The main campus of Northern Arizona University (NAU) sits in picturesque Flagstaff, situated in the mountainous Colorado Plateau. The surrounding San Francisco peaks, ponderosa pines, and four seasons weather make it an ideal setting for NAU’s community, and with all that natural beauty, it’s hard to not take special care to protect the environment. And that’s exactly what NAU has done.
In 2007, university president John Haeger pledged that NAU’s campus would be carbon neutral by 2020. The plan extends to all aspects of university life, but it most directly applies to the construction of new campus facilities. NAU has been building to LEED standards since 2003, but the 2020 action plan puts forth a much more rigorous challenge for further campus development. “It’s an enormous challenge to build 100 percent carbon-neutral buildings,” says Agnes Drogi, NAU’s director of planning, design, and construction, who adds that the 2020 plan only mandates the goal—it doesn’t specify exactly how to achieve it. “There’s no specific language for how we have to build new buildings. It leaves us the freedom to reach carbon neutrality in very innovative ways.”
PLANS
The NAU planning, design, and construction team put its freedom to good use with its brand new Health & Learning Center (HLC), which opened to the NAU community in fall 2011. They brought on Cannon Design early in the project to help plan and construct the building. Initially, NAU wanted to only upgrade its previous recreation center. The old building dated back to 1989 and, at 40,000 square feet, could not serve today’s campus population. However, once NAU and Cannon began exploring options, the HLC’s ambitions rapidly expanded. “We quickly discovered that the health center needed a new building, too,” she says. “Health and sports activities go well together, so we put the two programs together.” Pushing the programmatic boundaries even further, they decided to incorporate athletic training and competition facilities, disability resources, and general classrooms into the HLC’s plans as well. Size wasn’t too much of a concern, but performance absolutely was. The entire complex would have to adhere to the campus-wide 2020 carbon-neutrality plan.