the decision.”
Another of Pataki’s initiatives at the time was brownfield remediation. So the three-acre site made even more sense, politically. “There were difficult conditions on this site that we have taken care of, so this site is being restored for the next seven generations,” Bogucz notes. “Another element of the word ‘sustainability’ is it’s really about change. New ideas come, new technologies come. Where’s the typewriter today? It was a big deal for 80 years and then a new technology came. To have a sustainable economy, you have to have new ideas.”
Taken at its most basic, being or going green means paying attention to how much and what we consume. “Humans need to change our way of thinking about our relationship with the earth,” Bogucz says. “Sustainability, as a buzzword, is not enough for me. From an engineer’s perspective, either something is sustainable or it’s not. A sustainable energy system would be one that is based on the sun. We understand enough about fossil fuels now to know that there’s a finite supply, we’re about halfway through our supply of oil; we have about 100 years to go. If you see something in the lens of sustainability, then that begins to pull away the hype.
“But it’s not just about technology. We have to rethink our relationship with the planet and we have to change our values. That’s big. If people talking green helps to change values, that’s a good thing. Then we can get into a discussion about ‘one thing is not as green as the next.’ That’s a good conversation to have. If there are market forces that lead to raising the bar and making things more and more sustainable, that’s a good thing. Let public awareness inform people’s choices. If you are making claims about a product’s greenness, you, the public, have to probe into it: Tell me; show me.”
BEST Practices
Until the center opens, however, green work continues at the far end of Skytop Road, on SU’s South Campus. On Wednesday, April 8, Bogucz announced a new partnership linking the CoE, the Air Barrier Association of America, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, the U.S. Department of Energy and the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority. The partners have committed more than $2 million to conduct a three-year experiment on how Syracuse’s weather extremes affect energy efficiency.
The project takes place at the new Building Envelope Systems Test (BEST) Laboratory, and will focus on how different air barriers can affect a building’s energy use and indoor air quality. On average, noted Marc LaFrance, technology development manager in the office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy, Buildings Technology Program of the DOE, 40 percent of the energy use in a building can be attributed to air leakage. “Air barriers are a key element to improving energy efficiency,” he said at the press conference. “Conducting real world research with our partners is essential to develop new technologies for tomorrow’s zero energy buildings and to help assure building code organizations have the best information available for their decisions.”
Much like the CoE, the BEST facility is a living laboratory. This lab resembles a two-story house, and in place of glass windows are 34 openings for test panels. ABAA is installing various materials in them that will be subject to identical indoor and outdoor conditions. Oak Ridge Lab will analyze the results, which will then be put to use in the real world of building technology.
Rep. Dan Maffei (D-DeWitt), fresh off his hilarious April 7 appearance on Comedy Central’s The Colbert Report, donned his serious face to laud the project. “Congress has made weatherization and energy efficiency a national priority, and I am excited to see locally we have great institutions working on such important projects. Central New York is already known for being a leader in green technology research and development, and projects such as the BEST Lab will only strengthen that reputation.”
It’s green projects with practical applications that resonate with the populace. Just labeling something “green” or “sustainable” doesn’t make it so, and it’s really up to the consumer to machete through the hype to find the truth, or the lies. “There is a lot of hype,” Bogucz admits. “Within the green movement, those things that aren’t really green are called ‘greenwashing.’ Still, if people are talking about green, it helps to raise public awareness and when people start to ask deeper questions, they can make their own decisions. Green is an idea that goes across every product and service, they address the critical need of humanity to change our relationship with the earth, and it is definitely a spectrum.”
And while there isn’t one entity that certifies and labels products as green (like the U.S. Food and Drug Administration does with food nutrition labels), perhaps the best known agency that does that is the U.S. Green Building Council. Founded and led by Syracuse native and Le Moyne College and SU graduate Rick Fedrizzi, the USGBC’s mission, as outlined on its Web site, is “to transform the way buildings and communities are designed, built and operated, enabling an environmentally and socially responsible, healthy and prosperous environment that improves the quality of life.”
Like a Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval, the USGBC labels buildings through a ranking system called LEED, Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design. Using four designations of “greenness,” the USGBC bestows (from lowest to highest) certified, silver, gold and platinum. “We’re building what we expect will earn the highest rating,” Bogucz says. “The USGBC system is transparent. So now the public can judge for itself, how green is that building? There’s a list of how a building got the certification it did.”
Fedrizzi, who has spent 16 years trying to get the green word out, could not have been more thrilled when he toured the CoE Feb. 19. “I had goose bumps the minute I pulled up to it,” he says, “and not only because it was cold outside. From the very first, the university said this would be a platinum building, we are committing to platinum. The development team and buildings are so in tune with every LEED credit, every new technology. It was pretty astounding to see that this was happening in my back yard. I don’t care if Syracuse is picking this up a little later than a lot of cities. It’s all about how you did it when you did pick it up.”
Building Blocks
In many ways, the engineer’s job is to take theoretical thoughts scientists conjure and put them into practical application. Newton may have contemplated gravity, but his apple made it real to people. So while explaining that the CoE is a huge experimental apparatus may be just too much for people to comprehend, a tour of the building will codify things for you. “The whole layout of the building has been designed for the test group School Bus Load of Kids,” Bogucz explains. “Here’s how they’ll move through the building, here’s what they’re going to see. All of the visible guts of the building will be there for everybody to see.”
Even though the CoE will be nearly complete in September, in time for a Healthy Buildings conference that will attract 1,000 like-minded, international greeniacs, in many ways it will never be done. “At some level we’re never complete,” Bogucz says. “It’s like the space station: We’ll always be changing and adding and bringing new equipment to the building.”
Construction zone: Rick Fedrizzi (red jacket) of
the U.S. Green Building Council paid a visit to the workers at the
Center of Excellence; a month later, work continued on the
ground-source heating and cooling system (top).
Below, an installer prepares one of the
window-sized test panels inside the BEST Laboratory,
on Syracuse University’s South Campus. MICHAEL DAVIS PHOTO
One aspect of the CoE that Bogucz expects will remain static is its platinum LEED certification, earned through the following, incomplete list, of examples. The sloping roof will be completely covered with plants, which will provide thermal insulation, rainwater retention and a visible connection to nature. Inside the building sits a 5,000-gallon cistern where rainwater and melting snow will accumulate. That water will be used to flush toilets, saving drinkable water for, um, drinking.
“In the future, humans will look back on us and talk about how things were so out of whack that we used potable water to convey our waste,” Bogucz says with a hearty laugh. “That’s nuts!”
Another nuts-and-bolts aspect of the building is climate control. The CoE will be warmed and cooled using what Bogucz calls ground-source heating and cooling. “It’s often called geothermal, but we prefer to use ground-source,” he says. “We reserve geothermal for something like Old Faithful, really hot rocks.”
Once you dig four feet into the Central New York ground, the temperature is a uniform 50 degrees Fahrenheit. Using a network of pipes that extend 300 feet down, the climate-control system will pull relatively warm air up in the wintertime and deposit heat into the ground in the summer. A portion of the six-inch-diameter pipes will remain uncovered so the visiting public can touch them. “Our intention here is that people are going to touch the heating and cooling system, and we’ll let those pipes tell the story of heating and cooling the building,” Bogucz says.
That’s the public face of the CoE; Bogucz describes the work of the CoE as “a community of firms and institutions that are committed to collaborate to create green innovations.” The lead organization is SU, of which Bogucz is an employee, with a broad range of more than 200 partners from across upstate New York, including manufacturers and universities. “The enterprise that I lead is bigger than the building. We’ve been collaborating since 2001. This is our headquarters, an addition to our existing facilities. This is our showroom, our front door, for this enterprise that is distributed across upstate.”
Again, Bogucz has an analogy for us non-scientific types. “I like to think of the building as like the Y{MCA}. Our partners can come and work out and they get stronger and they get new ideas and then they go back to their places of employment and they develop new products. Our job is actually to create jobs.”
Equipped with large indoor spaces, the building is really an experimental apparatus. Companies can come to the Syracuse CoE to test out their new ideas. “We have some really special laboratory facilities in the building that we are confident will attract attention from around the world,” Bogucz adds. “The building is attracting a lot of attention around the world for lots of reasons, for both its form and its function.”
In fact, the building, designed by architect Toshiko Mori, was included in an exhibition of innovation and design at Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum in New York City. Her work, of which the CoE is one example, was highlighted in the museum’s National Design Triennial 2006.
Green is the new black, and there are so many aspects to green that it would be easy to conclude that Bogucz feels overwhelmed, that the task at hand is daunting. “When I’m speaking with Chief Oren Lyons, the Faithkeeper of the Onondaga Nation, it feels like I’m talking to all the accumulated wisdom of the Onondaga over the centuries,” Bogucz says. “When he says we’re running out of time, you get a sense of urgency. This is a person who has the perspective of seven generations past and seven generations into the future, so when he speaks it’s almost like this is too much, we’ve dug such a deep hole.
“It’s natural to have those thoughts, but you can come back and say, ‘OK, we can take steps to move in the right direction.’ The bald eagles coming to spend the winter at Onondaga Lake gave us hope. The lake is improving dramatically, faster than scientists expected. There’s a resilience to nature that is hard to appreciate until you begin to see it and I think we’re starting to see it in the rebirth of Onondaga Lake.”
Fedrizzi also believes we have experienced the watershed in terms of the green movement. “This is our moment of reawakening on so many levels,” he says. “The hardest job we have right now is convincing the status quo that we are living in important times. Historians will write about this time as, after a long period of time of complacency, now we have shifting personal priorities: They affected a national election, they changed the way the economy is viewed. Green is a symbol of awareness.
“Our wake-up call was Sept. 11,” he continues. “And somebody who had been ignored for years, Al Gore, and some very savvy Hollywood folks who turned his slide show into a movie {An Inconvenient Truth} and put the crisis in a way that people could understand. We are now in the midst of a time of people refocusing on what is important. It’s simple, really: Green is a way of respecting economic, environmental and human concerns. You take away any one of those, and the other two crash and burn. The bipartisan stuff doesn’t apply anymore. When the ship is going down, it doesn’t matter what side you’re on.”
