Usually the class is held on the fourth floor in the Archer Building, but on Election Day, we had the chance to take a tour at a local federal building that is used by the EPA and the Federal Post Office. The federal building is called the McCormick Building and it is located in the heart of the Financial District in Boston, Massachusetts. Before we could even start our tour, we had a rough experience with the security and their x-ray machine in the lobby, which took us about 20 minutes for all of us to get “check” before we could even enter the building. To me, that was absolutely ridiculous, and I felt really bad for the international students and I was really embarrassed that our federal government found college students to be such a threat. This is a blog, and I feel like that had to be mentioned.
When we did pass the security we were taken to one of the floors in the building to meet with Ms. Greene, who was very nice and informative. It was great to have her as our tour guide because she was one of the main personal to participate in the transition from an ordinary building to a certified LEED building. The Environmental Protection Agency works in this building, so I do find it very appropriate for them to work in a building that promotes sustainable and ecofriendly building practices. Ms. Greene brought us into one of the conference rooms where they had an incredible set up for a documentary that we were about to watch. The documentary was solely about the McCormick Building and how it was constructed during the Great Depression. The documentary talked a lot about the architecture and the history of the building, which I really was interested in, but it did start to talk about the transition of the building into a certified LEED building. In this part of the documentary it stated that it reused over 95% of the materials! I know from common construction practices, there is always a surplus of materials that weren’t used or wasted, which puts a higher burden of cost on the construction company and the buyer. If every construction company can use or reuse 95% of the materials, it will save them and the buyer money, and it will save the environment as well. After the documentary was completed, Ms. Greene asked us if we had any questions and then proceeded to start the tour once the questions were completed. Our first stop in the tour was one of the courtrooms in the building. It was extremely nice and it was incredible how they refurnished the entire room but still kept the historical features that made the room so beautiful in the first place. What was the most astonishing thing to me was that the windows that they put in cost $5,000 for each one to be installed. The reason for such a high price is because it had to be bullet and blast proof. I am sorry, but I am a taxpaying citizen and I find it ridiculous that they need blast proof windows…they are the EPA and the Post Office, not the White House and definitely not the Pentagon. We then went to a different floor and saw the library, and what a magnificent masterpiece that was! I really do not know that much about interior design and architecture, but that library was incredible.
The next stop was going to the green roof, which was really the only part of the tour where I felt like the building was environmentally friendly. It was on the 5th floor and the design of it was very interesting. Ms. Greene told the class that they had these wires spaced every couple of feet that were placed on top of the green roof to prevent the seagulls from coming on the roof. She said that they were viscous to the people that were using the roof so they had to be placed. I have never heard of this concept before but it actually works. Ms. Green explained how the roof allows the building to save money because it helps cool the building in the summer and keeps the heat in the building in the winter. She also explains how they use the water that is absorbed by the green roof for the building, which saves them money and allows them to use less city water. There were also solar panels on the roofs that got a lot sun, unfortunately the green roof receives very minimal amount of sunlight, which is why there were no solar panels and most of the plants were drought resistant.