Students in one Portland, Oregon middle school just earned some serious bragging rights among their peers.  The Evans – Harvard High Performance Classroom at the da Vinici Arts Middle School was recently awarded LEED platinum certification – the first K-12 public school building to achieve this level of certification. The classroom features natural daylighting, passive cooling systems and solar roof tiles that help it track toward net-zero energy use.

What better way to bolster student performance than by flooding a classroom with natural and fresh air?

The classroom was designed by SRG Partnership and constructed by Todd Hess Building Company.   SRG Partnership worked with the University of Oregon’s Energy Studies in Buildings Lab (ESBL), part of the Northwest Energy Efficiency Alliance’s BetterBricks Lab Network, to design the 1,500-square foot music classroom and fine tune a unique natural lighting system called the “Halo”.  The brain child of SRG and ESBL, the Halo provides enough natural light, even with overcast skies, so there’s no need to turn on a light switch at all during the school day. The system acts as a large central skylight with louvers that automatically rotate to control light levels.  The sun’s rays pass through the skylight, hit the louvers and bounce natural light evenly throughout the room.

The Halo was originally conceived as a daylighting strategy for the Mount Angel Abbey’s Annunciation Center for the Theological Studies in Mount Angel, Oregon.  In both the Mount Angel project and da Vinci Arts Middle School, a rigorous, iterative design process was used to maximize climate resources and minimize building energy loads.  To read more about the integrated design process from the perspective the Mount Angel team members – including Kent Duffy of SRG, Charlie Brown of ESBL, Mike Hatten of Solarc and Father Mee of Mount Angel – check out this interview series.  There’s also a terrific Mount Angel case study on the BetterBricks website.

Portland Public Schools plans to rebuild or remodel every building in its portfolio over the next 20 years and hopes to integrate as many green features as possible.  The da Vinci addition is a pilot project for the district to decide which new technologies will be included in future sustainable classrooms.

Project team key players included Portland Public Schools; SRG Partnership; Todd Hess Building Company;  Energy Studies in Buildings Lab at the University of Oregon which is partially funded by the Northwest Energy Efficiency Alliance’s BetterBricks initiative; PBS Environmental; Bonneville Environmental Foundation; Solarc; Greenworks; kpff; Listen Acoustics; and Green Building Services.