How Green Is Your Campus?

Want to see the best in environmentally friendly interior and exterior design these days? Then take a trip to America's colleges and universities--like Middlebury College in northern Vermont.

It's not just that these buildings are getting high marks from the U.S. Green Building Council for how environmentally friendly they are. They are great examples of architectural inventiveness and great models of how connected a building can be to its surrounding environment.

The Hillcrest Environmental Center is an 1875 farmhouse. Or, rather, was. A recent report by the Associated Press chronicles how the center, which is home to Middlebury's environmental science program, has been reborn with the marks of Vermont, from an old maple sugar tree as ceiling planks to desktops made from sunflower seed shells. Some 40 professors and 90 students a year will find a home here, the college says.

Is $4 million too much to much to spend on sustainability? Middlebury doesn’t seem to think so.

University, College Win Livable Building Awards

The Center for the Built Environment at the University of California, Berkeley has chosen higher education buildings to be two of the three winners of its Livable Building Awards for 2007.

Carnegie Institution for Science's Global Ecology Research Center at Stanford University won for features such as a radiant cooling system that has helped to cut carbon emissions from building operations by 72%. Its wood doors were salvaged from old wine vats and it also has an energy-efficient water system.

Also a winner: The Kirsch Center at De Anza College and part of the credit for the award definitely belongs to the Cupertino, Calif., community college's own students. De Anza's student government earmarked $180,000 of its own funds for the center, which has gotten second-highest designation from the U.S. Green Building Council.

With green building so hot a topic on college campuses these days, it's perhaps not surprising that there was also a university among the seven finalists. Donald Bren Hall at the University of California, Santa Barbara was given an honorable mention.