James H. Berchert Photography, via Hutton Architecture StudioNatural light alone illuminates the Sangre de Cristo school gym during the day.
When students returned to school this fall in rural Mosca, Colo., they had plenty to cheer about besides the Thunderbirds, their football team. In August, the school district completed construction of the new Sangre de Cristo K-12 school, replacing an old metal building that more closely resembled a potato cellar, according to some students, referring to the low, dark warehouses for storing one of the region’s primary crops.
The new building offers plenty of natural daylight and other design features intended to create a better learning environment while reducing energy costs for the school district, according to Paul Hutton, a sustainability consultant who worked on the project.
Designed by klipp Architects of Denver, the 80,000-square-foot building will use only 30 percent as much energy as the average school in the state. It qualifies for a LEED gold rating, and planners hope to win the top rating, platinum, after it completes the installation of a ground-mounted solar power array later this year.
LEED, or Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design, was developed by the United States Green Building Council and is like a report card for buildings, scoring energy efficiency and environmental impact. Only 30 K-to-12 schools across the country have been accorded a platinum rating.
Much of the energy savings will come from a geo-exchange system that relies on a constant temperature below ground to heat and cool a building without the use of fossil fuels. The system maintains a comfortable indoor temperature throughout the year by circulating fluid through long loops of piping buried underneath the football and baseball fields.
Bringing natural daylight into the building will help cut electricity bills. Daylighting is now common in green building design, Mr. Hutton said, but the challenge is controlling the contrast ratio, the difference between light and dark areas in the room. “Too much contrast in a space makes it hard for our eyes to adjust and see everything in a space comfortably,” he said.
Allowing direct sunlight into a room where it hits a desk surface or computer screen increases the contrast ratio. People using the room are apt to switch on the overhead lights to reduce this contrast, and there goes your energy savings.
For the Sangre de Cristo building, the designers carefully calculated sun angles so there was never direct sun on a work surface during the day when the building was occupied, Mr. Hutton said. Upper “daylight” windows are translucent, lower “view” windows are protected by exterior sunshades and an interior shade cloth to control glare.
Ceilings in the classroom are higher at the perimeter wall and slope down to the inner wall so the natural light can spread evenly across the room.
Finding the $23 million to develop the site and build the school would have been difficult for the Sangre de Cristo school district had it not been for the state’s Building Excellent Schools Today program, which covered all but $4 million of the project. Created in 2008 by state legislators, the BEST program allocates money to school districts specifically to cover the construction costs of new buildings or refurbishing existing ones. The money is not taken from taxes but from payments from private companies leasing state lands.
Ted Hughes, the BEST program director, estimates that the program received $122 million in the last fiscal year, 85 percent of which came from oil and gas companies that operate on state lands. So in a nice bit of symmetry, money collected from energy companies is being used to build schools that use less energy.