Green Project Highlight

April 23, 2009

From more than 2,500 nominated projects, A3C's LEED CI-Gold Sustainable Showcase & UrbEn Retreat (submitted by A3C-Collaborative Architecture) has been selected as a Green Building of America Award-winning project and will be featured in the upcoming special Real Estate & Construction Review-Midwest Green Success Stories edition. Hand-selected by the Owner/Architect, Irish Construction Company’s work on this project also received CAM’s Honorable Mention in the Green Project of the Year competition and was featured in CAM’s January 2009 magazine article “Pushing the Envelope” for the L.E.E.D. certified renovations. Nestled in the heart of Ann Arbor, A3C’s Green Renovation and Rooftop Retreat involved an extensive retro-fit integration of a wide variety of green building systems. Such systems included a geo-thermal heating and cooling system which uses the earth’s constant subterranean temperature of 54 degrees to moderate the varying surface temperatures, as well as catch basins for the utilization of rain water and skylights for using natural light in the existing workspaces. To crown the achievement, the Rooftop Retreat was specifically created to serve as a destination for “hands-on” education of green technologies, marking a resolved commitment to promote responsible building for generations to come. Each Green Building of America Success Story project is highlighted in a case study that intertwines the words of the project’s owner/developer, consultants, architects and contractors to explain how the teams worked together to design and build one of the region’s most important, innovative or unique new or renovated sustainable facilities.