New Activity Center
Coming Soon to the Olney Friends School Campus:
A Higher Standard of “Green Building”
For its first new construction project in more than 40 years, Olney Friends School will soon build an activity center that meets an impressively high European standard of energy efficiency and low environmental impact. Depending on how soon it is built, the new center will be the first non-residential Passive Haus building in the United States. Passive Haus is by definition at least two to three times as energy efficient as LEEDS.
The new activity center will provide a much-needed expansion of indoor space on the campus, particularly during the winter months. The new building will be home to a full-size gymnasium that will double as a performance space, offices, four classrooms of various sizes, a fitness center, and a serving kitchen.
The new activity center will be sited between the Main building and the Girls Dormitory, creating a pedestrian quad where there is now a parking lot. Construction materials will include local and recycled materials such as standing seam roofing from Follansbee, West Virginia and bricks from Sugarcreek, Ohio. South-facing panels to capture solar energy for electrical power, skylights and other “daylighting” features, airtight construction, heavy insulation, an interior “living wall” of plants to help purify indoor air, and heat-recovery ventilation systems are some of its many distinctive features. Year-round, the small inputs needed to heat and cool the building will be met entirely through a geothermal process making use of the nearby campus lake.
Originating in Germany in 1991, the Passive Haus standard is increasingly common in new construction of civic buildings in Europe. For example, the city of Frankfurt requires all new government buildings be built to the standard.
Passive Haus design focuses especially on the energy efficiency of the building envelope, the creation and maintenance of healthy indoor air quality regardless of the weather, and the optimization of non-fossil fuel inputs for heating. Especially, it aims to eliminate or minimize the use of “active energy” systems for heating and cooling. The maximum energy input permitted is 15 kilowatt hours per square meter (equivalent to 4,250 BTU per square foot) per year for heating and cooling.
Months of planning for a new Activity Center have produced architectural and engineering drawings, ready for the bidding process when sufficient funds are realized for construction. True to Olney Friends School’s core values, the Board of Trustees and school administrators are clear that this is not a time to borrow money in order to begin building. Efforts will continue to find further funding sources to see a new Activity Center accomplished.
This artist’s rendering illustrates the new concept for Olney’s campus “quad.” The view is to the south, with The Main building shown on the right and the Music Box / Powerhouse to the left in the foreground. The Girls Dorm is shown in the background and the future Activity Center is illustrated on the left side of the illustration. Read Olney’s Long Range Vision to see the plan for traffic circulation and parking lot locations, creating a people-friendly campus!