Hannaford Supermarkets, Augusta, Maine
Not surprisingly, Hannaford wasn’t content to just find a designer and project manager. Gray says company officials had well-defined objectives even before starting their hiring process.
“We started with our owner’s ideas of what we wanted this store to be,” she says. “We went through the LEED checklist and decided what points we felt we could go for with this particular site.
Click to enlarge “Then, we did what’s called an OPR – the owner’s project requirements. From there, the design team developed what’s called a basis of design (BOD). That was our program for starting our design.”
Gray says the company also hosted a two-day charette (planning session), inviting experts from the United States and other countries.
“We got a chance to see how different groups interacted with each other,” Gray explains. “From that, we formed our team.”
EXPERIENCED TEAM
Such a special project required a team that went a little beyond what’s usually pulled together – including members with previous LEED-project experience.
For instance, the conceptual architect – Boston-based Next Phase Studio Architects – isn’t necessarily known for its retail work, but principal Rick Ames says the firm is experienced in creating LEED Platinum buildings.
He believes the strength of his company’s work was the environmental design it brought to the job, since the Hannaford design-and-engineering staff, plus their consultants, had a good handle on the building’s needs.
However, he adds that after absorbing a great deal of information, Hannaford officials reassessed their entire front-of-the-house design.
“A lot of the actual fixtures and layout inside is very, very comparable to their former prototype store,” he says. “The envelope, the natural day-lighting, the energy performance and some of the customer experience pieces were retooled quite a bit.
“The back-of-house we didn’t reinvent; they understood the sequence of how they wanted things to work in the store from a retail perspective.”
Allison Zuchman, project manager for Fore Solutions, a Portland, Maine-based LEED consultant, agrees. Zuchman says defining the role of LEED consultant isn’t always easy, but for this project education and coordination seemed to be the keys.
“Because this is the first LEED project for Hannaford, and they were designing a new type of store, there was a learning process for many of them and a higher level of coordination between all the consultants and Hannaford,” she says. “Although everyone was very aware of the environmental standards we were trying to meet, it definitely required all team members to rethink how they do certain things and to collaborate at a very high level.”