IBC puts a green feather in its cap

By Candace Doyle

IBC Engineering Services Inc. has won more than its share of awards, including a few Top Projects awards from Wisconsin Builder and The Daily Reporter.

Those honors were for the Waukesha firm’s work on the Lynde and Harry Bradley Technology and Trade School, the Washington Park Library, Alterra at the Lake and Outpost Natural Foods in Wauwatosa.

But for IBC, which specializes in sustainable engineering systems, the best may be yet to come.

IBC recently learned it received the prestigious first-place ASHRAE Region VI Technology Award for its work on the Chicago Center for Green Technology, completed in 2002, said Tram Hoang Littmann, marketing director.

“We’re very excited about it,” she said.

Littmann said IBC competed against 12 other companies in the American Society of Heating, Refrigerating and Air-Conditioning Engineers region, which, besides Wisconsin, includes Illinois, Iowa, Minnesota, North Dakota and Missouri.

“We’ve never won a regional,” said Littmann.

Now, the company will advance to the international competition, held in August.

“I think by the end of the year, we’ll know,” she said.

And as exciting as that prospect is, Littmann said, sustainable design and building commissioning — quality assurance processes — for IBC is really all in a day’s work.
“That’s kind of been our core philosophy,” she said.

So it’s not really a surprise that IBC was chosen for the two-story, 34,000-square-foot, $3 million building in the first place.

The building, she said, was Mayor Richard M. Daley’s first public green building.

“Mayor Daley kind of put that out — that all public buildings will be LEED-certified,” she said. “There was a lot of city involvement.”

And green it is; the multiuse building houses the Green Corps, which takes on interns from disadvantaged neighborhoods to teach them natural landscape skills, and the Green University, where sustainable design techniques are taught.

“IBC actually does seminars there,” Littmann said.

While Chicago has taken the lead with LEED, Littmann said Wisconsin’s leaders are joining the green bandwagon.

Madison Mayor Dave Cieslewicz issued an edict similar to Daley’s, and building green is what Mil-waukee Mayor Tom Barrett’s Green Team is all about.
“It’s starting to pick up here,” she said.

That only makes sense — and dollars and cents, too. The Chicago Center, with its solar, geothermal and air-to-air recovery systems, uses 60 percent less energy than a typical building of the same size, saving $21,000 a year.

“They’re just starting to get the data from all the energy efficiencies,” Littmann said. “They expect to be on target.”

We wouldn’t be surprised.