Blue Ridge Parkway Destination Center Earns a Rare 11 of 10 PointsLord, Aeck & Sargent announced today that in awarding LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) Gold certification to the Blue Ridge Parkway Destination Center in the category of new construction, the U.S. Green Building Council gave the project the maximum 10 points in the category of optimized energy performance, plus an additional point for exceeding the maximum (60 percent) energy savings tracked for this credit.
The project tracked a 75 percent improvement in energy performance over a code-compliant base building.
"To the best of our knowledge, it's extremely rare for a project to achieve more than the maximum 10 points allowable in the USGBC's optimized energy performance category, but frankly, we're not surprised that our Blue Ridge Parkway project earned 11 points," said Jim Nicolow, AIA, LEED AP, director of sustainable development at Lord, Aeck & Sargent, which designed the Destination Center for the National Park Service.
"That's because, in addition to numerous energy conservation integrated design strategies such as hydronic radiant heated flooring and a high-efficiency HVAC system with an energy recovery wheel, our most innovative strategy was the use of high-tech computational fluid dynamics (CFD) modeling to analyze our use of low-tech passive solar Trombe walls," Nicolow continued.
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