James Learning Center LEEDs the Way in Prescott

By Michele Van Haecke

The $1.2 million James Learning Center, which houses the Highlands Center for Natural History, is expected to become Prescott's first LEED certified building.

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Prescott, the history-rich city known for its Whiskey Row and town square, is poised for its first LEED certification.

The USGBC badge of distinction is being sought for the James Learning Center, the 4,250-sq-ft hub of an environmental education campus located within Prescott National Forest. If certification is gained, the building will become only the second in Yavapai County to achieve LEED status.

Construction on the $1.2 million project was finished in January. The LEED certification process can take months after the building is done and was not completed at press time.

The project houses the Highlands Center for Natural History, a nonprofit environmental education organization with a campus on 80 acres leased >> from the national forest. The center includes classrooms, offices, a welcome center and bookstore and was designed to serve as a green-design model.

With an arresting, contemporary look aimed to engage, the building employs passive heating and cooling, harvests rainwater and demonstrates how accessible green can be. It uses vine-shaded arbors and breezes to cool, sunlight and concrete to heat and an innovative roof design to water its sustainable landscape.

 “We want it to stimulate some questions, then show the answers,” says architect Matt Ackerman, project designer and principal with Prescott-based Catalyst Architecture. “We want to build and show.”

Education began long before the learning center was completed. Though Ackerman is a seasoned, LEED-accredited designer, this was the first green project for nearly everyone else on the team, including general contractor Haley Construction of Prescott. 

“Most of the subs were conscientious about it but didn’t have the track record of LEED building, so there was a certain amount of learning curve,” says Tom Haley, who shares ownership of Haley Construction with his brother, Bill. “It was a real cooperative effort.”

Though Tom Haley gained LEED accreditation prior to the job, he says the inaugural, hands-on project made him the center’s first real student.

LEED requirements took some getting used to from everyone, he adds. Waste was segregated much like household trash. Metal was cleaned and recycled. Glue-free wood was chipped into groundcover. Drywall was crunched up into gypsum landfill cover. Plants were salvaged and stored until they could be reused, as were local rock and timber.

This all fetched points with the USGBC, so every bit required documentation. That became Tom Haley’s primary job. “There’s clearly a certain amount of difficulty and paperwork involved with LEED projects,” he says. “As they become more common, that will get easier.” 

Additional green building elements included the installation of 40 photovoltaic panels, which he says went “trouble-free”, hydro-radiant heating and specially formulated concrete.

Green design presented more challenges than green building, Tom Haley says. “We used a lot of things that don’t strike you immediately as green, but when you think about it, they support the overall sustainability of the environment,” he adds.

The project gained fossil-fuel reduction points by locally sourcing steel, engineered trusses and TJI joists, 2-by-4 framing and stucco. When the design called for standard clear glass (for passive-heating solar gain) instead of low-E glazing, everyone from supplier to installer missed it, an oversight later remedied.

“LEED-accredited professionals can get high-performance buildings out of conventional materials if they know what they’re doing,” Ackerman says. “There’s nothing too radical about the structural or material systems. It’s the way it’s put together.”

Framing called for precise configuration of supportive pine posts and custom iron connectors from foundation to roof, a conceptual dynamo whose v-shaped, inverted roofline gave the design the working title, “The Butterfly.” Clad in USDA-approved green metal, the roof collects rainwater into a main channel that irrigates a sustainable landscape designed by Prescott-based T. Barnabas Kane & Associates. “The idea is to get double duty out of a single system,” Ackerman says.

Landscape architects Barnabas Kane and Steve Morgan worked with Ackerman during the design process to add LEED points through salvaged native planting, rainwater-reliant irrigation and landforms that control erosion and drainage. Like the vine-shaded arbors, the roof works in tandem with landscaping to nurture existing and potential ecosystems.

Key Players

Owner: Highlands Center for Natural History
Architect: Catalyst Architecture
General Contractor: Haley Construction
Engineer/Design: Kunka Engineering; RTL Lighting; EV Solar; Quest Energy Group;
T. Barnabas Kane & Associates; Ecological by Design
Subcontractors: Cosmic Steel; Pat Beary Woodcraft; T&H Construction

Project Update: The James Learning Center was awarded Leed gold certification by the USGBC on Feb. 8, 2008. It is the first project in Prescott to achieve LEED certification, and the first gold project for Yavapai County.

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