Columbia’s Director for Project Engineering, Dave Carlson, P.E., and his colleague, Diana Allegretti, R.A., Associate Director for Capital Renewal Planning, are Columbia Facilities' stewards for sustainable design -- a responsibility they pursue while respecting the historic character of the campus.

"Our job is to review whether the architectural and infrastructure systems proposed for a renovation or a new building are going to meet 21st century criteria for such concerns as energy and water efficiency while providing a long life with low maintenance,” says Carlson. “You want to use proved technologies that are on the market, which have less of an impact on the environment.”

In a boost for environmental stewardship, Carlson and Allegretti are also qualified professionals in sustainable building design and development. Certified as accredited professionals by the U.S. Green Building Council in Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED ®), they can identify and advocate for standards included in the Green Building Rating System, a voluntary, consensus-based national standard for developing high-performance, sustainable buildings.

"For the past decade, Columbia has been conscious of and has promulgated sustainable initiatives wherever posible in existing campus buildings for energy efficiency, indoor environmental quality, materials selection and water conservation,” says Allegretti. "Now, with the proposed new Manhattanville campus, as well as the Northwest Science Building, it will be possible to continue these initiatives and reap a higher order of sustainable benefits from new building construction."

Achieving these gains will be a challenge as far as the new multi-disciplinary science research space, to be built on both campuses, is concerned. The good news is that old, relatively inefficient labs, built in the 1950s, will be replaced by a new generation of laboratories that meet energy efficiency and sustainable design goals while maintaining the highest standards of comfort, health and safety. The bad news is that laboratories are complicated systems, using an average of four times more energy and water per square foot than a typical office building. Under consideration in the construction of new buildings is the adoption of elements of the Laboratories for the 21st Century (Labs 21) guidelines, a voluntary program sponsored jointly by the U.S. Department of Energy and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, and aimed at improving environmental performance of public and private laboratory buildings.