NASA Opens Doors to New LEED-Gold Building

GREENBELT, MD — The NASA Goddard Space Flight Center cut the ribbon on the space administration’s newest LEED building this week -- a green building with a white roof and black walls in labs.

Constructed in less than two-and-a-half years, the three-story Exploration Sciences Building has a roof that is designed to reflect heat and a large skylight atop a centralized staircase to bring in a lot of natural light.

The sunlit space, especially on the two upper floors, complements gathering places on each level of the building that were designed to foster collaboration among scientists. A “conference hallway” on the first floor of the building and a symposium room that holds 200 people are among the other features supporting the theme of collaboration.

The lab floors in the building are made from epoxy to avoid off-gassing. The floors also are grounded, which is both a safety measure and move to prevent static electricity from disrupting sensitive equipment and work. The labs were built to enable easy, but secure, partitioning off of the rooms -- each with its own ventilation, lighting and lab racks. In addition, many of the labs have black walls, floors, furniture and fixtures to prevent light reflectivity problems for scientists developing and testing optics.

In addition, paved areas were made with reflective materials to further reduce the heat island effect at the development, site lighting was designed to reduce light pollution, the building uses plumbing fixtures that reduce water usage, and green building materials were used to avoid the presence of high VOC products in the structure. The building also has a stormwater management system, areas for recyclables, and a manifold exhaust system that allows separation of hazardous and non-hazardous lab exhaust and recirculation of non-hazardous lab exhaust, which helps energy costs.

Opening ceremonies for the structure, which earned a LEED-Gold green building rating, were held on Monday. The building was designed by EwingCole Architects, based in Philadelphia and Washington, and it was built by the Manhattan Construction Company of Fairfax, Va.

NASA has another high-performance building in the works: “Sustainability Base” at the Moffett Field in Mountain View, Calif. That $20.6 million building is slated for completion by the end of 2011.

Image courtesy of NASA.