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Project description
Name of the case study
Sustainable design of DR City
Description of context
DR City (DR-Byen) is the new headquarter for Denmark´s Radio, the national radio and television broadcaster. It is located in Ørestad, a new urban development area in Copenhagen. The head quarter will house a number of functions, including radio- and TV-production, studios, workshops, offices, concert-hall etc., covering app. 130.000 m2. The construction started in November 2002, and it is planned to finish in 2006. When completed, DR will be located in one building, whereas today it is spread over 12 different addresses in Greater Copenhagen.
Denmark´s Radio, the national broadcaster for radio and television, new headquarters in construction
Ørestad is expected to develop into "a center for culture, medias and communication". The Ørestad corporation has defined asset of environmental goals that DR City has to follow. DR City is based on partnering between builder, consultants, contractors, suppliers and authorities. The version of partnering in this project is called "the DR-Model", which include a number of different organisational changes compared to traditional construction management. This concerns the collaboration between the owner and the consultants inside each segment, and is a part of the general management of DR, which is based on "Value-based Management". This means that other values than just budgets and time schedules can be prioritised, for instance the employee´s satisfaction. In practice, DR City has defined the following 7 superior values for the project: Professionalism, Openness, Honesty, Dialogue, Punctuality, Respect for others and Good collaboration partners. According to DR, value-based management also means that the client is constantly kept up to date with the state of the project, and that the partners feel a commitment to the management process they are a part of (source: DR website).
Description of project - background
DR-City has given environmental issues a high priority in planning and designing the buildings and the green areas around it. One decisive factor for the green profile in DR City and using the tools has been that sustainable concerns were prioritized right from the beginning, and was clearly defined in the building program. Another factor is that the chairman of the building committee as a person was strongly committed to sustainability. The chairman, Finn Åberg, is also the major from the municipality of Albertslund, which is a leading municipality in sustainable urban policy (see also the case of Dogme 2000).
Description of project - objectives/aims
The sustainable goals and initiatives have been an integrated part of the partnering concept. The partnering concept has influenced the way MEMPD has been used in the project, which has included user involvement in decisions on sustainable goals and building design. The emphasis on sustainability is a part of the overall concept for DR City. To ensure that all environmental requirements are fulfilled, the principles of ISO 14001 on environmental management are laid down over all phases of the project (www.dr.dk). DR has formulated six policies for DR City, including an environmental policy: ´DR Byen should be a building leading, but not experimenting, in relation to green buildings and implementation of ecological elements in the building, and a project where there is openness on the environmental state of the projects´
The environmental efforts in DR City are divided in two separate projects: Buildings and production technology. These are two different tasks, requiring different approaches.
Buildings
The General Building Program includes a number of environmental goals on energy and water consumption, landscape, contaminated land, waste, use of materials, indoor climate, noise and safety. Although the ambitions are high, only a few goals have defined quantitatively.
• On energy a main goal is to reduce the ´energy-frame´ of the buildings (consumption of heat and electricity) by 33% compared to the present demands in the Building Regulations (BR 95). This reduction is expected to become a part of the next Building Regulations (BR 2005). This includes optimising the use of daylight, using low energy lights and low energy appliances in the building.
• For landscapes, recreational areas and contaminated soil the goals are defined rather soft.
• On water, rainwater is being collected and used for toilet flushing
• For waste, it is a goal to make waste sorting at the source easy, to minimise need for transport on the ground when waste is collected, and to consider local composting of garden waste.
• On materials, the energy consumption from the production of the materials should be as low as possible, based on an LCA-screening (using for instance BEAT-2002). There is a long list of demands for the materials used, e.g. to use materials with longevity, avoid environmentally harming materials (e.g. VOC, radioactive, cancer- inducing etc.), reducing waste of materials on the building process and so on. Each consultant on the four segments will have to make an environmental screening of the materials used, and choose the least environmentally damaging.
• Comfort and indoor climate has a high priority, as it is a precondition that the buildings should be nice and attractive to work in. In the General Building Program, it is formulated in a number of quantitative goals on temperature, humidity, static electricity and well-being. The latter is defined from the PMV–index (Predicted Mean Vote), the PPD-index (Predicted Percentage of Dissatisfied) and the PD-factor (Percentage of Dissatisfied). Similar, there are strong demands on the acoustics. As the concert hall of DR’s Symphony Orchestra will be located right next to the metro as well as the airport, special efforts have to be made to reduce the noise from outside.
Due to the functional demands, there are a number of limitations on possible alternatives, especially in relation to materials. For instance, when materials for the floor were going to be decided, the only material able to fulfill demands on being able to carry rolling camera wagons without making traces in the surface changing, was Epoxy, which is not very environmentally friendly. On this point is had also been suggested to use clay, treated with linseed oil, which would be more environmentally friendly, but probably would not last for many TV-transmissions. Also, the demand for noise reduction in the buildings reduced the possibilities for natural ventilation.
Production / technology
The largest environmental impacts from DR City are expected to come from the production equipment (for actually producing the television and radio programmes, i.e. all types of electronic equipment, light, cooling etc.). Therefore, a number of different technology projects to reduce the environmental impacts are included in this part:
• A 1.200 m2 solar cells plant (photovoltaics / PV’s) will be established, which will be Denmark´s largest plant when completed
• Ground water cooling in an Aquifier cold storage (which has not been used in Denmark before). It substitutes the mechanical ventilation by using cold groundwater for cooling in the summer, stores the heated water in the ground, and in the winter turns the direction, and uses the warm water for heating. There are no experiences with such a system, but according to calculations made, the energy consumption is expected to be 38% compared to a ´traditional´ solution.
• Natural and hybrid ventilation (intelligent double facades)
• Collection of rainwater (planned to become the largest in Denmark)
There is a limited number of benchmarks or quantitative goals defined in this part. The reason is mainly lack of references; in the Building Regulations there are no benchmarks of measures from which goals can be defined. Also in general, there are little experiences or standards for e.g. the energy use of such office buildings, with so much production equipment. Therefore, the demands on the production equipment have not been described that much in detail, but have been defined as using ´best available technology´, finding some good solutions on the site by being innovative.
Description of project - time interval and stages
The project started in 2002 and is planned to be finished in 2006.
Description of project - financing
The budget for the buildings is 3 billions DKK (app. 400 mill. €), for the production equipment 740 mill. DKK. It was originally planned that the environmental measures should be implemented within the total budget. However, as an opportunity for extra financial EU-support on the technology project (IT-ECO) showed up, it was decided to implement some more experimenting environmental technologies. Recently, it has been revealed, that the DR City will not be able to follow the budget, therefore more finances (623 mill. DKK, or. app. 85 mill. €) will be required.
Description of project - other sectors involved
The project covers several sectors (energy, water, waste, transport, green-blue).
Another important asset in DR City is to reduce accidents in the construction phase. They have been very successful in this, as there have been no serious accidents since the construction started. On security, they are one of the best organized buildings in Europe, which was the reason they recently (November 2004) received EU´s Good Practice Award 2004 on work environment.
What tools were used to assess sustainability?
MEMPD (Manual on Environmental Management in Project Design (in Danish: ´Miljørigtig projektering´).
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