Case Study: Kroon Hall, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut

With its rustic stone facades and vaulted roof supported by glue-laminated beams, Kroon Hall, the new home for Yale University’s School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, looks a bit like an elegant rendition of a New England barn. But the reference wasn’t intentional, insist its architects, London-based Hopkins with the Connecticut firm Centerbrook. Instead, they say, Kroon’s cladding and roof form are an interpretation of the campus’s gabled stone buildings, while its thin profile and east-west orientation are the result of efforts to minimize heat gain and maximize reliance on the sun for daylighting and energy generation.

But orientation and configuration are just the most fundamental of a host of tightly integrated features that make Kroon Yale’s greenest facility to date. Taking into account on-site renewable energy generation, the 67,000-square-foot academic building is projected to consume 58 percent less energy than a code-compliant building of similar size and use, according to its project team. The addition of purchased green power allows Kroon, which opened this past spring, to claim carbon-neutral status. The building is on track to become Yale’s second LEED Platinum project, following completion of a studio facility for the graduate sculpture program two years ago. Ambitious construction projects like these, along with campus-wide conservation efforts and renewable energy initiatives, will be key to helping the university meet its goal to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions 10 percent below 1990 levels by 2020.