Aldo Leopold Legacy Center

The Aldo Leopold Legacy Center, located less than a mile from the “shack” known to readers of A Sand County Almanac, is a fitting memorial by addressing tomorrow’s environmental needs today.

Click photo to enlargeThe center became the first building in Wisconsin to earn a platinum designation under the U.S. Green Building Council™’s Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design™ (LEED) program, earning a record-to-date 61 points in the process and being the first-ever to receive LEED credit for being carbon neutral.  

One of the highlights of the ground-breaking structure is the use of recycled stone – something that might not have happened if the president of the masonry sub wasn’t such a firm believer in rescuing old stone and brick from the landfill.

“WHAT THEY STAND FOR”

While the Aldo Leopold Legacy Center drew plaudits from everyone from different craft organization to the American Institute of Architects (AIA), Jeannine Richards, communications coordinator for the Aldo Leopold Foundation, says at least part of the idea for the center was quite mundane.

“We’d been renting an older Victorian house in Baraboo, which is the closest town to the Leopold shack,” she says. “Part of it is that we wanted a facility that was closer to the main draw for our visitation, and we wanted something that could be a visitors’ facility, as well as provide us with office space.”

She adds that the foundation ultimately wanted both an education/exhibition space and meeting spaces that it could rent to conservation groups. However, going into the process, that wasn’t necessarily foremost in the minds of the foundation’s board members.

“We didn’t have the details of what we wanted the building to be, but we knew we wanted it to be as green as we could possibly make it,” Richards says. “The big challenge for our architect was that we went into the process saying we wanted to be carbon-neutral. At that point, no building had done that.”

The foundation’s request-for-proposals (RFP) on the project got the attention of The Kubala Washatko Architects (TKWA) of Cedarburg, Wis. Tom Kubala, co-founder of the firm, says since its formation in 1980, he and partner Allen Washatko have had an interest in doing projects that are a little outside the mainstream.

“A lot of them were either solar-oriented or earth -helter or other appropriate technology,” Kubala explains. “It’s been part of our psyche since day one.”
Additionally, the firm was responsible for the design of the Dorothy K. Vallier Environmental Learning Center at the Schlitz Audubon Nature Center in Milwaukee, which received a gold LEED designation.

“Some logs that we used for columns on the porches at the Schlitz Audubon Nature Center were contributed by the Leopold Foundation,” says Kubala. “In that process, we met the Leopold Foundation folks and we really struck up a strong connection with them as a group. When the RFPs went out, we had a familiarity with who they were and what they stood for.”

He stresses that going in the foundation board had a strong commitment to constructing the greenest building possible.

“To paraphrase Aldo Leopold, the challenge of building on land without spoiling it was one of the bigger challenges there,” Kubala adds.

At the same time, the architects were quite concerned that they come up with a plan that worked for the foundation, which required a series of interviews with staff and board members.

“Ultimately, we were able to pin down how they would function in a building like this,’ says Kubala. “For instance, they wanted to feel a connection to the land, even while remaining indoors. And, it’s important that the kitchen be in the middle, because in their earlier working space the kitchen played an important role, and we made it a feature of the new work space.”

COMPANY INTEREST

To build the 12,000 ft² project, which includes two separate conference/classroom spaces, a land- stewardship workshop, offices and the exhibit area, both client and architects knew they would need an out-of-the-ordinary contractor, which they found in the Appleton, Wis.-based Oscar J. Boldt Construction.

“We worked with the owner in preparing interviews for the contractor, and we knew what questions to ask,” says architect Kubala. “We wanted to know how they’d respond to certain issues. We didn’t ask anybody to submit bids that we didn’t think would do a good job, so it was a small list of contractors.”

“Boldt had done a number of green buildings,” says the foundation’s Richards. “Their Stevens Point (Wis.) and Oklahoma City divisional offices are green buildings, and they had familiarity with some of the techniques and technologies we were using. We also felt they would be committed to following those specifications, and they had some idea of how the supply chains would work rather than going through conventional suppliers.”

Gregg Tucek, who works out of Boldt’s Madison, Wis., office and served as the project manager, says the Legacy Center is exactly the type of job that company CEO Tom Boldt likes to take on.

“Tom has a history of being a pioneer of sustainability, and a lot of us here have seen where there’s a potential for better ways to do things as far as building sustainable environments,” Tucek says. “Tom’s also familiar with the Leopold Foundation and knew they were looking to do something a step above the norm as far as green construction. We wanted to be involved in this project.”

Despite Boldt’s previous green experience, Tucek adds that finding appropriate subs for the job proved to be a major challenge, although the contractor did use a modified process.

“Because of the location of the project in a rural area (Baraboo, a community of 10,000 people, is located approximately 35 miles northwest of Madison), and because of the special type work involved, we had to go above-and-beyond just putting it out for bid,” says the project manager. “We had to pre-select the subs, and while some came to us wanting to be involved in the project, we had to go searching for others.”

For instance, he explains the heating/cooling and ventilation are done by two separate systems that were installed in tandem. The electrical contractor had to be able to incorporate photovoltaic solar cells on the roof to make the building energy-neutral. And, Boldt could only find a couple companies in the entire state familiar with earthen plaster.

The foundation’s decision to use wood from trees planted by the Leopold family on the property in the 1930s and ‘40s proved challenging from several aspects.
“We were working with a product that wasn’t on the shelf anywhere,” says Tucek. “When we started working on the project, it was a full year before any of the wood was even harvested. We were working on assumptions that when the trees were cut down we’d get different-sized timbers. However, when the pine was harvested, graded and milled, we realized we weren’t going to get some of the sizes that were going to be required.”

In that case, he explains solving the problem involved working with both the carpentry contractor and the round-wood designer, then changing the way parts of the building went together.

And, that’s not to discount the work of the cabinetmaker who also had to work with wood furnished by the foundation, and the custom window manufacturer.

“It really required a whole new mind-set with a lot of the subs,” says Tucek. “It was not so much ‘hurry up and get this built,’ as much as it was ‘let’s see what we have to work with and how best we can accomplish this.’ And, it all had to be done within the constraints of schedule and budget.”

THE DESIRE FOR STONE

The involvement of Madison, Wis.-based Monona Masonry was done at the behest of Boldt, and the decision to hire the commercial masonry firm was more than fortunate to keep with the bulding’s envirofriendly theme.

Click photo to enlargeRick Skaife, Monona Masonry’s president, says the firm had not only worked with Boldt on several projects, but is also is experienced in doing green construction.
“We’ve done at least four projects that have been LEED-certified and we’re doing more work in that direction,” says Skaife.

However, when Monona Masonry bid the project, the contractor was looking for a firm to build a Rumford fireplace and chimney out of concrete block with an exterior facing of board-formed concrete.

TKWA’s Kubala explains that the fireplace is an important part of the building for several reasons, including separating the two main wings, acting as an anchor for some of the truss-work and providing mass.

It might have stayed as it was bid, had Skaife not kept his ears open at a construction meeting.

“Someone said something to the architect about the board-formed concrete, and he said that he’d have liked to have had stone on it, but it wasn’t in the budget,” Skaife explains. “I said that I had some recycled stone and he perked right up and asked me to bring him a sample.

“After that, he asked me to make a sample panel and told me how he wanted it done. We tweaked that a little bit, and ended up putting the stone on there.”

The stone Skaife offered not only was recycled, but had a bit of history to it. A limestone quarried near Madison in the 1930s, it had been used by members of the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) to build a hanger at the city’s Dane County Airport.

“There aren’t many quarries in Dane County where you can get building stone these days,” says Skaife. “We had to chisel off the old mortar, clean it up some, put it in crates, and ship it to the site.”

Reclaiming old stone and brick rather than see it go to the landfill is part of Skaife’s ethos – he started his career there cleaning mortar off old brick – and he adds, “It’s perfectly good material; it’s a shame to put it in a landfill and not use it.”

Both Boldt’s Tucek and Kubala say the stone is an excellent addition to a first-rate project.

“That portion of the building was greatly enhanced by the stone as opposed to leaving gray poured concrete,” says Tucek.

“It’s a central feature of the building and it’s a traditional way to surround a fireplace,” says the architect. “The small converted chicken coop where Leopold’s family lived on the weekends in Baraboo was also dominated by a massive stone fireplace they built themselves.”

The availability of the stone ultimately resulted in more work for Monona Masonry. A second masonry feature for the project – an aqueduct to channel rainwater off the roof and into a rain garden that will allow it to be slowly filtered back into the ground while providing a small water feature – went through several iterations before becoming recycled stone over block.

“The aqueduct was the last thing we did,” says Skaife. “It wasn’t initially part of our bid; we came back and did that later.”

From a construction standpoint, the Monona Masonry president says his crew was in and out of the project multiple times, starting with some block work in the basement in June 2006, then moving on to the fireplace and chimney, and finishing with the aqueduct late that fall (the foundation moved into its new home in spring 2007).
“We had to build an enclosure to finish the aqueduct,” Skaife says.

He adds that by the time the project reached that phase, certain large pieces of the recycled stone from the airport were running low, and the company supplemented them with stone from the neighbor of the project foreman, who was cutting two new doorways in a barn made of the same material.

Skaife has nothing but praise for the project and for the architect for listening to his offhand comments about using recycled stone.

“The architect was at just about every job meeting, and he was always willing to listen to the subs,” he says. “That doesn’t happen very often, but it worked out well.”
TKWA’s Kubala says the praise goes both ways. He says the project wouldn’t have been the same without the entire construction team – and a good client.

“The owner allowed us to make some mistakes along the way,” he says. “They gave us permission to try a few things, so we achieved a few things that otherwise wouldn’t have been achieved. Some didn’t work, but others, like the stone, were quite successful.”

Speaking for the foundation, Richards says everyone who visits the building is quite impressed with just about every aspect of it, from the smell of the fresh wood to the amount of daylight coming in to windows that open to bring the outdoors inside.

“It’s really so different from a normal office building,” she says.

“I’ve never been involved in a project that’s received so much recognition,” concludes Boldt’s Tucek. “What’s really neat was that members of the Leopold family were able to see seedlings they planted 60 years ago grow up and be used to foster the land ethic that Aldo Leopold developed.

“It helps you realize we do have to do things differently for our environment.”

Client: The Aldo Leopold Foundation, Baraboo, Wis.
Designer: The Kubala Washatko Architects, Cedarburg, Wis.
General Contractor: Oscar J. Boldt Construction, Appleton, Wis.
Masonry Contractor: Monona Masonry, Madison, Wis.

This article first appeared in the June 2009 print edition of Stone Business. ©2009 Western Business Media Inc.