Cox sees the light

Daylight illuminates path toward energy efficiency

Tom Cox is a managing partner for Durrant Architects and Engineers, a national firm with nine offices in six states, but he picked an Eagle River high school he worked on while with Appleton-based Hoffman LLC as his favorite project.

The school, Northland Pines High, collected special recognition from the U.S. Green Building Council for its use of daylight to improve the indoor environment and reduce overall energy consumption.

Cox has a history with daylight. The licensed architect has used it since the oil embargos and the energy crisis in the 1970s.

“I cut my teeth on the solar-energy movement,” Cox said. “That was a big deal. When the cost of energy became cheap in the 1980s, the movement went dormant, but a few of us kept the faith. Now the movement has started to grow again for economic purposes.”

As president of the board of directors for the Wisconsin Green Building Alliance, Cox, 54, said he’s glad people are finally seeing the light.

New building techniques, such as using nanotechnology on glass to improve natural light and generate electricity and installing shingles that absorb sunlight, are just a few of the sustainable efforts that get Cox excited about the future.

“We are creating living buildings that produce more energy than they use and eliminate the need for utilities,” he said. “You can generate electricity through the use of the sun.”

Cox’s interest in environmental issues evolved from a childhood in rural Nebraska. Growing up in Grand Island, a small Nebraska town about 90 miles west of Lincoln, Cox spent hot summer days bailing hay, detasseling corn and building tree forts on farms owned by his aunts and uncles.

He water skied on Johnson Lake near Lexington, where his family had a cottage, and hiked the Rockies.

“I’m a big outdoor guy,” he said. “I was outside all the time. I came to an early awareness of the interconnectedness of agriculture, the land and quality of life. I have an affinity for the environment.”

Cox said art was his favorite class in middle and high school and construction work provided spending money. The combination of an art interest and a construction background led him to study architecture at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln in the 1970s.

Cox said he was interested in energy conservation back then, and he’s surprised it took so long for the rest of the field to feel the same way.

“I would have thought the industry would embrace the ideas much wider, much sooner,” Cox said.

Cox said he believes fear that responsible building practices are more expensive drove the delay.

But, he said, in reality, green construction should save money.

“We have to get past the notion that you pay a high premium to be green,” he said. “The real goal is to build very sustainable, highly performable construction that doesn’t cost any more than (nonsustainable) construction.”

Cox can point to that high school in Eagle River as an example of his construction ideal.

“It’s a moral obligation of architects and engineers to create buildings and environments that reduce the carbon footprint by using less energy and sending less waste to the landfill,” Cox said. “We need to evolve in our practices to leave behind a world better than the one we inherited.”

— Maggie Rossiter Peterman