SLU Research Tower Should Not Be Awarded a LEED Designation
Saint Louis University is putting a friendly spin on its new Research Tower under construction at the SE corner of Grand and Chouteau. A new story in the St. Louis Business Journal had this to say:
Officials are seeking silver-level Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design, or LEED, certification for the building. If they’re successful, the $66 million, 206,000-square-foot building will be the largest in the area to get the green designation.
LEED certification, awarded by the U.S. Green Building Council, is granted if a building or interior meets environmentally friendly requirements, including water and energy efficiency, sustainable materials and resources, and indoor environmental quality, each of which are assigned a certain number of points. The level of certification — certified, silver, gold or platinum — depends on the number of points awarded the project.
Many are all excited about the building. Some like the way it looks. It will have bike racks and showers for researchers that want to bike to the building. Some parking spaces will be dedicated to hybrid or low emissions vehicles.
Having a LEED-certified building and adding green space to the area around it will have an economic cost, but will have a positive trade-off in terms of being the right thing to do, and creating a better working and living environment, Joe Weixlmann, provost of the university, said via e-mail. “Moreover, we are confident that certain donors will agree with our reasoning and help us to support the added cost.”
The “green space” is my issue with the building. This is not a massive building at 206,000 square feet yet it is being placed in the center of a massive nine acre green. The site was, until recently, three and a half city blocks. The 10-story building would easily fit on a fraction of one city block. Click here to see the project website including drawings and a site plan.
Everyone from City Hall to locals is hailing the “investment” this project represents. Indeed, I’m happy to see $66 million being spent. The wasteful use of land and the destruction of the interconnected street grid is not offset by any “green” building methods. SLU and Architects Cannon Design must be fooling themselves to think this is friendly to the urban environment.
In typical SLU fashion the nine acres will most likely be surrounded by fencing that says the public is not welcome here unless you’ve got big bucks for tuition. At the corner of Grand & Chouteau a fountain will decorate the lifeless intersection.
Preliminary drawings indicated planted medians along the center of Grand which will present challenges for building future street car lines. The drawings also show no street parking along Grand nor any any street trees. Basically the sidewalk along Grand and Chouteau will be a miserable place to walk. SLU and the architects fail to understand that such a sterile sidewalk will not benefit from the adjacent green grass.
Nine acres! I can’t get over it. Keeping the street grid in place you could create a very interesting and urban area. Once again in St. Louis we are applauding a major institution for their wasteful and anti-urban “investment.”
Connecting SLU’s main campus and the medical campus should be a high priority. Rebuilding three and a half city blocks at Grand & Chouteau is an opportunity to create storefronts to enliven the sidewalk experience, provide services for students and researchers and even create some additional housing. Why is this corner so important? Couple of things. First we already have the Grand MetroLink stop between both SLU campuses. This stop is used by many students as well as residents connecting to local buses. A future Southside MetroLink line will run along Chouteau making it even more important to our future. And big plans are underway to make the bridge between the SLU campuses more pedestrian friendly. From the St. Louis Business Journal:
The proposed bridge would serve as a needed connector between the two sides of Saint Louis University’s expanding campus, according to Kathleen Brady, the university’s vice president for facilities management and civic affairs. Brady said the existing bridge is a barrier to the school’s campuses on either side of I-64/U.S. 40 because it is not pedestrian friendly.
The new four-lane, 102-foot-wide bridge, designed by local firm Zurheide-Herrmann Inc., would include sidewalks on both sides for pedestrians and bikers as well as a 14-foot-wide landscaped median. It would replace the current 80-foot-wide, six-lane bridge.
“With the pedestrian and bike lanes, we really think a lot more of our students, faculty and staff may choose to move between the campuses,” Brady said. The pedestrian-friendly bridge would also make all parts of the campus accessible from the Grand MetroLink station, she said.
SLU may help the city foot a portion of the bill for the project. “The school has not made a firm commitment at this time, but we certainly know that down the road, we’ll be having those discussions.”
The city is currently putting together a funding package to cover the cost of the project. At an estimated $25 million, the bridge’s pricetag is nearly 10 times higher than the average bridge replacement in the city. Most of the bridges the city replaces run between $2 million to $3 million, according to Board of Public Service President Marjorie Melton.
So we are going to spend $25 million to make the area more pedestrian friendly yet at the South end of the bridge the new Research Tower in the big green will be a big dead zone of activity. According to the Mayor’s site Republican US Senator Kitt Bond “found” $15 million to move the project forward. I love how elected officials responsible for dividing up our tax money for transportation projects suddenly find money. In congressional terms $15 million is sofa change.
Building interesting cities is not easy but common sense tells you blank sidewalks with no activity is not the way to go. The bridge project is a good idea but tragically it will be underutilized due to the new SLU research building taking up space that could be put to use encouraging more pedestrian traffic. To go for green accreditation is an insult. This new building may employ some energy saving techniques but in the big picture it is hardly friendly to the environment.
Forgive me if I don’t join others in applauding SLU.
– Steve
I had originally heard that the barren site was needed to satisfy federal security requirements –although frankly creating lots of ead space around a biolab makes it a pretty easily identifiable target — then I noticed how close the building comes to Grand. I guess it’s just the worst site plan in SLU’s history — and that is really taking the whole f’in cake!
Don’t forget the large city park (Terry Park) directly to the east of the building’s parking lot. It looks like they even show a corner of it in the aerial perspective rendering in your post.
I’m not privy to all the behind-the-scenes site assembly machinations, but I can say that at least one local housing developer was at one point exploring new single-family housing where it appears SLU will be building a parking garage (directly facing the park).
I certainly don’t disagree that the site plan is at best anti-urban. Look at the players: with the exception of the church at Lindell SLU pretty much ignores Grand already, Cannon appears to design mostly “signature” buildings on large parcels, and the City hasn’t stood up to a power player since who knows when. It is a shame that the University, the City, and the architect didn’t demand more from each other – what a lost opportunity to truly remake that most visible corner.
In their defense, SLU does appear to maintain its property well. Even if it is fenced off from the general public. And it’s not like Cardinal Glennon, Peveley, the industrial storage facility, and the Cap’n D’s are exactly beacons of pedestrian activity… I have personally witnessed some docs and med students J-walking Grand between the med school and the hospital so I know that there are in fact people IN the buildings that line Grand. They just don’t appear to venture out to the street very often – the elevated walkway to the new building won’t help the situation.
I hear the Cardinal Glennon cafeteria is pretty good, but I don’t think they don’t have a storefront.
Just for reference, every building shown is already there except for the research building. The garages are the Hickory East and West garages, the ones that have the giant overhead SLU signs between them.
My thought on the situation is that SLU should have their own planning students consult on their developments. It would be good real world practice, and SLU could tap a valuable resource free of charge. In the end, everyone would win, including the city as a whole.
I’d just like to point out that while SLU grounds appear to be “fenced-off” there is not any harsh efforts by SLU to keep the public off their property. The perception may be there, I understdand. However, I graduated from SLU several years ago and have on many occations since then gone back to simply walks the grounds and enjoy the scenery. Never once have I had any problem in doing so.
[REPLY – True, they don’t stop you at one of the many gates and ask for a student ID. The public is free to walk through the campus. But, it feels isolated and is not welcoming to an outsider that doesn’t know where they are going. – SLP]
Say what you will about SLU’s status as a good/bad neighbor, but when national magazines rank SLU as having the 23rd most unsafe campus in the nation, I can understand their “defensive” posture.
[REPLY – I have not seen any rankings of campus’ with respect to safety, I’d love to know your source. SLP]
Having seen photos of what the SLU campus was like back in the 70s. Before the fountains and green space, Before the gates with the “Saint Louis University” on them. Before the closing of West Pine. I can honestly say that if these changes had not been made, I and a great many other students would never have gone there. The campus not only was not pleasing to look at or be in. But it also looked very cold, unsafe, and empty of any identity.
[REPLY – The 1970s were a bad time in cities. Neglect and destruction was everywhere. Don’t get me wrong, I love having lots of trees, flowers and such. These things are very nice and were most likely missing from the campus in the 1970s. If SLU is indeed the 23rd most unsafe campus I’d say it was their own fault. The fencing, closing the streets and not having an active campus perimeter all lead to unsafe conditions. Each “improvement” they’ve made has only made the situation worse. – SLP]
What SLU does may not be perfect but I think attention should be better focused on the slum property owners to the West and North of campus first.
I wish I could provide you with the source but I’ve been unable to find it online.
From my what I can remember around 2001 a magazine (Princeton review, Kiplinger’s, US News) listed the 25th most unsafe college campuses in America. It could clearly be seen that the rankings were calculated based on neighborhood or zip code crime data. The prove of this was the fact that Harris-Stowe State College happened to be ranked 24th.
At the time SLU was very upset about the rankings, particularly since campus crime was at a 10-year low I believe. The fact is that aside from car thefts, which have been a problem, (just like in every other nook and cranny of the city) crime ON campus at SLU has been very low for a while now.
Is there any reason that closing Spring and West Pine had to happen, though? The efforts at forging identity could have been served with flowers, gates and the link without sacrificing SLU’s connection to the public sphere. I am glad that SLU did not leave the city behind, as some of its trustees had urged in the 1970’s. But that decision to stay and expand in the city should have acknowledged that some senitivity is needed to build a campus in a dense urban area like Midtown, and that spatial integration within such an area makes for a safer and ultimately more attractive college.
Some of us had hoped that some retroactive contemplation of the university’s urban location would be evident in the new biolab.
I remember that “unsafe campus” ranking as well, and it had nothing to do with the amount of crime on the SLU campus itself – it was based on the neighborhood in which the campus is located. While the neighborhood may still have its problems, the campus itself is very safe.
Like Becker said, I’m fairly sure that I would not have attended SLU had it not been for the numerous improvements that have been made to the campus over the years. While the improvements have detracted from the urban feel of the campus, they have allowed SLU to become much more competitive with other comparable schools, and I don’t doubt that they’ve helped play a role (albeit an indirect role) in SLU’s rise in the U.S. News rankings.
I don’t necessarily agree with everything SLU does from an urban planning perspective, but closing off Spring and West Pine was one of the university’s smarter decisions. The West Pine pedestrian mall created the campus feeling that had been lacking for so many years and resulted in a much more peaceful environment. The campus has more of an identity now. It still has a great urban look and feel along Lindell which I wish could be replicated along Laclede and Vandeventer.
With regards to the Research Center, I’m just speculating, but something tells me that the land that will initially be used as green space will eventually be home to an additional building.
Who now has the contract for the Grand Avenue Bridge? Why was the previous contract with Zurheide cancelled? Has the previous plan for the bridge changed? When do you think it will be executed?