What a day!

Saturday, August 30, 2008

A new group of Oles arrived on campus today and it was one of the most beautiful move in days of my 20 years on the hill. It was just a great day, happy kids, happy parents, happy faculty and staff, and especially - admissions counselors!

More people are happy though. The entire planning, design, and construction team for Regents Hall breathed a great sigh of relief when our third major milestone was completed on Friday - the Certificate of Occupancy. This means the building can be used for its intended purpose. It doesn't really mean it's done. There's a bunch of finishing to do, but classes can begin!

Landscape is well underway and walks are complete to the main entry of Regents. There's a continuous new walk that hooks up with existing walks near Old Main. With these pieces in place, pedestrians can get where they need to be even while the remaining flat concrete work goes on.

This new quad - Old Main on the east end, Steensland and Holland on the north side, and Regents Hall on the south, has beautiful flow into the main central campus green. It's really hard to remember what this felt like when it was unorganized parking and roadway - but I do remember it didn't feel good. It just feels great now!

Now - all we have to do is get it really truly done, landscape and all, in time for Homecoming and Family Weekend (and Regents Hall Dedication).

And another one bites, another one bites, another one bites the dust…

I missed posting on Milestone Number 2, the east Conditional Certificate of Occupancy that happened on Friday 8/22. An inch further down the road! Folks have been moving into east offices, work rooms, and labs all week.

Does that mean the building is done? No.

Today we hope to get a straight up Occupancy Permit. Will that mean the building is done? No again!

It will mean we can use the building for its intended purposes even as finishes continue. Mainly it means that all of the life safety components are in and fully functional. The large crews that have been on site will be ramping down through Tuesday, September 2^nd. Non-disruptive work will continue during the day, and more disruptive activities will move to the evenings.

Campus sidewalk work that will provide access to Regents and its new mini-quad is well underway but will not be complete until the end of next week. There will be a continuous walk – even if some is temporary - to serve Old Main, Steensland, and Regents at the end of the day today.

Please stay on the walks as work in this zone continues!

Also, permitted occupancy or not, please stay away until Wednesday September 3^rd! Too much going on!

One down...

Our first of several important milestones was achieved today. A Conditional Certificate of Occupancy was received for the west wing of Regents Hall. This means that the faculty and staff can start unpacking their boxes and establishing their offices, the stockrooms, and labs. Because it is conditional, folks can't really start doing their daily work in offices, but at least the faculty, who are chomping at the bit to get in those boxes so they can have some sort of head start on preparations for the start of a new academic year, can start digging around to find stuff.

Dave Van Wylen and assistant director of facilities Bill Nelson have been coordinating moves, and Custodial Supervisor Gary Hall and his group have been cleaning to try to stay ahead of the faculty.

Over all of our big projects we've built post-construction cleaning into our budgets, but for a variety of reasons it hasn't worked all that well. The goal has been to relieve the load on our folks so that they can get their regular assignments in shape, but in most cases we have had to go in to finish things as well as we hope for. Gary and Bill got together and propose d that we do the cleaning with St. Olaf people so that it happens the way we want up front, and it has gone really well. It is just different when there's a commitment to the college instead of a contractor.

The next big date comes a in a week when we hope to get the same sort of permit for the east wing

Green

A Green building for Science?

Green design is not so well understood. It is a set of concepts more than a strict protocol. Really all have been integrated into our Regents Hall, and it is on the way toward achieving the US Green Building Council’s LEED program’s Platinum rating. If it can be pulled off, Regents will be the largest and most technical college or university science building to achieve Platinum in the world. LEED is Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design.

Are green buildings the most energy efficient they can be? Not really. Green design definitely looks at, and takes seriously, energy consumption and all of the associated issues. However, it is as much about what it is like to live, work, and learn inside the walls that shelter our programs. The most energy efficient version of Regents Hall might not even have windows, let alone as many as there are today!

We need to remember right at the start that buildings really don't use energy, the people and their programs use energy. If the program can require less energy, the building will instantly perform better. Maybe the most important green element of Regents Hall then is the commitment of St. Olaf chemistry to a move to mostly water based reactions - known as, what else? Green chemistry.

Because the building does have laboratories, and also because all of the air that is used to ventilate labs must then be exhausted from the building, it is possible to have a science building that is a huge energy hog. Again, green design is as much about our work processes as anything else, and St. Olaf has pushed hard, designing the systems to be right on for our relatively new discipline – green chemistry. Green chemistry does all of the same work as good old un-green chemistry, but with mostly water based reactions. This means that a cutting edge building for 21^st century science could be planned and constructed with about half of the fume hoods you’d expect, and so half of the exhausted and wasted conditioned air you might expect. Green chemists are, and will be increasingly, important as we try to minimize human’s impact on the Earth.

What are the concepts? Daylight is almost always a good thing. A building and its people should use only the water that is absolutely necessary. The building site and its surroundings should be designed to manage the associated storm water to the advantage of the environment. Production of materials should be sustainable, and have positive socio-economic impacts. Occupants should have the ability to control their environments to the greatest extent practical. Only the energy necessary to produce the program should be necessary. When renewable energy can be incorporated, it should be. It should be easy to access the building by mass transit and alternative fueled vehicles. The landscape should not require irrigation. Materials should be safe, and not negatively impact the environment through off-gassing. Materials should be selected based on their performance and their whole life cost. Materials should contain recycled content when they can, and be recyclable themselves. This can go on and on.

We chose some materials that you might not think of. Good old actual linoleum of baby boomer’s youths turns out to be one our most green floor coverings. It is very benign and recyclable itself. It doesn’t require an entire family of custodial supplies for good maintenance. The colors and patterns that are possible make it a great aesthetic choice as well. Our Rolvaag Library still has the original linoleum on the corridor floors in the English Department, and it is well over 60 years old.

Distance is another material issue. We had a goal of getting as many materials as possible from within a 500 mile radius to minimize the amount of hydrocarbon fuels necessary to get them to Northfield. This also helps to support more local production. All of the concrete in the project contains a minimum of 15% boiler fly ash which was always land-filled in the past. Even our fly ash is from a coal gasification plant in North Dakota, and so within our radius. About 9,000,000 pounds of this ash in our project would have been land-filled in the past. St. Olaf limestone is actually Fond du Lac dolomite. Before 1954 it all came from a now played out quarry outside Faribault – really local! Now it comes from close by Fond du Lac Wisconsin, farther away, but still “local”. The buff colored smooth finished stone is Kasota Limestone, from St. Peter.

Many very common materials contain some level of volatile organic compounds (VOCs), and our plans and specifications were put together to minimize these to the greatest extent possible. VOCs are the largest contributors to total off-gassing as materials live their life. Many forest products especially have contained formaldehyde in the past. We specified that woods and related forest products be VOC and formaldehyde free as specified by the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC). All this comes together to have cleaner indoor air than is otherwise possible.

The HVAC systems have been designed to reclaim the heat energy form the air that is to be exhausted, and that energy is then sent to warm the incoming air to the greatest extent possible. In this way we even reclaim some of the energy used for lighting, refrigeration, equipment operations, as well as the steam that’s sued to further warm the new air.

Electrical consumption will be minimized by thoughtful use of lighting in conjunction with day light, variable speed motors (so that they only run as fast as necessary to achieve the desired effect), more highly efficient appliance and equipment, and so on. The St. Olaf wind turbine supplies the kilowatt hours the building requires. All together, the design achieves great than 50% better performance than if it was modeled just on the energy code.

All that said, even a LEED Platinum facility such as this still has some negative impacts because it still has a steam and chilled water requirement, even with the great systems we have. While it isn’t the most energy efficient that it could have been, it is very much better than a conventional building, but still has great daylight and views, really nice interiors and furnishings, and mostly, the teaching, research, learning, study, and work spaces that the program needs.

When you are not the lead dog...

Leaders

Willie Nelson says, “A leader is someone who can find a bunch of people going in the same direction and then jump in front of the line.” Leadership at St. Olaf is different than some places because with a little help we can all pull in the same direction.

Nearly all of us really want to be here for one thing. I feel like all of us, regardless of role, are here to help students get ready to lead lives of worth and service. With those two things in place the biggest barriers to good leadership developing are resolved.

Dave Van Wylen, St. Olaf’s associate dean for natural science and mathematics the last several years has been an important leader throughout the development, design, and construction of Regents Hall at St. Olaf. Before Dave took over, Professor of Biology Anne Walter “shepherded” the project through several years of evolution before we got to a time where the work and money were approved. Because of Walter’s and Van Wylen’s early work, we were pretty much heading in the same direction all along.

Shepherd is a significant word in college and university science facility development because of the work of Jeanne Narum ’57. In addition to being the matriarch of one of St. Olaf’s great families, Narum is director of the Independent Colleges Office in Washington DC, and is also the leader and inspiration of Project Kaleidoscope. PKAL is a resource for colleges and universities who hope to develop science facilities that will serve their, America’s, and the world’s, science researchers, educators, and students well into the 21^st century. In the PKAL world the “shepherd” is the faculty person who leads the program development. In St. Olaf’s world, this person co-leads St. Olaf’s team with the Director of Facilities.

Walter is a physiologist with many additional interests. She and colleague Mike Swift (they're also close personal friends and spouses - spice, whatever) are currently teaching the biology course that is a key part of the Summer Bridge Program for the Student Support Services program at the college. She also co-leads St. Olaf’s Biology in South India program and serves the college in many other ways.

Van Wylen, also a biologist, is interested in cardiac physiology. As associate dean Van Wylen coordinates the work, resources, and staffing for psychology, biology, chemistry, physics, psychology, and mathematics and computer science. This is a big job as slightly more than 40% of Oles graduate in the natural sciences and mathematics. He and his family will be celebrating the successful conclusion of several years work on Regents by traveling the world with St. Olaf students this fall semester on the Global program.

In my view, leaders help establish a vision, communicate it, develop buy in, and gather the tools and other resources the led need to execute it. Anne, Dave, and others on the faculty design team(see July 30 post) are great leaders, and the project reflects the vision that they and their team developed.

Whoa!

8/13/08 - Whoa! The days are FLYing by.

Regents Hall is a beehive of activity as we head to Friday 8/15 when we hope to get a conditional certificate of occupancy for the west wing. A second conditional permit for the east wing will be on 8/22, and the final on 8/29.

Everything looks to be on track for 8/15, but there’s still plenty to do. In order to get a conditional occupancy permit, all of the life safety aspects of the building must be complete, tested, and operational. The college has seen a great deal of cooperation between contractors and sub-contractors the appropriate Northfield officials and the State of Minnesota inspectors for plumbing and elevators.

Boldt’s Jim McConachie helped to set the stage for this cooperative attitude by asking to meet with Building Official John Brookins, Community Development Director Brian O’Connell, Fire Chief Gerry Franek, and City Planner Dan Olson, when the very early conceptual ideas were first on paper. The basic concept of the building – entries, number of occupants, circulation, and exiting – was introduced so that we could get early reactions. With that sort of information, we could make any conceptual changes that were needed before there was further design development. These sessions continued informally through the project and the formal and informal communication established a new level of city/college relations. A real win – win for St. Olaf and Northfield.

McConachie has been the lead Boldt person for St/ Olaf projects since the addition to, and renovation of, Rolvaag Library in the early ‘90s. He’s a resident of Cloquet, MN, location of Boldt’s Minnesota Operations office. He has contributed to a great body of work at St. Olaf with the Rolvaag project, Buntrock Commons, Dittmann Center, the Tostrud Center, the wind turbine, Boe Chapel, and other smaller projects before Regents Hall. Four or five of these are among the very best buildings of their kind in America.

Jim and his wife Nancy, a teacher and retired coach in Cloquet, had two kids who are smart enough to settle in great places to visit, Colorado and Florida. He is a guy with more hobbies than time as he is an avid hunter, fisherman, archer, and golfer. He was also one of the lead people for the Cloquet Hockey Association when they built the newer Cloquet arena with volunteer labor.

Jim is planning to open a bait shop in Death Valley at the conclusion of Regents Hall work.

Kelly Newman

For any major project (and I’ll just go ahead and call Regents Hall major, you know, $64,000,000 – pretty soon you’re talking real money) there are hundreds of people who each have important parts. Once a project has passed the planning and design phases and it’s getting ready to go, the superintendent of construction becomes the person who has to put all of those hundreds of important pieces together, and make them flow.

Our superintendent is Kelly Newman, but we call him Beetlejuice. He makes the work go. Kelly is committed to treating his folks and our sub-contractors’ people fairly and well. He listens maybe more than he speaks, but when he has something to say, people listen and they appreciate the way they are treated. His goal is always to deliver the best value he can to St. Olaf.

Kelly was also the superintendent for Boldt on the Buntrock Commons project and played a huge role in the overall success of that facility. He also led the Tostrud Center work and has been with the Regents Hall project since the first days. Kelly has been with Boldt Construction for 21 years.

He is a native of Moose Lake, MN, just down the road from Boldt’s Minnesota office in Cloquet. He has 4 kids, 4 grandkids, 3 dogs, and a Harley Street Bob to occupy his “spare time”, and resides in Forest Lake, MN.

I have to take a minute for a ”small world” story. In 1988 my folks retired and moved to a year around lake home that’s just between Moose Lake and Barnum and east of I 35. They got into the community right away and loved living in small town Minnesota with a great church, inexpensive golf, and a morning coffee group for my dad that I called the Liars Club. I sat in with those guys several times and it was an interesting group to say the least! They met at the Chef Café in downtown Moose Lake every morning at 10:30 for years. It’s unknown if there was ever an actual chef in the café, but there definitely wasn’t when I was there!

We got started building the Buntrock Commons in September of 1997. One morning in the Chef Café my dad was talking about this great big project that his son was building at St. Olaf College. One of the other guys said, “What are you talking about? MY son is building that project.”

That evening Kelly and I both got phone calls from our dads, and we’ve laughed about it since. The dads probably argued and joked about whose kid was a bigger part of all that for years. Over the past few years both of our dads passed away, and pretty much everyone in both families feels like it was probably the Chef Café coffee that did them in!

Kelly says, “The best thing about working on St. Olaf jobs is the people. Everyone at St. Olaf has been great to work with over all these years. Beside that, where else do you get to build buildings the way St. Olaf does? The designs are great and they use materials everyone likes to work with. Those that will last and look good way into the future.”