Sustainable Design and Construction

Green Building Certification

We are committed to developing sustainable buildings that reduce resource consumption while protecting the environment and providing a high indoor environmental quality. Increasingly, our building projects involve certifying our buildings by means of green building rating systems, thus obtaining recognition and creating further awareness.

On the Byblos campus, two buildings have recently followed this path:

The Library and Riyad Nassar Central Administration buildings were being constructed with USGBC’s LEED gold certification in mind.

The Tohme-Rizk building in Byblos has obtained the International Finance Corporation’s EDGE certification, becoming the first EDGE certified office building in Lebanon (PDF - 0.7MB). This will will result in reductions of 41 percent in energy, 29 percent in water, and 34 percent in materials’ embodied energy compared to local benchmarks. It will reduce, at no additional capital cost, utility expenses for the building by around $600 each month, in addition to saving the environment 21 tCO₂ per year.

High Performance Renovations

We aim at transforming LAU’s campuses into high performance facilities, one project at a time, without necessitating large budgets for the retrofitting or replacement of inefficient installations. For example:

• Byblos’ Architecture L1 renovation was designed and is being executed with energy conservation features.
• Beirut’s Wadad Sabbagh Khoury Student Center renovation was designed and executed with water and energy conservation features.

Green Design Guidelines

We are in the process of establishing guidelines for green criteria/systems to be adopted in all of our designs. These would consist of solutions that are most relevant to our culture and to our university’s context, most technically appropriate to each building type, and most financially feasible. We are currently identifying the appropriate systems and will launch this initiative in 2016.