Page 38 - Winter_2020

USG is a regional campus of the University System
of Maryland that offers 80 undergraduate and graduate
degree programs from nine different Maryland public
universities. The $175-million BSE facility, which is
USG’s fourth academic building, houses 20 teaching
laboratories, 12 active learning classrooms, two lecture
halls, a product-design laboratory and maker space for
student research, academic offices, and a dental clinic
with 20 dental chairs and four surgical offices that
will provide comprehensive dental care to community
patients. Each floor of the building includes one “icon”
laboratory space, and tiered classrooms and glass-
enclosed labs support a goal of putting science on display.
Classes offered at the building support 17
undergraduate and graduate programs in healthcare,
biosciences, engineering, and computational science
for the University of Maryland, College Park, the
University of Maryland, Baltimore, and the University
of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC). The addition
of the new building will permit the campus to increase
its enrollment from 3,000-plus students to more than
7,500 over the next several years.
The project incorporates numerous features
supporting LEED goals and the promotion of wellbeing
and biophilia. “Biophilic goals are focused on human
senses and experience, while LEED for the most part is
focused on building performance,” Jones said. Far from
conflicting with one another, however, the project’s
LEED and biophilia design goals were complementary,
Fredlund added.
To achieve the highest-level LEED certification,
the building was designed to reduce water and energy
use by 79% and 36%, respectively, compared to a
conventionally designed building of similar size. The
reduction in water use was achieved through rainwater
capture, recovery of HVAC system condensation,
capturing the output from foundation and under-
slab dewatering systems, and diverting that output
to a 20,000-gallon cistern for flushing toilets and a
10,000-gallon cistern for irrigating the site’s landscape.
The reduction in energy use was achieved through
features such as a heat-recovery chiller that adequately
conditions the building in mild weather, active chilled
beams in labs, LED lighting, and air-side economizers,
which allow outside air into the building when the
ambient temperature falls within a certain range. The
building has a measurement and verification system
to monitor its energy performance and display it on
screens throughout the facility. Photovoltaic arrays on
the roofs of the BSE building and an adjacent building
and parking structure provide 19% of the building’s
electrical requirements, and the design includes a
provision for adding wind turbines for generating more
on-site electrical power.
“Since the campus is small and constrained on
all its edges, we knew that in the future the site would
be very limiting for the university,” Jones said. “For
this reason, we chose to use a smaller footprint and
taller massing, which also meant we could maximize

36 A HEALTHY REGARD FOR DESIGN Atrium.