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Green Hotel, LEED® Gold
element℠ Hotels
By now, anyone who has stayed in a hotel or motel has seen them: the little signs urging guests to save water by reusing their towels, compact fluorescent lightbulbs replacing less-efficient ones. The lodging industry has been making admirable attempts to decrease the size of its carbon footprint. Now imagine an entire line of upmarket, extended-stay hotels designed, literally from the ground up, to shrink that footprint to a toenail. These hotels are so green, one of their reasons to exist is to achieve LEED certification.
Meet element, Starwood Hotels and Resorts Worldwide's contender in the sustainability sweepstakes. The four-story, 78,000-square-foot prototype in Lexington, Massachusetts, uses natural daylight to illuminate the lobby and other common areas. Stainless steel, Energy Star® appliances shine in the guestroom kitchens. Low-flow faucets are estimated to save nearly a million gallons of drinkable water every year. To cut down on plastic bottle waste, guests enjoy filtered water and get shampoo from dispensers. They walk on carpet and admire artwork made from recycled materials. No shade of green is overlooked, from guest access to complimentary bikes and preferred parking for hybrid vehicles all the way down to the "do not disturb" sign; the traditional paper hangtag is now an environment-friendly magnet.
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Project architect Costas Kondylis and Partners continues the green theme in the hotel's impressive swimming pool area, which is enclosed in a highly insulated, daylit space created by Structures Unlimited, Inc. A structural aluminum box beam framing system provides the basis for this unusual, wedge-shaped, 2,100-square-foot pool enclosure with a 12% sloped skylight overhead. An architectural aluminum finish was factory-applied to the beams, rendering the pre-engineered composite system extremely resistant to the highly corrosive atmosphere of intense humidity and airborne chlorine. The box beam structure incorporates an insulated Kalwall® translucent panel system to form the walls and roof into a total composite system that fills the pool area with an energy-efficient wash of balanced, glare-free daylight.
Structures Unlimited's pool enclosure was selected for many more very sustainable reasons. Diffuse daylight provides natural brightness, reducing artificial lighting, without the eye fatigue associated with hot spots or glare glinting off the water's undulating surface.
Maintaining a comfortable temperature takes less energy as well, as translucent Kalwall's low solar heat gain significantly keeps things cooler in summer; in winter, the enclosure still transmits solar energy through the vertical glass walls, and heat loss through the translucent roof is significantly reduced. The pool enclosure delivers a .15 solar heat gain coefficient, a .14 U-value and 10% light transmission. The architect also liked its high percentage of recycled materials content. Structures Unlimited and Kalwall are featured in numerous LEED-certified buildings.
And in such a moist environment, the highly insulating system prevents condensation from developing on the inside. The enclosure also offers far lower operating costs than other pool structures and all components are designed for minimal maintenance and upkeep. Acrylic and polycarbonate glazing panels measuring one inch thick or less cannot compare with the strength and performance characteristics of Kalwall. In a northern climate such as Massachusetts, the custom-designed and engineered enclosure meets or exceeds all local snow and wind load requirements.
Research by Starwood Hotels and Resorts Worldwide concluded that their guests want to tread on the environment just as lightly on the road as they do at home. And the hotel group has discovered how much easier it is to design green into a new hotel than to retrofit an old one. Not surprisingly, the Structures Unlimited pool enclosure helped this first-ever element Hotel win LEED Gold certification. Starwood likes Structures Unlimited so much, the company is building a similar enclosure at the element Hotel in Ewing, New Jersey, and a skylight for a site in Denver. In the end, green lodging isn't just the right thing to do; it actually helps fill hotel rooms. Nicely.
element Hotels (Starwood Hotels and Resorts Worldwide)
Lexington, MA
Architect: Costas Kondylis and Partners
Specifications
Light Transmission: 10%
Solar Heat Gain Coefficient: 0.15
U-Value: .14 Btu/hr/ft²/°F, or .80 W/m²K
For more information, contact:
Structures Unlimited, Inc., 603-645-6539 (800-225-3895 N. America)
Kalwall is a registered trademark of Kalwall Corporation U.S.A.
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