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Located on the northern slopes of Diamond Head the Kapi’olani Community College (KCC) Culinary Institute of the Pacific (CIP) will showcase Pacific-Rim cuisines, offer educational opportunities for visitors, training for the local restaurant and hospitality industries; all while serving as a model of sustainability. KCC is not only committed to minimizing the environmental impact of its new buildings, but to actually improving the existing site and surrounding areas by building there.
The Center for Smart Building and Community Design (the Center) will work with KCC officials in realizing their vision. To begin the project, Dr. Stephen Meder, the Center’s director and a professor of architecture, partnered with architecture doctoral student Trenton Lum, whose graduate assistantship is funded by UH Sea Grant and the KCC’s Culinary Arts Program. In taking on this project, the Center has provided a platform for KCC administrators and faculty to develop their goals and programmatic needs while introducing them to the concepts of sustainable design. In addition to Meder and Lum, the Center will also bring aboard professional designers, who will offer a wide array of energy-saving options for the facility.
Lum’s work through the Center produced a dissertation containing an overall design for the facility. Going along with KCC and the Center’s goal, the work includes a multitude of sustainable strategies: green roofs, on-site wastewater treatment, photovoltaics, and solar absorption strategies. Major elements of the CIP facility design proposed by Drs. Meder and Lum reflect the character of the crater hillside location with terracing forms, green roofs, and an abundance of plantings integrating the built and natural environments. The buildings are open, maximizing views, tradewind ventilation, and daylighting. These sorts of facets in the design showcase the smart part of smart building and community design: they increase energy efficiency while also improving the aesthetics and ambience of the built environment.
As for parts of the building to be used by its students, all of the appliances in the building will be top of the line in energy and water efficiency. To encourage the use of local products, the plan includes planting areas for local fruits and vegetables, which will educate students in local agricultural practices as well as support diversified agriculture in Hawai’i. The use of local products at the school will create a demand of high-quality local goods in the restaurant industry, hopefully building the local agriculture industry, which currently accounts for less than half of the typical Hawai’ian supermarket stock.
The CIP project should develop into a viable economic mechanism as well as an environmental and cultural support that will stress conservation and resource responsibility. By working with the KCC, the Center demonstrated its ability to advance sustainable design in the community while producing a high quality product for its partners.
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