Projects

Commissioning Authority and LEED Co-assessment

ROMARZOLLO PRIMARY SCHOOL - TN - ITALY

The Romarzollo School was developed between 2006 and 2011 in northern Italy as a LEED prototype project with the joined effort of different Italian and American, public and private, organizations. Originally designed as a conventional primary school, the Romarzollo project was modified and adapted to the LEED for School 2007 protocol requirements. The result was outstanding, in fact, in 2013 the Romarzollo school became the first LEED Platinum School outside the United States.

The school complex was designed to host 300 students with a sober architecture composed by several regular squared volumes interacting with each other at different heights. The structure is made of concrete beams, columns and partitions with an average insulation layer of 20 cm and green roofs located on the top of each volume. Since the architectural design had been already defined and approved a lot of effort was put in optimizing the mechanical equipment and building performance in order to achieve the maximum score within the LEED certification system.

GBF’s partners took part in the project for assisting the design re-development process and for the commissioning authority tasks. Being one of the first LEED for School buildings outside the US the team faced several difficulties such as matching American and European standards, merging project management processes and, last but not least, overcoming cultural and linguistic barriers between technicians, final users, public administration, etc.