THE U.S. DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE HAS ADDED A NEW TACTIC TO ITS ARSENAL: SUSTAINABLE DESIGN.
when the u.s. army corps of Engineers set out to redesign the infrastructure at Fort Leonard Wood, Mo., they shot for the moon. A team of nearly 30 USACE engineers, architects, and scientists from across 18 districts in two countries was given three months to come up with the U.S. Army Installation Management Command integrated living community, a master plan to be implemented in stages by 2030 – and a design that was to have the largest impact possible.

It was not designed, however, to be particularly comfortable for the soldiers based there.

“Typically in architecture, you spend a lot of time making the user feel comfortable, feel relaxed. You would look down on something austere and rigid,” says Lyndsey Pruitt, sustainability and energy program manager at USACE. One of the two buildings that she and fellow USACE team members designed for the Fort Leonard Wood master plan was a facility for basic training company operations – a soldiers first stop. “The intent of the facility is to give a first impression for soldiers. It needs to say, You now have the honor of being a soldier in the U.S. military. Forget about the bad things that have happened to you. Any baggage you have – youre a soldier now. You do that through control and regimen.”The basic training company operations facility is no typical dorm room, Pruitt says; project designers even shared the charrette for the facility with the drill sergeant for input. In a sense, the design team experienced the reorientation that the building is made to facilitate. “As an architect designing this facility, everything you learn about in architecture school is stripped away,” Pruitt says.

The commission stems in large part from the Department of Defense s new orientation toward sustainability. An edict issued by assistant secretary of the Army for installations, energy, and environment Katherine Hammack calls for a number of net – zero energy, net – zero water, and net – zero waste installations by 2020. The Army aims to build or adapt 25 installations by 2030 that achieve net – zero efficiency in all three categories. The USACE team designed the Fort Leonard Wood installation to take it completely off the grid.

The USACE team is coordinating with the installations garrison to implement the first phase of the Fort Leonard Wood redesign, which also includes building an advanced individual company operations facility where soldiers receive training specific to their roles in the military. The team is also publishing a book on its work and, moreover, recommending changes to the militarys master template for installation design.
The impact of the militarys strategic interest in sustainability isnt limited to the warfighter. One of the DODs major construction missions of the last decade, the 2005 Base Realignment and Closure plan, has resulted in new or consolidated facilities that prioritize energy – efficient design.

The largest BRAC project has effectively doubled the base population at Fort Belvoir, Va. There, the National Geospatial – Intelligence Agency consolidated offices from Bethesda, Md.; Reston, Va.; Washington, D.C.; and other locations in a vast new NGA Campus East facility – the third – largest federal facility in the Washington area.

The 2.4 million – square – foot campus is composed of five separate buildings. The 2.1 million – square – foot agency headquarters features two independent office structures connected by an ellipse of curving, low – emissivity glass. In addition, NGA Campus East includes a central utility plant, a technology center, visitor control center, and remote inspection facility. Designed jointly by Baltimores RTKL Associates and Philadelphias KlingStubbins, the campus achieved LEED Gold certification, exceeding the militarys mandate that requires new construction projects to meet LEED Silver energy – efficiency standards.

Aspects of the NGA Campus East design relate specifically to the NGAs mission to provide geospatial intelligence to the White House, Pentagon, intelligence agencies, and other clients. The NGA describes its mission this way: “Everything and everyone is located somewhere on the surface of the Earth, and thats what GEOINT depicts.” The agency played a critical role in mapping the Abbottabad, Pakistan, compound where U.S. Navy SEALs killed Osama bin Laden.

“Because we are who we are, we have considerations for safety in case there were a blast event,” says Thomas Bukoski, director of the NGA executive secretariat. “We are a defense agency, and potentially a target.”

So it was not entirely an aesthetic concern behind the selection of a transparent membrane for the NGAs atrium roof. Ethylene tetrafluoroethylene – the same material used to clad the shimmering Beijing National Aquatics Center – was chosen for the atrium roof for security reasons. “Its simply resilient,” says Bukoski, who served previously as the assistant program manager for design and construction for the NGA Campus East. “In order to get light into this atrium, if we were to use glass or plexi, it would be much heavier. And in case of a blast event, this material is very resilient. While it might rupture, it would not shower down on our people.”

The NGA Campus East demonstrates the militarys commitment to energy efficiency at the largest scale yet. However, the sheer size of military construction projects can directly affect their surrounding communities – in terms of sustainability and in ways that the DOD does not necessarily provide for.

The Fort Leonard Wood net – zero design was motivated in part by a dispute with the installations energy provider, the Sho – Me Power Electric Cooperative, which announced that it would no longer provide energy to Fort Leonard Wood, a non – co – op customer. Alexandria, Va., has seen a crisis in reverse: The introduction of the Mark Center, the home of the DODs Washington Headquarters Service, has forced the city to radically revise its municipal planning.

The Mark Center supports 1.7 million square feet of office space for some 6,400 DOD employees – a significant addition to the dense and over – trafficked municipality of Alexandria. In 2009, Rep. Jim Moran published an editorial in The Washington Post asking the DOD to step up its funding of transportation upgrades around the Fort Belvoir BRAC plan.

“We dont have a lot of say – so as to what actually happened on the base property,” says David Grover, BRAC coordinator for Alexandria. Grover has worked to coordinate the citys transit response plan. “Once the army acquired the property, they became immune to all local regulations, including the building codes.”

Joanne Hensley, USACE New York District chief of project development for BRAC 133, says that she anticipates LEED Gold certification for the project. The design team achieved lighting savings of 34 percent, she says, by installing occupancy sensors and LED lights at desks and in fixtures. “We actually recycled or salvaged 88 percent of the construction waste,” Hensley notes.

From a sustainability standpoint, some of those savings could be offset by an increase in traffic from thousands of commuters. So the DOD is subsidizing additional city bus routes between nearby Metro rail stations and the Mark Center during peak hours, and, in addition, paying $20 million for local road and intersection improvements.

Todays military describes net – zero as a force multiplier. As the DOD continues to shape its sustainability goals, its stance applies not only to combat readiness but to civilian service. One USACE ambition for Fort Leonard Wood, for example, is to develop a net – positive energy stance – so that the installation can supply energy to the larger community in the case of an emergency.