The R.W. Kern Center is a living symbol of Hampshire’s values in practice and ideas in action. Our first major new building in three decades, it was built with the goal of certification under the world’s most advanced green building standard, the Living Building Challenge: generating its own electricity, collecting its own water, and built avoiding toxic “red list” chemicals using materials mainly from local and regional sources. The 17,000-sq-ft center is a major piece of Hampshire’s broad sustainability initiative to make campus operations carbon neutral, including a plan to go 100 percent solar for campus electricity this year. This multifunctional building will also serve the campus as a living laboratory, where students and the public can study its systems and performance, tied to measures for sustainability.
For more on the Kern Center:
How To Build A Non-Toxic, Net-Zero Energy/Water Campus Center
Hampshire announces ribbon-cutting opening ceremony for Kern Center
October 25, 2015
Wednesday, October 14, 2015
Science lab demonstrates wastewater system of campus’s new Kern Center living building.
Wednesday, September 23, 2015
“I’ve never taken a math class that was this pragmatic,” says Walden Avery as he scoops a pile of gravel. Avery and the three members of his team, all first-year Hampshire students, are gathered around a plastic box on the lawn outside the Cole Science Center. Their aim: to create a miniature wetlands, a lesson related to the wetlands being constructed around the Kern Center to help treat the building’s wastewater.
The R.W. Kern Center’s design documents explain that the building’s greywater—water from the bathrooms and kitchen sinks and drinking fountain drains—will be pre-filtered and captured in a greywater storage tank.
The Kern Center is quickly taking shape as the most visible symbol of the College's commitment to sustainable building practices, placing Hampshire at the center of the national discussion around the confluence of design and energy and water conservation.
April 22, 2015