Designers of Kaiser Permanente's Antelope Valley Medical Offices overcame the severe environmental challenges of its 44-acre site in the high desert to win our first environmentally friendly design award.
The Antelope Valley sits at an elevation of 2,350 feet, tucked between the Tehachapi and the San Gabriel mountains at the western tip of the Mojave Desert.
“The winds are really high there, anywhere from 25 to 90 miles an hour,” said Harbans Ghataode, associate and senior designer at Taylor Design. “When I walked the site, I was almost blown away—literally.”
The project, then, was designed to attract Kaiser members to the site and shelter and nurture them with outdoor pathways protected from the wind by earthen berms, an open courtyard sheltered between the two legs of the nearly A-shaped building and an inviting, wavy, energy-efficient glass wall on the southern façade. The wall tilts at 10 degrees to offer shade from the summer sun while still enabling sunlight and mountain views to reach the building's interior.
“The whole idea about the wave was to dissipate the wind and keep it away from the main entrance,” Ghataode said.
“We tried to create micro-environments so (patients and staff) wouldn't be trapped inside, and they could go outside and engage in the environment,” said John Kouletsis, vice president of facilities planning and design at Kaiser Permanente.
On the roof, nearly 1,700 square feet of solar panels provide enough energy for about 75% of the building's hot water needs. Installing low-volume plumbing fixtures and flushing toilets with re-used, treated water enabled the clinic to save 250,000 gallons of water a year compared with normal usage. Its annual energy-use efficiency rating of 42.8 kBtu (thousand British thermal units) per square foot a year was “an incredibly impressive feat,” said judge Cecilia DeLoach Lynn, director of sector performance and recognition at Practice Greenhealth, Reston, Va.
The finished product met the U.S. Green Building Council's LEED Gold standard in the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design certification program.
“The first thing that struck me was the whole idea of sustainability,” said judge Jim Bicak, vice president of facilities at Chicago's Sinai Health System. “Energy efficiency stuck out from the early design part of it. Sometimes people take advantage of the opportunities, but one could say this was a seminal factor in the design.”
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