Vision - Leads to Awards and Recognition (Boston Globe)

Reissue: A year ago, I wrote about my vision to create a retreat center and my projects at Kripalu. I just wanted to share some of the recognition given to four years of thinking, selling, planning, managing and sweat that I did there.

My Project at Kripalu was just featured in an article in the Boston Globe entitled Kripalu Center Dorm Radiates Simple Sustainability.

The project was also recently awarded an AIA Housing Design Award for 2010 and my thanks go to Peter Rose and his team at Rose + Guggenheimer (now Peter Rose + Partners).
photo courtesy of Rose + Partners


You can also read about the analysis and financial justification required to build such a beautiful green project at Metamorphosis Management Group (white paper) -and- read about how I built the team that designed and built this project employing the principles of Engagement and Respect at my blog on business solutions.

Here's the story of where it all began.

In 1993 during a workshop on Empowering Leadership, I was working along with my clients on developing a personal vision. There for the first time, I wrote about creating a retreat center. I had never heard of Kripalu at the time. But in 1996, three years later a former colleague from International Paper, Belinda Bothwick became the first outsider to be hired as Executive Director of Kripalu and I eventually received a phone call asking for help.

I took on Kripalu as project, so that I could learn about retreat centers and stayed 3 years, becoming the COO. I left Kripalu for five years and then returned to work upon strategic planning and development of both the operating educational and service businesses and the infrastructure of both the facilities and the technology. Although I resigned my full time position in April of 2008, I stayed on part-time through May of 2009 to complete the large construction projects which I have been working on for four years. Like all personal visions that are successful, they look now in reality, as I have imagined them for years.

In 2007, we began construction by moving a road and the adjacent parking lots to accommodate the Annex building. Once the road was moved and site cleared, I asked the civil engineers to have the Annex's corners staked out on the ground. The surveyors marked and placed the stakes. I walked to the stake marking the northeast corner of the building. I moved over a few feet to stand on the spot where one day there would be a beautiful enclosed walkway and above it five stories of bedrooms. When I looked out toward the Stockbridge bowl (Lake Mahkeenac) the view was wrong from what I had visualized from the building plans. The building had existed in my minds eye for years before we built it. I asked the civil engineers to check the stakes and they found out that they were off by seven feet. Only seven feet, but seven feet which blocked the view with an existing building.

The Annex building is an exceptional green building using Integrated Design methodology. It employs a radiant heating and cooling system for both the building as a whole and individually for each guest room. Day-lighting systems are designed into the building to allow the low winter sun into the building and to block the high summer sun and heat gain. The hallways of the building are "venturi tubes" and will provide passive cooling without wind. All in All, the building as built uses 45% of the energy of typical new construction of this type and can accept geo-thermal in the future.

I have posted an end of construction slide show on slideshare.com as well as my presentation on this project at the Nation Council for Science and the Environment annual conference in Washington, DC. (NCSE 2010:The New Green Economy.)