Marin County's 1st LEED Certified Building
More Than Just a Sustainable Building
By: Tegan Holly - Tuesday, April 6, 2010
Source: iGreenBuild.com
Royston Hanamoto Alley & Abey (RHAA) is a landscape architecture firm with offices in Mill Valley and San Francisco, California, with a broad practice in the design and planning of outdoor spaces. | | Founded in 1958, RHAA continues to be a leader in design quality and service to clients. Our passion is to build and shape the landscape for people’s use and enjoyment while protecting and preserving the beauty and substance of nature as a resource for the future. We apply the principles of sustainable design and development to our all projects to ensure that the solutions are environmentally sensitive and appropriate.
RHAA recently completed the design of their first LEED certified project, the Marin Health and Wellness Campus in San Rafael, California. The design for the Marin Health and Wellness Center expands the sustainable principle of reuse into a holistic, transformative site strategy. In Marin County—an affluent area north of San Francisco—county leaders sought to engage an underserved community by re-inventing a light-industrial complex as a state-of-the-art health facility. The design repurposes the asphalt-dominated collection of buildings and parking lots into a campus distinguished by comfortable, program-appropriate spaces with flexibility to respond to future needs.
The project has obtained LEED Gold certification by the USGBC. This is Marin County’s only LEED Gold facility, and the County’s second largest facility. It is the only LEED Gold medical facility listed by USGBC in Northern California. RHAA played an integral role in obtaining the LEED Gold certification by including the following key elements: |
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- Tough, low-maintenance, low water-use planting was used site-wide. RHAA collaborated with County staff to choose appropriate plant species and varieties. The project was designed to meet the stringent requirements of Marin Municipal Water District and uses predominantly drip irrigation.
- Storm water in the main courtyard drains to the planters which reduces run-off velocity and encourages infiltration.
- Two oval garden areas in the courtyard employ permeable paving.
- Sustainability is a key aspect of this project in everything from solar bollards to recycled materials to low water-use plants. The design treats these sustainable aspects in visible ways, to encourage education.
The transformation of the Marin Health and Wellness Campus is an exuberant example of a key sustainable design principle—reuse—embraced at a comprehensive site level. Together with RMW Architecture, RHAA was tasked with creating spatially-appropriate, programmatic cohesion and clarity in oddly-proportioned and challenging spaces. The result of our work is a welcoming and comfortable campus, which is both contemporary and built to endure. The new environment acknowledges and relates to its unique neighborhood, with the flexibility to evolve over time.