Mashouf Wellness Center was completed in 2017. The wellness center provides students with opportunities for adventure and athletic experiences across its 118,700 square feet of state-of-the-art facilities. (Yoobin Shin/Xpress Magazine)

SF State’s new buildings on campus meet requirements that will certify their status as sustainable buildings. Through a combination of design, construction materials, low-energy fixtures, and post-occupancy use, each of the new buildings on campus meets sustainability requirements established by the U.S. Green Building Council’s LEED, or Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design program. The USGBC website says LEED strives for “healthy, highly efficient and cost-saving green buildings” and grades each building from design to completion on its sustainability index.

Building construction accounts for nearly 40% of global emissions, according to the Yale Center for Ecosystems and Architecture. With SF State’s new construction projects, several buildings have been demolished and replaced with sustainably designed classrooms, dorms, and student resource centers. These structures are healthier for the environment, the students, and the faculty who occupy them.

What is LEED?

LEED is the rating system used by the United States Green Building Council, which functions from multiple prongs. The program encompasses accrediting industry professionals through exams and certifying building design and operations through a point system.

“By promoting a whole-building approach to sustainability, LEED recognizes achievements in location and planning, sustainable site development, water savings, energy efficiency, materials selection, waste reduction, indoor environmental quality, innovative strategies and attention to priority regional issues,” explains the US Green Building Council’s website. 

Once meeting the prerequisites for certification, additional credits are tallied through a point system. This point system then ranks buildings from Certified to Silver, Gold, or Platinum. 

Mashouf Wellness Center, LEED Platinum

Built in 2017, Mashouf Wellness Center, SF State’s new gym and natatorium facility, is the first LEED Platinum certified building on campus.

“There is a purple piped greywater reuse system in the building so the toilets use reused water from the showers, native and adaptive low water landscaping, use of natural daylighting, passive heating, and the front garden is a bioswale,” Caitlin Steele, the director of sustainability and energy at SF State said in an email. 

Greywater, water collected from the shower and sink drains, is reused to flush the toilets in the building, according to Mitch Fine, architect and partner at WRNS Studios, the architecture firm that designed Mashouf Wellness Center. 

“When you think about these rec centers, they’re really water intensive,” said Fine. “You’ve got showers running all throughout the day. You’ve got a lot of sinks running throughout the day, so you’ve got a lot of greywater. And then you’ve got the pool.” 

Water conservation and recycling are important aspects of meeting the LEED sustainable building requirements, from the design phase to the ongoing operations of the building. Mashouf Wellness Center has two pools and a hot tub. 

Audrey Trujillo, the student manager of sustainability for Mashouf Wellness Center, is part of the team that works to renew the LEED certification. 

“We do 80% of all of what they ask to be LEED certified,” Trujillo said. “And each year, you get renewed. So, within that, there’s things like consumption, like reducing consumption levels, we have a lot of sustainability factors or features like natural lighting, solar panels, we have a great water system. Our greywater system was something that was really important for us to be Platinum certified, and [the] greywater system really affects our pools,” Trujillo said. 

Due to the nature of the water-recycling system, when one element needs maintenance, the whole system stops working, as it is a closed-loop, continuous filtration system.

“It reuses and refilters water from the three pools,” Trujillo said. Two large water basins are stored behind the pool. Water travels from each basin, flows through a filter, and is recycled into another pool.  It is a continuous cycle. “I believe when we have pool issues, it’s because once one thing is not working, and unfortunately, that shuts down everything.” 

There is also a photovoltaic system, or solar panel system, installed on the roof of the building. Solar energy use is an additional category for LEED certification that helped the building qualify for Platinum.

“We needed the photovoltaic system to get [Platinum], and so I believe there was a budget augmentation to get the photovoltaic system that would allow Platinum to come into play,” said Fine.

Due to the foggy San Francisco climate, the 295 kilowatt solar photovoltaic system isn’t functioning as well as possible. According to SF State’s How We Power webpage, the school is “actively working toward purchasing energy from renewable sources that aligns with our budget and other solutions.” 

 What does LEED cost?

“They made it into commodity,” said Amily Huang, professor of architecture and design at City College of San Francisco and accredited LEED Advanced Professional. “It’s just a barrier … there’s all these costs involved here.” 

The fees associated with the LEED certification are calculated by first, a base fee and from there additional fees calculated by the building size. According to the LEED fee list, an estimate for Mashouf Wellness Center’s initial certification fee was around $50,000, and each yearly recertification has an additional cost.

“We have plenty of clients, institutional clients, that won’t go for the LEED plaque because there are costs to do it,” said Fine. “Not only are there design fees for us to have to develop a lot of exhibits and administratively go through the United States Green Building Council [USGBC], but the campus also has to pay fees for that. So, a lot of campuses say, ‘What’s most important to me is not a plaque or a checklist. It’s that I holistically have a sustainable building.’ Some campuses want the evidence of the design, so they can actually point to it and say, ‘We did it.’”

While the USGBC oversees LEED certifications for sustainable buildings, sustainability or ‘green building’ is a design practice that doesn’t require any official certification. 

“Why do you need extra cost to make something green?” said Huang about building ‘green’ versus building ‘LEED’. “I can use the same checklist. I can do the whole checklist but not file for LEED. And my building could be just as green as the other one, but it doesn’t have a plaque on it,” Huang said of building ‘green’ versus building ‘LEED’. “So many clients want to have the branding for that, and I get it. To be part of society, we need to communicate and engage in that, but as an academic person, I have a lot of personal, philosophical struggles with that.” 

Sustainability encompasses much more than just how humans interact with our world in small actions, like recycling and reusable water bottles. Mashouf Wellness Center’s design and operations have a 51% energy savings over the baseline for buildings of its use and size, and a Platinum LEED plaque on the outside of the building to show for it. Moving up the ladder to the built environment, the spaces we construct, demolish, and inhabit in between, is where the most significant impact on the environment lies. With each existing building replaced with sustainable design, LEED certification or not, the long-term environmental impact of building use lessens. 

“When I asked students at SF State what they liked most about the building, it had nothing to do with recreation,” said Fine. “95% of them were happy about the sustainability strategies of the building. It wasn’t like, ‘Wow, we love the pool’ or, ‘We love the mountain climbing wall.’ It was that they liked the fact that their campus cared enough to design a building that was sustainable and thought about future generations and about the earth. I was impressed and surprised by that answer.”