Tom Hartman on “Log Lessons from Scandinavia”

The Log, home of the true Log Lunches, is currently under construction and on-track for completion in September. So on Friday May 1, architect Tom Hartman came to Log Lunch in Dodd to speak about his approach to the project and the building’s goals. Additionally, he broadened the scope of sustainable building strategies in his talk with a discussion of climate-change building models in Scandinavia. Hartman is partner at the Amherst-based firm of Colham and Hartman Architects and has worked at this eight-person, small project firm for fifteen years.

When presented with the Log project by the College, Hartman said that he was told “Don’t change the Log.” This advice had guided Hartman’s approach to the Log. His firm has sought to build an environmentally-sound structure in the image of the old Log. For returning alumni, he hopes that they will feel that the Log is the same but better.

The project presented various difficulties to the architects. For example, Hartman had to install a new roof plane in the back of the building given its structural deficiencies. With this improvement and others, Hartman has sought to make the faulty envelope of the building sturdier, wrapping it in insulation and then rebuilding the interior.

Yet the improvements to its environmental performance extend past just insulation, as the goal is to substantially reduce the Energy Use Intensity (EUI) down from 119 to 69. To view visual plans for the Log, follow the directions at the bottom of this page.

Though this small Williamstown renovation will produce an environmentally-friendly building, on average, American architecture lags behind Northern Europe in sustainability. Hartman transitioned to speaking about lessons from his recent trip to Scandinavia, where countries intend to become fossil free. He noted that Sweden and Denmark are led by the policies of their big cities, with Stockholm’s 2050 fossil free initiative as an example. Such projects are facilitated in part because most of the land in cities is actually owned by the municipalities. Additionally, because cities such as Copenhagen are only 1.5 feet above sea level, the pursuit of environmental building solutions is not only desirable but necessary.

Hartman presented a number of innovative Swedish sustainability initiatives and building strategies. For example, he described how residents do not compost food waste but are told to chop it up and deposit it through a system that transforms it into biogas that fuels city buses. Old gasification system structures have been turned into sports stadiums and arenas. Bicycles are omnipresent, and vacuum tubes send recycling to a centralized facility. In addition to these large-scale efforts, sustainability is in the building details as well, with gutters having simple leaf diverters to allow them to function efficiently. With their urban environmental policies, Stockholm does not use a penalty system.

In Copenhagen, a city of 600,000 people, bicycles are also a prominent mode of transportation, and the streetlights are timed to the pace of a bicycle. During the snow season, the bike lanes are even plowed first. Copenhagen aims to be carbon neutral by 2025, and the state aims to achieve its energy goals in two means; in the short term, Denmark will buy biomass from Finland and Russia, while in the long term, it plans to drill five miles into the Earth to utilize geothermal energy.

Updating the crowd on the Log, Hartman provided vision of our newest sustainable building on campus. Yet presented with his knowledge of innovative national strategies from abroad, Hartman elucidated that environmental building policy in America still could progress much further to meet the high standard set by Scandinavia and the challenges presented by climate change.

By Sara Clark ‘15

For the plans for the Log, in addition to more information about Hartman and his firm, please visit http://www.coldhamandhartman.com. Scroll down to “Client Area” in the lower right hand corner. The username is “sarah” and the password is “gardner.”