By Teresa A. Martin
This afternoon I tucked myself under a big white tent on the Cape Cod Community College campus for the dedication and “cable cutting” of the brand spanking new Lyndon P. Lorusso Applied Technology Building.
The building may be housing academic technology programs, IT staff, and computer classrooms, but this application of technology pales in comparison to the technology behind the creation of the building itself.
The Lorusso building is the first public building in the Commonwealth to be LEED-certified. "Huh"? you may be asking. "LEED what?"
LEED stands for Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design. It is a US standard for what are called “high performance, sustainable buildings.” That is, for buildings designed for a new era of smart energy use and built with high tech/low impact materials.
The standards are developed by a building trade association called the US Green Building Council -- http://www.usgbc.org// -- which wanted to find a way to define a common way of measuring environmentally smart building design and essentially transform the building market for the new century.
Some of the things it measures are sustainable site development, water savings, energy efficiency, materials selection and indoor environmental quality.
Getting to this goal doesn’t just happen. There’s a lot of technology innovation behind it.
Look at power use, for example. At the new building, photovoltaic panels turn sun energy into building energy. Panels are tucked into all sorts of clever locations, including within a portion of the south facing windows. Sensors know how bright or dim to set the lights. Smart heating and air conditioning system know when a window is open and turn themselves off instead of pumping power out the portal.
Or water use. In the new building, gray water systems were engineering to recycle rainwater. Bathrooms monitor water use and sip the resources without loss of performance.
Both these areas are examples of applications where the ideas and concepts within a human mind meet the real world. Through engineering and technological development, the notion of sustainable buildings becomes the hard reality of construction technology. And through these disciplines, the building industry can deliver the concept, deliver the science, and make our lives a bit better, safer, more comfortable.
That’s technology in action. That’s the way that technology impacts everyday life.
What happens inside this building will be a beautiful thing – students learning, services provided, education underway.
But the things that happened on the way to this building are equally beautiful – it’s the story of the magic of human minds fusing with the world around us, to create engineering solutions that sustain us into the future.
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