Boo! Chicago Center for Green Technology closes

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It's an experiment that's apparently run it's course.  The Chicago Center for Green Technology won't quite make it to its twelfth birthday, announcing its closed just in time for Halloween.  An email to presenters in its Green Tech U program, whose fall semester had already been put on the hold,  noted that the Center has been �struggling with funding for the past couple years�, which would dovetail with the retirement of its key supporter, former Mayor Richard M. Daley.  �While the building tenants will still be here, CCGT will be closed to the public after this Friday, October 31st.�


The 32,000 square-foot office building, originally constructed in 1952 in what is now the Kinzie Industrial Corridor, was converted, in 2003 at at cost of $5,400,000, the Center was built as a showcase for green design, an educational resource offering training courses and public tours, and a home to sustainable-design related companies, including Greencorps Chicago and WRD Environmental, which will remain after the center closes. 

Farr Associates was the architect for the conversion, with Tylk, Gustafson, Reckers, Wilson and Andrews as structural engineers and The Site Design Group handling the landscaping, which emphasized native plans requiring minimal maintenance and a partial green roof.

Cited as the first rehabilitated municipal building in the country to receiving a Platinum LEED rating,  it was part of of former Mayor Richard M. Daley's Chicago Brownfield Initiative.  The 17 acre site at 445 North Sacramento in East Garfield Park had been filled with more than 600,000 cubic yards of illegally dumped waste, piled 70 feet high.  It was cleared and renovated using sustainable materials, and such environment-friendly features as operable windows offering natural ventilation, a ground-source heat pump system with 28 vertical wells up to 200 feet deep providing the cooling an most of the heat, and a self-monitoring building automation system.  Four cisterns could capture up to 12,000 gallons of rainwater.  The elevator ran on canola oil.

Now, with no environmentalist version of George Lucas in sight, the center will soon be only a memory.  But for the time that it had, the Chicago Center for Green Technology served well.