Methods
This study sought to investigate occupant satisfaction within LEED-certified higher education buildings at a southeastern public university in the USA. In order to establish controlled settings across all sample sites, buildings were carefully selected based on their ability to meet a series of criteria. At a minimum, each building had to be occupied and certified for at least three years prior to the commencement of the study. Additionally, each building had to have achieved 50 percent of the credits within the LEED system’s IEQ category. These two standards helped to ensure that occupants were familiar with the attributes of their indoor environments and verified that the initial design intent for selected buildings was to provide an enhanced indoor experience. Based on these criteria two buildings, referred to herein as Building A and Building B, were selected from the initial list of eight certified buildings. At the time of this study, Building A and Building B represented one-third of the LEED gold-certified projects on the university’s campus. Table I has been provided to illustrate the LEED prerequisites and credits achieved by Building A and Building B.
Two LEED buildings: Building A and Building B
Building A is three-stories tall, located in the northeast quadrant of the university campus, and was intended to be a leadership facility for the university’s college of design, construction and planning. This new construction project was completed in March of 2003 and accommodates a variety of work environments including 46,530 square feet of classrooms, teaching labs, construction labs, faculty and staff offices, and student facilities. Building A focussed on addressing user’s indoor environmental comfort in a variety of ways. For example, the building features an 8,000-gallon cistern for the collection of rainwater and is oriented on a north-south axis to naturally utilize low-angle light. Classrooms were also arranged to provide unobstructed servicing and flexibility so that the building could be retrofitted if necessary in the future. Finally, the design approach for this building allowed for the consolidation of several technologies such as the mechanical, fire safety, communication, and plumbing systems in order to optimize the availability of usable square footage (US Green Building Council (USGBC), 2013b).
Building B is located across an auxiliary road from Building A in the northeast quadrant of the university campus. This newly constructed facility was intended to be the primary music hall for the collegiate marching band and was designed to accommodate the needs of both the student performers and faculty alike. Building B is a two-story freestanding facility and was completed in July of 2008. The 18,082 square foot facility was located on a sloped site, allowing designers to embed the building into the terrain and construct a new outdoor terrace space for rehearsals or performance staging. Building B’s lower level offers ample storage room to accommodate large
LEED-certified higher education buildings instruments, sound equipment, sheet music, uniforms, and a performance hall that comfortably seats up to 300 musicians. Finally, engineers were specifically tasked to design an HVAC system that could service large assembles without interrupting the sound levels required by the musicians (USGBC, 2013b).