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GOING GREEN

Some developers work to minimize centers’ ecological impact

By James McCown

The idyllic names sometimes given to shopping centers — Fox Woods Acres, Hunt Valley Chase, Rolling Meadow Hills — belie their somewhat less than pastoral impact on the environment. Large centers are spread low and wide on the earth and have a tremendous bearing on water tables and other elements of local ecosystems.

Charles River Center has been designed to minimize the effect on adjacent wetlands.

But some developers, under pressure from major retailers as well as local authorities, are trying to make their projects kinder to the environment. Chestnut Hill, Mass.-based S.R. Weiner and Associates has taken a particularly aggressive approach with its Charles River Center, a new power center in Bellingham, a suburb about 40 miles southwest of downtown Boston. To mitigate its effects on a wetlands area next to the headwaters of the Charles River, the developer voluntarily undertook a program to redirect relatively clean water from the roof and filter dirty water from the parking lot back into the center’s aquifer.

“Ten or 15 years ago, we would have just drained the site,” said Richard J. O’Connell, a vice president of civil engineering at Carter & Burgess, Fort Worth, Texas, the project engineers. “Now, not only does the water have to go back down there, it has to be clean.”

Rooftop water is directed into large pipes underneath the parking lot, which are perforated and buried in beds of gravel, allowing the filtered water to seep gradually back into the aquifer. The water from the parking lot, polluted with oil, gasoline and winter sand and salt, enters a completely separate system; it travels through a series of swales (essentially ditches with vegetation) and a few other filtration processes before it returns underground.

The process appears to work, said Cliff Matthews, president of the Bellingham Conservation Commission. “They’ve achieved a 96 percent recharge rate back into the aquifer.”

Such a system, O’Connell estimates, can add 15 percent to 20 percent to a center’s site work costs. But though Weiner undertook the work voluntarily, Matthews said, the company also knew that legislation mandating such systems was “coming down the pike.”

With the environment becoming an increasingly mainstream issue around the country, retailers and developers are paying attention, and not for purely altruistic reasons. A number of retail architects specializing in green design insist that ecofriendly materials and construction can have many financial advantages, from lower long-term costs to favorable attention from green-oriented retailers.

Some large national tenants zero in on potential environmental headaches before they ink a lease, and Weiner saw the costs as good business sense, according to Bob Frazier, vice president of development.

“Home Depot has their consultants and attorneys consider the potential environmental impact,” he said. “They do their due diligence.”

Others have drawn similar conclusions. At Tanforan Center in San Bruno, Calif., a regional mall just south of San Francisco, owner Wattson Breevast is spending $100 million to “virtually rebuild the center in place,” with a heavy emphasis on sustainable materials and methods, said senior project manager David Green of Altoon + Porter Architects, Los Angeles, the project’s designers. And not entirely by coincidence, the headquarters of Gap Inc., one of the most prodigious occupants of retail space anywhere, is just to the north in San Francisco.

“A company like [Gap] really takes notice of efforts by retail developers to adopt sustainable design and building techniques,” Green said. A Gap spokeswoman echoed the idea. “While our store location decisions are made up of many factors, an environmentally friendly center would certainly be a positive one,” she said.

The Washington, D.C.-based U.S. Green Building Council sets guidelines for designating a building as “green” under its LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) program. Designation is achieved through a point system.

One important criterion is the ground-level and below-ground impact of a center’s building and parking facilities. Green said that after its completion in 2003, the renamed Shops at Tanforan will qualify for a LEED designation — possibly even a “silver designation.”

A silver designation would indicate “aggressive commitment to green design” on the part of a developer, a commitment that could add about 4 percent to 6 percent to the total cost of construction, said Seattle-based architect Mary Casey of Callison Architecture, the self-described “green queen” of her office and an accredited adviser in the LEED program. This cost estimate, however, does not take into account long-term savings on energy and other paybacks that the owner might accrue, such as tax breaks.

But going to such lengths as Tanforan has is the exception rather than the rule. Casey said that though retail clients are increasingly asking about issues of sustainability, few if any are ready to commit to comprehensive programs that would integrate all of the best current thinking in green design.

“If I had a dream retail client,” said Casey, “I’d recommend an array of solar panels, a permeable paving system that filters and returns water to the aquifer, and Xeriscaping.” That last term refers to Xeriscape landscaping, a water-saving method that uses plants needing little in the way of water, fertilizer or pesticides.

But this au naturel look is a tough sell. “Retailers tend to like the manicured look,” Casey said.

Altoon + Porter’s Green has traveled far and wide as an evangelist of green shopping center design. One of the firm’s most ambitious projects is Botany Town Centre in Auckland, New Zealand, a NZ$185 million ($77.1 million) development by Australian financial services giant AMP. A substantial amount of land was set aside along the perimeter for native plantings, some having been reintroduced to the site after decades of absence. Once they park their cars, shoppers wind their way through the vegetation. The center’s landscaping tab came to about NZ$5 million, AMP said.

“The center is conceived as a village within a garden,” Green said, a concept recommended to the developers by his boss, firm partner William Sebring. Given the area’s temperate climate, he said, a heating, ventilation and cooling system called displacement ventilation is designed to air-condition mainly in the afternoon; the rest of the time the system merely circulates the relatively cool outside air inside, reducing energy costs and pollution.

Most of the parking is surface, but a combination of garage and rooftop parking accounts for about one-third of the spaces, lessening the center’s overall footprint on that front.

Though green retail architecture is relatively new, it already has an interesting history. In the late 1970s, catalog-showroom retailer Best Products Co. commissioned a few artsy, academically oriented architectural firms to design a series of retail showrooms — the very kind of work that elite architects are wont to spurn. One of those firms was New York City-based SITE Environmental Design, which designed a project at Best’s Richmond, Va., headquarters in 1980. James Wines, one of SITE’s founders and the author of the 2000 book, Green Architecture, describes the building as “nature’s revenge.” It looks as though it has been taken over by some primordial Virginia forest, a giant oak tree appearing to tear a seismic crack in the facade. This was an early, radical version of Xeriscaping. According to Wines, the building is no longer used for retail; it has been converted to a church. (Best filed for bankruptcy and closed its stores in the late 1990s.)

As one of the gurus of green design, Wines said he is optimistic about the field in general and its application to the retail sector in particular.

“There’s tremendous pressure on retailers to be sustainable, but hey, they just haven’t gotten it yet,” he said. “But they will. I just spoke to the AIA [American Institute of Architects] students’ group in Pittsburgh. These kids are incredibly knowledgeable about sustainable design. If they have their way, things will change.”

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