National Western Center, CSU Spur Campus, Vida:
A One Health Building

Located on Colorado State University’s Spur campus, the Vida building is a one-of-a-kind animal health facility that incorporates offices, clinical labs, classrooms, indoor and outdoor arenas, barns, space for equine assisted rehabilitation and a variety of residential living spaces. CSU Spur comprises three buildings which bring together different CSU colleges, offering the general public free opportunities to experience science and research firsthand. Vida was first among these, opening its doors to visitors in January 2022.

CSU Spur is part of Denver’s National Western Center, a 250 acre art and agriculture hub slated for completion in 2024. The NWC has ambitious sustainability objectives including zero net energy, and the future campus will source nearly 90% of its heating and cooling from an underground sewer pipeline. A central utility plant will transfer energy from sewage into a clean-water loop running beneath the buildings to heat and cool indoor spaces. Once finished, it will be the largest sewer-heat recovery system in North America.

The client selected ENERGY STUDIO to evaluate the Vida building’s potential to achieve LEED compliance, assess the building’s performance and assist the project team in determining a pathway to achieve net zero. This highly complex project required not only consideration of multiple baseline systems for diverse building area types, but coordination with several key team members across multiple fields and disciplines.

ENERGY STUDIO used a genetic algorithm modeling process to identify energy performance bundles and simultaneously evaluate multiple energy conservation measures (ECMs). Ultimately, the ECMs implemented were: improved envelope performance, high-performance glazing, reduced interior and exterior lighting power density, a variable exhaust system, heat recovery coils and heat recovery chiller system.

As the first building on campus to go through the LEED certification effort, CSU Spur’s Vida paved the way for additional campus projects. The final design resulted in an impressive 30% energy savings and greenhouse gas reductions, which alone earned the project 12 LEED points and an additional regional priority credit.