Basking in the Glow

Academic building sheds light on green building

By Jeremy Harrell
Daily Reporter Staff

For the newest building on the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay campus, designers at Somerville Inc., came up with a bright idea: Let there be light... and lots of it.

Fifteen of the 20 classrooms in the Mary Ann Cofrin Academic Building are top lit by the sun, and the dozens of rooms that aren't still have large windows that draw in an abundance of natural light and heat. There's natural light in the 88 offices, in the hallways, in the large public spaces and even in the basement corridors. The only rooms not to have overflowing natural light are the laboratories, where the designers were asked to keep things dark.

"The idea is that if you walk around in the building, you don't have to turn on the lights," said John Oates, Somerville vice president and the project's lead architect. "Everything is fine-tuned to the exposure of the sun as it travels across the sky. Even the underground classrooms are top lit. We're always trying to get some kind of natural light."

When Somerville took on the project for the state of Wisconsin, its designers were instructed to find as many energy-efficient, cost-saving measures as possible. Meanwhile, Wisconsin Public Service wanted the building to serve as a state model for green building, with an emphasis on solar-energy generation and recycled materials, Oates said.

Somerville merged the two by designing the first building in the country to have sun-gathering photovoltaic cells both on the roof of a building and in the structure's windows, he said. The architect did have to abandon the use of recycled materials throughout the building due to cost concerns but found spots where they are appropriate and cost-effective.

Thanks to the solar cells, the building has a generation capacity of 27,500 kilowatt hours, and the power is pumped back into the university's main electricity grid.

"That's not a lot of power, but it's only a demonstration project," Oates said.

Lighting up

And, for the most part, the building needs power only when the sun doesn't shine.

The architects worked out a three-story tiered design that exposes roof lines on every floor, allowing the sun to heat and provide light for the majority of the classrooms.

"In the classrooms, we can basically turn off all the lights and still see enough to take notes," Oates said.

The light is so bright, in fact, that the windows have a tinting glaze that blocks direct light by as much as 90 percent. Somerville and its environmental consultant, Architectural Energy Corp., Boulder, Colo., calibrated the shading to the window's exposure to the sun; those with maximum exposure have a laser-etched film bonding that converts the light into power, Oates said.

As a final touch, he said he tried to find an artistic flourish to embellish a sheer wall that runs as an axis through the building. A right-angled section of the wall fans out over the building's west side, and Oates dreamed up a way to tie the theme of light into an easily recognizable building feature.

The result is a rectangular window of glass with an imprint of UW-Green Bay's symbol, the phoenix. As the sun migrates from east to west, the phoenix gets projected onto the building and the grounds, serving as a kind of sundial, Oates said.

"It gives the impression that this is a solar building," he said. "I think it's an intriguing idea -using the sun as natural light art."

Jacob C. Basten Construction Inc., Green Bay, oversaw the construction project and finished the job in 18 months. Despite the technical hurdles of the job, Basten's sense of cooperation held everything together, Oates said.

"Everything fell into place," he said. "Overall, it went smoothly. Basten did a good job of coordinating everything."

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