cc >> Welcome to University Place.
I'm Norman Gilliland. Because Aldo Leopold was the
founder of modern environmental ethics, we'd expect a building
named in his honor to have minimal impact on its
surroundings, and the Aldo Leopold Legacy Center in Baraboo
is a building that has gone even beyond that.
It's a net zero energy use building that takes all of its
energy right there on site and uses it very, very efficiently
in ultra modern ways. We're going to find out how it's
done from the executive director of the Aldo Leopold Foundation,
Buddy Huffaker. Welcome to University Place.
Buddy Huffaker: Welcome, pleased to be here.
So the concept for this building came from where?
It really originated from the Leopold family that created the
Leopold Foundation, and I think as they saw their father's
legacy continue to grow, recognized that really their
father's idea of this land ethic was as relevant today as when it
was first written in the 1940s. And so because people would show
up from all over the world on their doorstep, they began to
realize that a center that could accommodate this increasing
interest in traffic, could both help improve the experience for
visitors, but also kind of demonstrate what Leopold's ideas
might look in the 21st century. >> So in a way it was a good
thing that they waited for the 21st century to build this
because so much has been learned about the use of energy, the
efficient use of energy, even in the last 10 years.
Well, I think you're right. The Leopold family has always
been kind of writing and pushing the modern wave of the
environmental movement and conservation.
But certainly this moment in time kind of presented us both
with the theories and the technology to really, I think,
demonstrate how sustainable architecture and design can
really achieve the kind of goals that people are talking about in
terms of addressing climate change, limited resources and so
forth. >> So even in this distinctly
four-season climate that we have in Wisconsin, this is a building
that uses really minimal energy, in fact it is a zero sum result.
The goal is to be net zero. And in our first two years of
operation we haven't quite got there but we're at about 90%.
That's incredible. >> Which is pretty admirable.
Of course we set the stake out pretty far so we're learning
some things. Our performance gets better each
year. So it's still our goal and
attention at some point in time to produce all the energy we
need to run that building within the course of a year.
And without getting too complicated, that's just energy.
Also on the carbon side, because of how we managed the forest
where most of the building blocks in the building came
from, we're actually sequestering that carbon.
So our energy performance is so good and then we've improved the
health of the forest so much that from an overall carbon
perspective, we're actually sequestering more carbon than
we're consuming over the course of a year.
And by sequestering you mean it's not being released into the
atmosphere in the form of carbon dioxide.
Exactly. So if you have a traditional
building that's drawing its energy from a local power plant
that, say, burns coal, all of the energy that it needs to run
itself comes from coal that is a fossil energy and is being
extracted somewhere else and is consumed, and all of that carbon
dioxide is going into the atmosphere.
So you're taking it from the ground and putting into the
atmosphere, whereas with this Legacy Center it's nothing
added. >> We're collecting the sun's
energy, that's part of it, but then also any shortfall that we
have, the trees that are left in our forest are actually growing
and so that carbon is sequestered right there on our
site. >> Well, let's have a look at
the early concept of the place and get a sense of how it might
have changed. Here's an image I gather from
the design phase of the Leopold Center.
This is just after we moved in.
And so you can see it's kind of a small campus-like facility.
You can see the black on the roof.
That's our power plant, if you will, the solar panels.
And you can see how we're kind of open to the sun so that we
can take full advantage of the sun's energy.
And what do you do then in the winter?
Or all the cloudy days that tend to come with the winter?
Right. Again, it's designed so that in
the summertime, kind of in peak solar production, we're
generating excess energy, and then in the wintertime when
we're short, the balance over the course of the year evens
itself out. >> So you actually can store it
with solar cells? >> Well, interestingly enough
we chose not to store the energy on site which would require
batteries or some other technology.
We're connected to the electrical grid just like any
other home or commercial building.
So on any given day we're either selling power to the power plant
or buying power from the power plant.
So in that way-- Batteries are still expensive,
a little bit messy, and somewhat inefficient.
So this way, again we're trying to demonstrate in all aspects of
the building what's available to at least in any new construction
project so it doesn't have to be this radical, kind of off the
grid type thinking. >> Keep it on the grid.
Just keep it on the grid, use the infrastructure that exists,
but add some dimensions that increase the energy efficiency
and then the productivity. >> So there are times when
actually some household in Baraboo is using energy that has
been sold by the Legacy Center. >> That's correct.
And what does this illustrate here when we have kind of this
broad, closer look at the center.
Well here again you see the solar panel system, you can also
see kind of up by the chimney in front of it to the right is a
solar hot water system. So that's another type of
renewable energy production system where we heat all the
water that we use in the building through that system.
And then it also shows with the chimney itself that we do
harvest dead fall wood and we do burn about two cords of wood
over the course of the year to help further temper the space.
So it kind of shows you all the different forms of energy that
we're using right there. >> So you can enumerate this
from solar and from wood and what other sources?
So there would be two forms of solar.
One is what it called photovoltaic or kind of the
traditional solar panel that actually converts the sunlight
into electricity as we kind of know it.
Then there is solar hot water which takes a collector and
warms that up and then liquid flows through there and so it's
a kind of water transfer. So that would be for taking
showers or washing dishes and those kinds of things.
And then wood would be the third form.
And so is the idea that this center is setting an example for
homeowners who might be able to do the same kind of thing on a
maybe slightly smaller scale? >> Yeah, I think the facility
all told in kind of usable space is about 10,000 square feet, the
total square footage is about 13,000 square feet, and the way
it was designed there are technologies that work for a
residential scale and there are technologies that work for a
commercial scale. So it kind of goes back and
forth and we can help use that as an example to all aspects of
the building community to think kind of anew about how and what
can be done in terms of green building.
Let's look at Aldo Leopold himself for a minute.
There he is looking very relaxed but watchful at the same time.
What was the state of energy conservation during his life?
He died in 1948, right before A Sand County Almanac became
such a big success. >> Correct.
Well, of course, Leopold himself is our inspiration and was one
of really the first early voices to question and challenge how
humanity was going to relate to the natural world, and that, in
fact, most of our wealth comes from the natural world in some
way, shape or form. And his big concept was the land
ethic where people are part of the biological community not
apart from the biological community.
And so it was really his challenge that he wrote actually
as part of an address to the Engineering Department here on
campus at the University of Wisconsin Madison that he
delivered in 1938 where he wrote, "The oldest task in human
history is to live on a piece of land without spoiling it."
That's 1938. So energy was not the kind of
pressing matter it is now but he was clearly aware that we were
not being very cautious with how we utilize precious resources,
and so I don't think he would have been surprised that we find
ourselves in this quandary at this point.
And in a minute we'll look at a before and after at woods that
have been harvested by people from the Leopold Center.
Let's look at the center itself again here and see what kind of
insight we can get from this. This obviously is more of a
conceptual piece. >> Right.
This has been one of the really interesting aspects as an
ecologist conservationist to be involved with building a
building. And early on, as the family and
the Leopold Foundation kind of came up with this idea of
building a center that would help stimulate interpretation
and research into Leopold and his ideas and applications of
the land ethic in the 21st century, we begin to ask
ourselves where's the bar? What do we have to do in terms
of demonstrating what, in fact, a land ethic is?
And so beginning with this idea that we could build a building
out of trees that he planted, generate all of our energy on
site, collect rainwater on site, we began the process of kind of
setting the bar for ourselves and seeing how close we could
get to achieving the vision that we had set out for ourselves,
again that we thought was left to us by Leopold.
Well that's an interesting dimension that I think most of
us wouldn't think about in terms of energy conservation in the
design of our home is conserving energy in the actual
construction of the home by not importing materials from distant
places. >> Yeah, this is a thing that's
becoming, I think gaining interest, if you will.
There's the certified products and opportunities to buy organic
or forest certified products, but the other really important
aspect in the dimension is buying locally and trying to
keep that loop as tight as possible from an energy
perspective, from an ecological perspective and even from an
economic perspective. So we were presented with a
really unique opportunity in that, of course in the '30s and
'40s what inspired Leopold to write his book, A Sand County
Almanac, was really his own effort to restore the family
farm along the Wisconsin River. >> Right, he had bought that
farm, as I understand it, in a very depleted state.
Yeah it was, from the soil profile down, about 400 feet
worth of sand. So not your good agricultural
soils. And the farmer that had owned
the property before him had tried to make a go of it with
corn and beans and wheat and oats and just couldn't do it.
And so he picked it up for the back taxes and then really set
about kind of restoring it to some kind of land health.
Planted thousands and thousands of trees.
He would plant 3,000 trees a year.
A thousand white pine, a thousand red pine
and a thousand jack pine. Now, he purchased the farm in
the mid-1930s, and you probably remember that at that point the
Dust Bowl was upon us. >> Yes indeed, sure.
And so the first five years, all of the trees that they
planted literally died. >> Hot and dry.
Hot and dry. But somehow he inspired the
family to come back out that fifth year, plant another 3,000
trees and the climate began to change and their trees began to
take hold. So the foundation continues to
manage this farm that is really one of the, along with the
arboretum here, one of the oldest ecological restoration
projects in the country. And we began to recognize that
the trees that the family planted actually were not
fairing so well because they were too close together.
And so by doing a modest thinning we could actually
improve the health of the remaining trees.
That's often true. I remember Nina Leopold Bradley
talking about, as a girl or a young woman, the family out
there planting these thousands of trees which seemed to have
been kind of an adventure, really.
As was having five children I suppose.
Yeah, a built-in workforce. You bring up one of the really
kind of fun parts of the story. All five of the Leopold children
are prominent ecologists or have been.
We've lost three of them. But they understand ecology and
so Carl Leopold, in particular, who was a plant physiologist and
part of the vision for this new facility, we told him that we
were thinking about doing a thinning of the trees that he
planted in order to both leave the healthier ones and then have
the building materials for the new building, he sighed and he
said you could also not cut any of them.
And here's a plant physiologist who knows a dead tree when he
sees one and it just represents, I think, what a wonderful story
the family has of this scientific approach to land but
also this emotional approach to it.
It can be hard to separate. For example, if you look at
these logs, these are logs planted by the Leopolds then in
the '30s. >> That's correct.
And in a way it's hard not to react negatively and say look
those are good sized trees that have all been cut down.
But you're saying that the ones remaining are going to be that
much bigger and healthier. >> And again as a tribute to
their kind of knowledge and understanding, now that they
look at the forest everybody agrees that it's healthier.
But it's just that initial, I spent all that time planting
those. >> Well they've gone to a good
cause because now they're really, literally, part of the
Leopold legacy. >> Right, right.
And I think nobody is more proud of the facility than the family
and what we were able to achieve, and to take a tree, I
always say people often refer to Leopold as quite a visionary,
and I say, yeah, to think that 70 years ago he planted this
building for us. >> Yeah, very convenient.
Now is this next image some of the actual work on site?
All of the planing or whatever the process would be of turning
trees into lumber was done on site?
Not all of it. The heavy timbers, we brought a
portable sawmill in so that those materials would never have
to leave the site. We would save all the energy of
taking these big 10 x 12s, 10 x 14s off somewhere else
and planing them and then bringing them back.
So all that happened on site. For the interior finish material
that would be flooring and paneling and ceiling decking, we
did have to dry that so that the moisture would come out of it so
that it would be stable. So that we took to a family
sawmill, Samsel Sawmill up in Hancock, Wisconsin.
So all of that material lasts, about 160-mile round trip was
all it ever made from forest to finish to building material.
Should I assume that you're not using a lot of particle
board in the construction. >> That's correct.
We try to use our material as much as possible.
Where we weren't able to use ours we would buy certified
material or other kind of green certified materials that would
be keeping with the spirit of the project.
Here's another conceptual look, or at least it gives us an
idea of design and purpose. >> Well I think what you also
begin to realize is that the way we kind of generate building
materials relative to the way we design, there's very little
feedback looped to that anymore. And so an architect or engineer
will design a building and then the contractor gets the part
list and goes down to the building supply material and
says hey, deliver all this next week.
We didn't have that luxury. Our challenge was to give to the
architect and the engineer here's what we have, how are you
going to design a building that can utilize that.
When was the last time that was done?
It's probably been decades or maybe a century.
That's how all building used to be done.
So it was a really interesting experience, I think, from the
architect and engineering perspective to really understand
what it would take to utilize local materials in a really
significant way. >> And here we have another look
at some of the materials that went into the building of this
Legacy Center. And I like the way it's labeled
there: Leopold. >> Well the family, the Samsels,
were really terrific. They, in essence, set their
operation aside for a year as they processed our 50,000 board
feet of material that went through the building process.
And so here you see, we saw the trees being taken down with the
forester equipment and now you see them in the yard and then as
the beginnings of building products.
So how long was the process from ground breaking to
completion so that you could actually move in?
From ground breaking to completion was about a year but
the timber harvest started a year before that.
To let it dry you mean? >> To let it dry and just make
sure we could get the material out of the woods.
So kind of a two-year window from start to finish.
And then really from conception to move-in was just shy of seven
years. And of course for an
organization like ours, a fair part of it is the fundraising
associated with securing the resources to build it.
So it was a pretty complex project and process but kind of
once we really got started things really came together
quickly. >> Well now let's make kind of a
leap to Lambeau and figure out what's connection between
Lambeau Field, I can't imagine a place that would be much
different from the Leopold Legacy Center.
Well I love to use this graphic because when I say
50,000 board feet, what does that mean to you?
Not much to most people. But if you can envision a
football field or Lambeau Field covered end zone to end zone,
side line to side line, one-inch thick in wood, we had two of
those that came off of our property that ended up being
used in the building. So it's just a way to give some
scale of kind of one of Wisconsin's most beloved sites,
Lambeau Field, with one that we hope will be even more beloved,
the Leopold shack and farm and the center in the future.
How many acres are we talking about of timber harvest?
Well actually all of that came off of a relatively limited
amount. Probably about 50 or 60 acres
all told. >> And you got enough to cover
Lambeau twice over? >> Now remember what they call a
board foot is kind of one inch thick by 12 inches by 12 inches.
So a big timber that's 10 by 14 and 20 feet long, that ends up
having quite a fewer board feet in it.
And then I think as we'll see in later pictures, all the exterior
siding is oak from the site. We have a lot of flooring.
We have a lot of ceiling decking.
So all of that came off just a portion of our acreage.
So two Lambeau Field's worth. Still pretty impressive.
Now here we have an image of a before and after, and when I
looked at this ahead of time I said what's the point here of
having, I thought it was almost a stereoscope thing going here
except for the different color of the coat of the person in the
picture. But you're telling me this is
before and after harvesting this stand of woods?
That's exactly right. So it shows you really how
sensitive we were to leaving the best trees in the field and how
little volume we took out of the woods in order to get this
50,000 board feet or two Lambeau Fields worth.
And so we use this picture just to demonstrate that we're not
talking about a clear cut here, we're really talking about very
selective thinning that leaves that forest healthier when we're
done with it. >> So do you categorize or
assess or somehow count the amount of material you have
after you've cut these trees down or do you do some kind of a
board foot estimate while they're still standing?
A little bit of both. Most of that was calculated when
we marked the trees in the field to, again, find, if you were a
good tree and I was a bad tree we'd mark me and tell the
forester that I'm the one to cut down and to leave you.
And as we did that, we would scale the tree and get a sense
of how much volume would come off of it.
We'd also take what they call diameter at breast height.
That's how big around a tree is at breast height on an average
individual. So we'd put that in a computer
and then our ecologist would scale how tall he thought the
tree was and so how long, what they call the butt log, that's
the first and most valuable log out of the tree would be, and
then the next one, and in the cases where we might get a third
one, how big that might be. And so then he used that.
He had this master list that would kind of calculate how many
members we think we'd have this big and then this big
and then this big. And that's what he gave the
architect and the engineer to use to kind of do the final
design. And then we had to come back and
around and kind of fact check all of that once they had done
their preliminary design and we had begun milling the members to
see what we thought would give us a four by 10 in the field by
the time we cut the tree down and got it off the mill wasn't
quite measuring up. So there was a lot of
information that went into the process and kind of checks and
balances along the way. >> How much of the tree did you
actually use? >> This is kind of an
interesting part. We would go up as far as we
could and get anything, we'd even take what most people would
probably just discard but we would take and still utilize and
get some paneling out of it, or something like that.
And then Steve Swenson, our ecologist, came up with the idea
that we still had some tops and even some major branches here
and there that could be utilized.
So he worked with the Forest Products Lab here in Madison,
the US Forest Service Research and Design Lab, and they were
using a new innovative technique to make pulp which did not use
chemicals. So we brought the material down
to them. So the scraps that we couldn't
otherwise use, we brought down here, they turned it into pulp
and then it went up to Stevens Point at the paper making lab.
They made paper out of it and then we printed A Sand County
Almanac on paper made from trees that Leopold had planted.
You can't beat that for efficiency.
Now, are these the solar panels? >> That's right.
So this is our power plant and early on we calculated how much
energy we thought we would be able to produce given the size
of the building that we anticipated and the roof area
and those kind of things. So then that became our energy
budget. And as opposed to more
traditional projects, even ones that intend to use solar energy,
usually you kind of figure out what all you want your building
to do and then you figure how much energy it's going to take.
You say holy smokes, that's a lot of energy.
Well, let's put a couple solar panels up and maybe the next
project will address it. For us, we really used that as a
budget that we had to work within.
So that began to influence both the architectural design as well
as the engineering of the facility.
So again you're designing it from, if not materials in this
case, but energy available. >> Exactly, exactly.
Again trying to find where the limiting resources are for any
such project and using those to guide the process as opposed to
just the demand side. We were coming from a little bit
the supply side as opposed to the demand side.
Now is this image here another example of a design of
solar use? >> So this begins to show, from
an architectural perspective, how we began to address the
challenges that we were going to face from an energy perspective.
And what you begin to see is that we've isolated functions.
And so on the right-hand side you see the workshop which is
where we keep our tractor and trucks and chain saws and all of
that. We decided that we didn't have
to heat and cool that space because it was just housing
equipment, and that saved a bunch of energy.
Then in the bottom you see what we call the seed hall.
This was actually modeled after Nina Leopold's sleeping porch.
And we wanted to have a big gathering space where we could
fit 100 people or so, but we didn't really convene those
people on a regular basis and really not in the wintertime.
So this basically a glorified three-seasons screened in room
that has a wood stove in it and storm windows so we can use it
from early spring to late fall and in the wintertime we just
shutter it up and it's not an ambient energy drop.
And then the last kind of wing on the left was the year-round
meeting hall. So we wanted to have one space
where we could have groups and meetings all year-round.
Relatively small. >> Relatively small and since
it's off on its own it has its own mechanical system.
So at any given day if we're not using it in the wintertime it's
a little bit colder than the rest of the building.
In the summertime it's a little bit warmer than the rest of the
building. And when we're going to use it
we just turn the system on and bring it up to temperature.
Now I gather you don't have issues such as houses can that
have been built in the last 10 or 15 years or so where they're
so tight, the windows are so air tight and the walls are so air
tight that you get mold growing on the walls?
Yeah, we haven't had that problem.
I suppose one of the benefits that we had is we fell in a
commercial building category so they have a lot more stringent
requirements on air flow and air exchange.
So we haven't suffered that problem which has been a real
problem in the kind of residential construction arena.
Yeah, I had a fireplace in one of my houses that had been
built I think as long ago as the late '70s, and in order to have
a fire in the fireplace I actually had to open a window or
a door slightly to get it to draw.
I thought that was a little paradoxical.
That's kind of the interesting part is we kind of
almost got over-aggressive on some of those regulations.
So what have we here? >> Well this is just a picture,
then, of the workshop or the garage.
And you begin to see how the spaces kind of isolate
themselves so that we can treat them accordingly.
You can also see here from a material perspective, all of
that siding is black oak that came off of the property.
So you're working with, if I remember right from what you
said the Leopold's planted back in the '30s, oak and pine?
Primarily, there's a little bit of cherry that we harvested
and then some red maple, but primarily oak and pine were the
resources that we had. >> What was Aldo Leopold's
guide, let's say, for what trees he would plant there in the
first place? >> Yeah that's a great question,
Norman. The whole science of ecological
restoration was just beginning with Leopold's role in the
arboretum. And so he didn't have the luxury
and kind of information that we have now about what the
landscape would have looked like prior to widespread agricultural
conversion. So he was really looking at
several things. One being what could grow in
hot, dry conditions that the region was experiencing.
What would mitigate soil erosion, that was the primary
kind of conservation concern at the time, mainly from wind.
And then finally, what was cheap.
Sure, you have to think about that too.
With five children and single income resources weren't
excessive in the Leopold family. So he got a lot of his material
from the state nursery and that's, in part, why white and
red pines and jack pines dominated what he planted.
So they met all of those criteria.
They grew fast, they would mitigate soil erosion and they
were relatively inexpensive, if not free at times, from the
state. And ecologically, they provided
cover for game and those kinds of things.
But his understanding and concern and sensitivity to
diversity also led him to plant oaks and maples and other kind
of wildlife habitat. But the pines really did and
still do dominate the landscape. >> Pines like sandy soil anyway,
if I remember right. >> Yeah.
I got a kick out of reading A Sand County Almanac
some years ago. It was after I already had a
landscaper, on his own suggestion, plant a Norway maple
in my front yard. And it wasn't more than a couple
years had passed before I had a very lumpy yard with a lot of
bare spots under that maple. I read in A Sand County Almanac
something to the effect of, well, for some reason people
insist on planting Norway maples in their yards even though they
know they're going to kill them. And I thought what's with this
landscaper that he didn't know this.
Well, a lot of us are still catching up with Leopold and
some of the insights and understandings he had.
And it continues to fascinate me how insightful he was and really
what a rich knowledge of ecology he had, both kind of in urban
residential landscapes as well as more wild landscapes.
Right, that's the kind of thing I didn't expect in
Sand County was to talk about actually urban landscapes,
as well. It was a bit of a surprise.
Here's a look from the inside out of the Leopold Legacy
Center. >> Right.
So here's the three-season space.
And again you can see that the glazing that we have.
So lots of the windows and then those are storm windows so they
can come off and we have screens.
You can see the long timbers in the roof and those are, again,
the very trees that Aldo and the family planted in the '30s and
'40s. And this is kind of very
interesting structural engineering approach where, as
it turns out, when you make a two by four, you're actually
cutting off the strongest part of the tree.
Really? >> So if you think about it, I
hadn't really thought about it, but when you do think about it
the tree is really living from the outside in.
And the heart wood is basically kind of considered dead.
And so it's that living part of the tree that's actually the
strongest part, which intuitively makes sense but you
just don't think about. So an eight-inch round log is
actually stronger than a 10 by 12 dimensional rafter.
So again we worked with the Forest Products Lab, and they
helped us come up with strategies to utilize these
relatively small trees and get great structural strength out of
them. And it also kind of then
demonstrates from an ecological and economic perspective, if we
could utilize our forest resources better, the kind of
advantages that everybody would get out of that.
So what are you using these logs for?
For braces, for beams, for support?
Or are you actually making log structures on this facility?
These are trusses that they kind of created.
So it's a network of the logs that create a kind of structural
skeleton that then the roof just sits on top of.
What part of the facility is this?
So this is the meeting hall, the kind of space that we use
year-round. It's a really beautiful interior
and we've had groups from all over the country come and have
retreats and think-tank sessions here.
So that's the space, again, that has its own mechanical system.
So it's kind of connected to the main part of the building, but
again we only have to heat and cool it when it's in use.
I don't see a chimney. >> There is actually a little
smokestack on there. We have a wood stove in there,
but it's mainly meant to radiate the heat out into the space so
there's not a big thermal mass of the chimney like there is in
the main part of the building. >> Wood stove?
Franklin stove? >> It's similar.
I think it's a slightly different brand but same
concept. >> Same design.
Much more efficient than a fireplace.
I think with a fireplace something like 90% of the heat
is supposed to go straight up the chimney.
Exactly. >> Franklin was on to something
there. >> Another person way ahead of
his time. >> What do we have here?
This just kind of shows then the overview of how the
buildings come together. So you see, again, the different
spaces. The main building with the solar
panels on it is used year-round, and so that has extremely thick
walls and thick ceiling for good insulation.
And we also, then, ended up using this as a site advantage.
So we have gardens and little kind of outdoor spaces that
connect to each of these buildings as well so that the
inside comes out and the outside comes in.
Had that kind of flow. So that you're never far from
your surroundings. >> Exactly.
So you continue to harvest wood for heating?
Yeah, but mainly that comes from, in our neck of the woods
we have a lot of oak trees that suffer from oak wilt and so just
modest harvest. Again, two cords of wood for
10,000 square feet is not much. I use more than that in my own
home that's about 2,000 square feet.
It was built in 1917. And we don't have the problem
with being too tight. You can feel the draft through
the home. So we do continue to just kind
of harvest dead fall and trees that blow down in wind storms
and those kind of things. >> So what kind of trees would
have gone into this part of the facility?
Well here, again, anything that's kind of big and
dimensional is a Leopold pine. The ceiling decking here is the
red maple that came out, and that was really important
because in this part of the state and really the eastern
half of the United States a lot of our oak woods are
transitioning to maple or soft wood.
And it's a problem, both economically, because maple, at
least at the moment, doesn't have the same kind of market
value that oak does. And then ecologically, maples,
kind of like your example of Norway maple, they create so
much more shade at the ground layer, and that's part of what
you were experiencing is it shades out the grass, that it
shades out the wildflowers. And maples, as opposed to oaks,
aren't as good of wildlife forage.
So we were able to demonstrate, again, a use of red maple that
most markets aren't taking advantage of.
Here you see these doors are cherry, and part of what this is
showing is also how we get solar daylight into the building so
that we don't have to use as much task lighting.
So that's one of the ways we save considerable energy is most
days we don't have to have many lights on.
All the light is provided by the sun.
Also, this corridor shows you how we keep the heat in the
wintertime. And so you see during the day
the sunlight is penetrating through the windows and so we
open up these doors and windows and the heat kind of comes into
the occupied space. And then at night, when we would
lose all that heat through the windows, we close all of these.
I can't help thinking that the 18th-19th century had some
ideas that have fallen by the wayside.
Once you get away from the concept that you have to air
condition and that you're sticking with the idea of
working with light and shade and air flow that's available, you
can live comfortably with a pretty simple design.
You're exactly right. So here's the most novel way
that we save energy. When it's nice out, we open the
windows. And it sounds like a no-brainer.
We still do most of the time in our homes but commercial
buildings often have inoperable windows.
That's right. >> So even if it's 70 degrees
outside and you want it to be 70 degrees inside, you have to run
either the heating or cooling to get the temperature comfortable.
Well, in our building we just open up the windows and let that
air move through. But that's not high tech, that's
old school. >> That's common sense.
Is this part of the heating system?
Yeah, so we heat and cool the building with geothermal
systems. And so the main load is
delivered through a radiant floor, and that's driven by 200
geothermal wells that go down, I'm sorry, 20 geothermal wells
that go down about 200 feet. >> That amazes me.
A relative of mine in Maryland just had this done in his
backyard. And I thought, you're going down
200 feet, do you even own that far down?
Well the state does have a pretty intensive permitting
process to make sure you're operating appropriately down
there. And then what that does is you
just take the ambient energy of the earth and bring that up and
deliver it to your floor. In the summertime you're taking
the kind of coolness of the earth out, and in the wintertime
you're taking the warmth out. You're kind of exchanging that.
But then the kind of more, and this is becoming more and more
commonplace and very efficient because if the ambient energy of
the earth is 55 degrees and it's zero outside, you're already a
long ways to where you want to get it.
But one of the more innovative things we did is how we treat
our fresh air because commercial buildings also have requirements
just as we talked about to have this air exchange so that you
don't get mold, you don't have indoor air quality problems.
And so we use a kind of modified geothermal system where we use
these concrete pipes under the ground and we bring the air in
through this, basically a sewer inlet.
The air travels underground at a really low speed.
So if it's zero degrees outside, by the time it gets into the
building into our air handler to go somewhere in the building,
it's 55 degrees. Likewise, in the summertime it
gets pretty cool. So it's being done a lot in
Europe but a little bit more cutting-edge, I guess if you
will, for North America. >> Are you using fans to handle
this air? >> It's a very small fan, and
that's one of the benefits by making the building so efficient
we were able to use a fan about one-fourth the size that we
otherwise would have needed to kind of push the air through the
building. >> This is another winter
differential I suspect here. >> One of the things we've
learned and part of the reason we're not quite at being net
zero from an energy perspective is I think as you find out solar
panels are rated a little bit like your car in terms of miles
per gallon. >> A little bit of wishful
thinking built in. >> Yeah, probably you can get
that performance if you drive 55 miles an hour, constantly, no
topography, those kind of things.
So I think what we estimated we would get based on the
manufacturer's information and what we actually got, there's
some discrepancy there. So we're learning that.
And then the other thing we've suffered kind of the hard way is
the last couple of winters we've had extremely high levels of
snow fall, and if you remember back to that winter of
2007-2008. >> A hundred inches.
Yeah. That's a lot of snow to clear
off a roof, as we learned. So maybe some of the things we
would do differently if we had this to do all over again is
maybe have a steeper pitch, but those are the things you learn
as you embark on these kind of challenges.
The steepness of the pitch then, of course, affects the
shape of what's inside and creates other issues in terms of
heating and cooling. >> You're exactly right.
And there were two things that we were interested in there.
One was kind of the functionality and what it did
inside, but also some of it was aesthetic and not getting these
kind of contorted pitches. And, again, remember we started
this effort planning in 2000-2001.
We recognized energy was going to be important, but I'm not
even sure we appreciated how important and kind of what would
happen over the last kind of five years.
And so if we were starting this project now or even right before
we moved in, maybe we would have had stand alone solar panel
systems or something else like that.
But at that time we wanted the aesthetics and the functions to
kind of be co-mingled and be elegant, I guess if you will.
So have other facilities, houses or even commercial
institutions, been patterned after the Leopold Center?
Well we've had people literally come from all over the
world to see kind of what we did and how we did it.
And so I do think we're having an influence over how high
performance buildings are being designed and constructed and
operated. Of course, this community is
really fortunate in that the St. Benedictine Holy Wisdom
Monastery has actually exceeded us in green performance
by one point. And so this area really can
boast that it has the two most sustainable buildings in the
world at the moment. So it's been really fascinating
to see the interest and the synergies get created, and of
course all along our goal was to set the bar high and then hope
that many more people jumped over it.
Well, here's Aldo Leopold kind of thinking about that bar
as he looks out over the Wisconsin landscape.
You get the sense of Aldo Leopold even here is this
visionary. >> Absolutely.
I think he challenged us with this concept of a land ethic and
reminded us that all of our kind of health and wealth derives
from the natural world, and that as such, we really have a
responsibility to it and to ourselves to take care of it.
And we keep going back to his line from this campus in 1938
that the oldest task in human history is to live on a piece of
land without spoiling it. And I think that's the challenge
in front of us now and for future generations.
Well, continued success with that.
Buddy Huffaker. >> Thank you.
Thank you for being with me today for University Place.
I'm Norman Gilliland and we've been talking about the Aldo
Leopold Legacy Center and its extremely efficient use of
energy and cutting-edge technology and some plain old
common sense. And Buddy Huffaker
is the executive director of the Aldo Leopold Foundation.
I'm Norman Gilliland, I hope you can join me next time for
University Place .