AMHERST — The American Institute of Architects and its Committee on the Environment have recognized a Hampshire College building as one of this year’s greenest structures.

As part of the institute’s yearly “Top Ten Awards,” the AIA has recognized Hampshire’s recently opened R.W. Kern Center for its “sustainable design excellence.” The building is the first in the Pioneer Valley to be awarded the top-10 distinction in the award’s 21-year history.

Constructed mostly from local materials, the center was the first major new building on the college’s campus in some three decades when it opened in spring 2016, and was part of an effort to make campus operations carbon-neutral by 2020. The 17,000-square-foot, multipurpose building is entirely self-sustaining: It produces all of its energy needs with rooftop solar panels, harvests its own water from rainfall and treats it own waste.

“The project demonstrates Hampshire’s dedication to the highest level of sustainability and stewardship, and to the college’s mission of critical inquiry, active leadership and hands-on learning,” the AIA said in a statement.

The criteria for determining winners include water and energy use, walkability, the building’s cost and the portion of the site designed to support vegetation. Educational institutions dominated the AIA’s 2017 list, including Bristol Community College’s John J. Sbrega Health and Science Building in Fall River.

“I was absolutely delighted, and glad that they are looking at the kinds of issues that I think this building addresses,” Hampshire College President Jonathan Lash said Monday.

Among those issues, Lash said, is a commitment to education that ensures the building functions as a laboratory for current and future inquiry into sustainable practices.

To that end, the building was used in an integrated sciences tutorials course to teach first-year students. Those undergrads eventually used those lessons about designing wastewater systems to defeat seven teams of graduate students to win the student design challenge at last year’s American Ecological Engineering Society Annual Meeting.

And that work teaching others is something Lash said is important for furthering sustainable building practices. Hundreds of visitors have come from nonprofit organizations, universities and other institutions to learn from the building’s design, Lash said.

Architects from Bruner/Cott & Associates worked with the school to design the R.W. Kern Center, and Hampshire alum Jonathan Wright of Northampton’s Wright Builders constructed the building to meet the Living Building Challenge, a green building certification program that the International Living Future Institute gives to self-sustaining projects.

To be certified as a “living building,” builders had to follow strict policies meant to protect the environment, workers making the building materials, tradespeople building the structure and those who will eventually use the building. Among other best practicies, that meant avoiding the use of materials containing a list of noxious chemicals.

The R.W. Kern Center must now pass a yearlong performance test to be officially certified as a “living building.” Hampshire College’s Hitchcock Center for the Environment is also taking the Living Building Challenge.

Hampshire raised some $10 million in private donations to fund the R.W. Kern Center’s $10.6 million price tag, according to college spokesman John Courtmanche.

Dusty Christensen can be reached at dchristensen@gazettenet.com.

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