What happened to the Kuykendall sustainability project?

Constructed in 1964 with a “passive” design (design that does not require mechanics to keep people comfortable), noise, atmospheric and temperature issues forced the University to convert Kuykendall to a sealed, air-conditioned space.

Years later, the University has a plan that would convert Kuykendall back to a passive-state building. It would also transform the central classroom facility at Mānoa (nearly every undergraduate student passes through Kuykendall for Freshman composition, among other general education courses taught there) into a beacon of sustainability that the rest of the state could follow.

“Hawaiʻi has the most expensive electricity in the nation,” said Director of the UH Center for Smart Building and Community Design and Interim Assistant Vice Chancellor for Physical, Environmental & Long Range Planning, Steve Meder. “That cost comes out of tuition dollars and as tuition rises that impacts our ability to deliver our main mission, which is education and research. We’re one of the most vulnerable states to climate change, but we use the most fossil fuel. So the University decided that we want to reverse these impacts. The idea with returning Kuykendall to its passive design was that it would become a model for similar projects in the State. We feel it’s our responsibility to demonstrate viable models for sustainable solutions.”

In 2010, Kuykendall, along with the NASA AMES and the New York Times buildings, were selected out of hundreds of applicants to participate in a Federal Department of Energy (DOE) research grant-program called the “Commercial Buildings Partnership,” administered out of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

“We were able to bring in a lot of building-science technical assistance to work with the local architects to make very advanced analyses of the building,” said Meder.

The idea was to use this data to make sure Kuykendall could be converted to passive design again without running into the same problems encountered in the 60s.

In 2011, UH was asked to participate in another Federal DOE program called the “Better Buildings Challenge” and in 2012 the major sustainability-centered Kuykendall renovation plan was put into UH’s Capital Improvement Project (CIP) budget.

Where it has remained without funding.

According to Meder, the project stalled in the Legislature this past session. State legislators chose not to fund the Kuykendall CIP, putting money into other system-wide projects instead.

“This was a chance to do it right: to really put UH on the sustainable map,” said UHM English professor Steve Canham, who has complained to the administration for years about the horrible conditions in the nearly 50-year-old building.

Canham and other professors in the English Department also believed that the Federal grants were supposed to help pay for the construction process, something Meder says was not the case.

“The federal money was exclusively for the technical assistance from Berkeley,” said Meder.

Mostly, faculty just felt stonewalled by a lack of communication. “Now we’re just stuck in limbo,” said Canham. “I couldn’t even get Chancellor Apple to sit down with me for just five minutes to explain the situation.”

Meder acknowledged that the administration needs to do better at communicating, but also expressed the difficult position of working within a constrained budget.

“You can certainly acknowledge that there are many needs across the system and only so many dollars to go around,” he said. “It’s unfortunate, but it isn’t exactly a small amount of money.

“Chancellor Apple wants to continue pursuing funding for it,” said Meder. “It’s too bad, because this is a real, meaningful project that could be an engine of change and opportunity in the state.”