Philadelphia's Friends Center Wins LEED Platinum
By Margaret Foster | Online Only | Feb. 2, 2010
Since opening its doors in 1856, a Quaker meeting house in downtown Philadelphia has played a role in the abolitionist, women's suffrage, and Civil Rights movements. Now the Race Street Meeting House has become part of the green revolution.
Last month the U.S. Green Building Council awarded LEED platinum certification—its highest honor—to the Friends Center's renovation, completed last fall. (The Friends Center is a three-building complex that includes the meeting house, a former school, and a 1972 office building.)
UJMN Architects + Designers, a Philadelphia-based architecture firm, oversaw the comprehensive six-year program, which integrated a host of green features into the office building. It also added a rainwater-collection system to the 19th-century building, a National Historic Landmark.
The project has its roots in the late 1990s, when Friends Center board members recognized that the meeting house urgently needed repairs and committed to a sustainable renovation. "There are so many exisiting buildings, including historic structures, that need to brought up to higher levels of energy efficiency and water usage," says Stacey Blankin, planner and associate at UJMN Architects + Designers. "This project demonstrates that it can be done."
UJMN's restoration program addressed water damage in the meeting house. The firm also designed environmentally friendly features for the attached 1972 building, including a green roof, solar panels, and geothermal wells that heat and cool the 56,000-square foot structure and meeting house without fossil fuels.
"Even though, technically, the meeting house did not receive the LEED platinum, a lot of its features are supporting the renovation of the office building," Blankin says.
"It's certainly the most ambitious effort of someone in Center City trying to take an existing building and look at the full range of things one could do to make it more sustainable," says John Gallery, executive director of the Preservation Alliance of Greater Philadelphia. The Race Street Meeting House is one of just two Quaker structures in downtown Philadelphia, Gallery notes. "Quakers were the founders of Philadelphia, and therefore the remaining meeting houses in Center City are unique examples of that historic heritage."
In Memoriam
The lead architect on the Friends Center project, Mark Ueland, died late last year. "We are so proud of this project, of all that it achieved and stands for," says Stacey Blankin of UJMN Architects + Designers. "It also has special meaning because of Mark's passing. He left us special legacy that we and the Friends hope all will learn from."
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