Princess Noura University sets standard for Middle East sustainability

The Princess Noura bint Abdulrahman University for Women, which began operations in September 2011, is a trail-blazing project for anyone promoting sustainability in the built environment in the Middle East, Dar Al-Handasah (Shair & Partners) design director David Hansen told the Saudi Green Buildings Forum 2011 in Riyadh this morning.

Dar Al-Handasah was the original master planner and architect for the university, which can accommodate up to 40,000 students and 12,000 employees, and also worked with Perkins & Will as one of its design consultants on specific buildings which constituted a little over a third of the project work. 

Hansen said that the project involved delivering 2.8 million square metres of buildings in a greenfield site near the King Khaled International Airport in Riyadh. Thirty-eight of those buildings are seeking Leadership in Energy & Environmental Design (LEED) accreditation.

“I think that some of the energy conservation measures that are particularly effective include external shading and occupancy control,” Hansen said. Technology is being extensively used. “When classes are not in session in the university, no lights are on,” Hansen said.

“We used an Islamic sun-screening system to reduce the solar impact,” Hansen said. “There are quite a bit of energy savings to be made from blocking the sun.”

Speaking later in the day, ABB Saudi Arabia sales and operations manager Ali Nazzal, said energy management systems installed in the University have radically reduced electricity consumption at the world’s largest educational institution for women. “We have been working successfully to integrate the 24 colleges inside the Princess Noura University. We can reduce electricity use in the project by up to 40 per cent,” he said.

On top of the electricity saving, the academic colleges and health sciences campuses have reduced their water consumption by 45 per cent, with the rest of the campus saving 35 per cent. “Landscaping is a very large portion of how sustainability can be accomplished. We are using treated sewage effluent blended with non-potable water for irrigation. We turned large portions of the site over to local plant life,” Hansen said.

“One way to get round the car-centric relationships we have here in Saudi Arabia is by providing transportation. What we did is build an automated people mover. Once they get on it, students and staff can travel anywhere in the university in privacy and they will never be more than 500 metres from where they want to get to. Almost always they are within 250 metres. It is a wonderful way to use mass transit and free people from dependency on cars.”

He said that buildings on the Princess Noura bint Abdulrahman University campus have between 10-50 per cent recycled content in steel rebar, structural steel, metal doors and other metals, curtain walls and false ceilings. “The concept for our construction waste management was to prevent waste becoming land fill. We were pretty successful here. Our contractors were inventive in developing ways of recycling waste,” Hansen told delegates at the conference.

“There is a misconception that LEED probably isn’t appropriate for countries in the Gulf,” Hansen said. “What we found in contrast is that it was quite appropriate and it led us logically into ways of saving energy and recycling. It offered us the metrics that were essential for measuring our performance.”