Frick Environmental Center’s COTE Award Featured in Architect Magazine

This past Earth Day, we received our fourth AIA Committee on the Environment Top Ten Award for the Frick Environmental Center (FEC) in Pittsburgh, which was featured in Architect Magazine.

The COTE Top Ten program highlights projects that meet the Committee’s rigorous criteria for social, economic, and ecological value while the Plus designation, which Frick received, indicates projects that have accomplished exemplary performance data and post occupancy lessons.

The FEC is the first free-and-public Living Building-certified project in the country and achieves on-site net positive energy and net positive water. While the integrated systems, science, and metrics of the FEC are impressive, it is the design’s expression of these through multi-sensory, tangible, experiential elements that results in a facility that is an experiential educational tool, visible in the rain veil, ravine, and amphitheater, but also woven through green infrastructure strategies and tangible salvaged materials.

The Center’s predicted net energy use intensity (EUI) was just 2 kBtus per square foot per year — 60% below average for similar structures, and the actual net EUI came in at -0.7 kBtus per square foot per year—an energy surplus, which is sent to the grid.

The FEC is a joint venture between the City of Pittsburgh and the Pittsburgh Parks Conservancy and has since welcomed more than 200,000 people since it opened in September 2016.