Rating System

LEED BD+C: New Construction

Rating System Version

v2 - LEED 2.2

Inquiry

We are building a corporate attraction / museum in the downtown area of a large city. This attraction, built on a brownfield, is in total about 11 acres, 6 of which are allocated within the LEED boundary, and in which sits a 90,000 square foot building with the rest of the area to be public parkland (the continuation of a larger park). The arrangement is not dissimilar to, say, Central Park in New York City with regards to urban locality. The LEED Reference Guide and subsequent other CIR\'s (most notable the CIR ruling of 12/1/2003) give instruction for which there could be two interpretations and it is this point where clarification is requested. On the one hand, this credit requires that the building and site have a density of 60,000 square feet per acre. On the other hand, the Reference Guide notes that undeveloped urban space such as parks and bodies of water be omitted from the calculation. If we take the building in isolation (i.e. omitting the parkland), we easily meet the density requirement. If we include the entire site, we do not meet the density requirement but are then including parkland. By the way, whatever density radius emerges will capture major, multi storey downtown urban buildings and meet the density requirement several fold. This site, quite frankly, could not be in a more urban setting and is adding sorely needed open space for a public that is rapidly re-populating the once deserted downtown area. The building captures the intent of this credit and our request is to clarify our assessment of the Reference Guide that allows public park space to be omitted from the Urban Density calculations when calculating the density of our own project site and building.