Navy at the Leading Edge of Green Design

In what may be one of the most significant developments in green building in recent years, the Department of the Navy has become the first Federal agency requiring all facilities and infrastructure-related design and construction to incorporate sustainable design principles. While energy efficiency and sustainability have long been mentioned in federal building and procurement guidelines, the Navy became the first to actually put it into practice when it issued new policy statements covering design, design criteria, and architect/engineer (A-E) selection. This could be a very significant shot-in-the-arm for green building and a strong incentive for mainstream A-E firms to take green design and building seriously.

The Naval Facilities Engineering Command (NAVFAC) handles domestic construction for the Navy, Air Force, and Marines, along with about half of domestic Army construction and about half of all offshore military construction. (The Army Corps of Engineers handles other military construction.) NAVFAC has an annual construction budget of about $5 billion—roughly one percent of all construction in the United States—and builds all types of buildings, from homes to schools to hospitals. NAVFAC’s Sustainable Design Program was initiated in 1993, with a policy directive from the Assistant Secretary of the Navy. According to Terrel Emmons, FAIA, chief architect for NAVFAC, the Navy learned a difficult and expensive lesson with the environmental cleanup of Naval bases that were being closed. “Every time we went to close down a base, we found out how badly we’d done,” he told attendees of the EEBA conference in Washington this October.