Note: My Project at Kripalu was just featured in an article in the Boston Globe entitled Kripalu Center Dorm Radiates Simple Sustainability.
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 have stayed on part-time to complete the following 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.
We needed to move a road to accommodate the Annex building and two years ago after the road was moved, I asked the civil engineer to have the building's corners staked out on the ground. After the surveyors put the stakes down, 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 (slide 13) and above it five stories of bedrooms (slide 20). When I looked out toward the Stockbridge bowl (Lake Mahkeenac) the view was wrong from the one I had visualized from the building plans. 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.
This slide show presents two projects and $19 Million dollars in construction I am just completing at Kripalu Center in Stockbridge, MA. The Annex building is an exceptional green building using Integrated Design methodology.
The building has 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 40% of the energy of typical new construction of this type and can accept geo-thermal in the future.
Check out this SlideShare Presentation:
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