The International Sustainable Campus Network (ISCN) awarded the University of British Columbia and its Centre for Interactive Research on Sustainability (CIRS) with the 2015 award for Excellence in Building. As a living laboratory, CIRS demonstrates UBC’s commitment to exploring net-positive, regenerative sustainability practices on campus, both in terms of environmental and human wellbeing.
2015 ISCN award winners, including Dr. John Robinson, Associate Provost, Sustainability, and Victoria Smith, Director, Communications and Community Engagement, UBC Sustainability Initiative (centre).
“The competition this year was fierce,” says Matthew Gardner, 2015 ISCN Jury Chair. “The winners have clearly demonstrated technical ingenuity, sustainability integration and thoughtful stakeholder engagement to further campus sustainability. It is an honor for us to award these great efforts and provide global recognition.
Reflected by its receipt of the award, CIRS exemplifies the three core principles of the ISCN:
- To demonstrate respect for nature and society, sustainability considerations should be an integral part of planning, construction, renovation, and operation of buildings on campus.
- To ensure long-term sustainable campus development, campus-wide master planning and target-setting should include environmental and social goals.
- To align the organization’s core mission with sustainable development, facilities, research, and education should be linked to create a “living laboratory” for sustainability.
Located at UBC’s Vancouver campus, the CIRS building was the first demonstration project of UBC’s Campus as a Living Laboratory Initiative. It was conceived in 1999 by Dr. John Robinson, as an opportunity to create a sustainability showcase in the province of British Columbia: a building in which to push the envelope of sustainable design by integrating passive design strategies with the most advanced sustainable technologies of the time. LEED Platinum-certified and exemplifying innovative sustainability features, CIRS is more than just a building: it’s home to a multi-disciplinary research centre that uses the entire building as a research platform.
The atrium inside the Centre for Interactive Research on Sustainability.
CIRS goes a step beyond pure laboratory environments by enabling research testing in real-world conditions, using a fully operational and inhabited facility with complex engineering systems and engaged participants. setting thus delivering more realistic conditions for assessments. The building contains a 3,000-point building monitoring and controls system which monitors performance and captures data on the performance of equipment, systems and components for use in both research and continual optimization projects. Lessons learned from the design, construction and ongoing use of the building, as well as the results of research projects, are made public through a variety of communications pathways.
The experience and knowledge gained from CIRS has influenced the ways that the university plans and delivers building projects. Based on the CIRS experience, UBC now has a Sustainability Process which is followed by all major building projects and specifically aims to optimize integrated design.
In addition to the ISCN award, CIRS has recently been recognized with the 2015 Royal Architectural Institute of Canada (RAIC) Green Building Award.
For more information on the Centre for Interactive Research on Sustainability, visit: http://cirs.ubc.ca.
For more information on CIRS awards and certifications, vist: http://cirs.ubc.ca/building/building-overview/certification-recognition.