Taking the LEED | From the newest Hannaford store to projects in China, a Portland consulting firm puts its all into green
Photo/Mindy Favreau
Gunnar Hubbard, principal and founder of Fore Solutions in Portland
Gunnar Hubbard’s passion for sustainable building came at the age of 12, when his parents moved him from New York to Vermont. There, he helped his family peel logs for their own log house, which had no electricity but did have a composting toilet and a gravity-fed water system.
That early exposure ultimately led Hubbard in 2003 to launch Fore Solutions, a green building design consultant firm based in Portland. As “keeper of the environmental mission of the project,” as Hubbard puts it, the company helps developers and building owners both nationally and internationally design and construct a green building, often to meet LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) certifications. “We help guide them through the process and make good, cost-effective decisions,” Hubbard says. Making news recently is the new Hannaford supermarket in Augusta, touted as the nation’s greenest grocery store, which earned it the U.S. Green Building Council’s platinum LEED certification. Hannaford Bros. Co. tapped Fore Solutions to help manage the project, bringing in green building consultants and keeping all members of the design team — from architects to engineers — on track. Hubbard even convinced Rick Fedrizzi, president and CEO of the Green Building Council and a friend of his, to come up to Augusta for the supermarket’s grand opening last month.
The Hannaford building is just one of many projects Fore Solutions and its seven employees have worked on. Others include the Baxter School in Falmouth, a science complex at Harvard, residential towers in Amman, Jordan. The company’s major undertaking has been CityCenter in Las Vegas, a $9.4 billion, 18 million-square-foot hotel, retail and residential development — the country’s largest private real estate project ever — slated to open in part later this year with a silver LEED certification.
The company’s involvement can be big or small — “Sometimes it’s just handholding or redirecting,” Hubbard says. Other times, the company uses a sophisticated computer program to show clients what the building’s energy performance will be. By inputting data like the number of lights, hours of occupancy and climate, the program calculates how installing things such as better insulation can save money by allowing for a smaller HVAC unit. “You’re investing a little more, but there’s a long-term payback,” Hubbard says.
A licensed architect, Hubbard came to Maine with his wife in 2002, after stints at Rocky Mountain Institute in Colorado and the Yestermorrow Design/Build School in Vermont. He was originally tapped by international construction consultant firm Davis Langdon Schumann Smith to open a branch office in Maine, but the post-9/11 economy forced the company to pull the plug, leaving Hubbard with signed contracts in hand. So he decided to launch Fore Solutions. “It was a little risky at the time, but I felt like it was the right thing to do, and we just grew from there.”
Though some architecture firms offer LEED services in-house, Fore Solutions is one of the relatively few firms in the country specializing in it, Hubbard says. Hubbard spent four years as a LEED faculty member for the Green Building Council and has taught workshops in London, Dubai and especially China, where the company is considering pursuing its next batch of projects. “It’s a little scary to venture that far,” Hubbard says.
But for Hubbard, LEED projects are only the tip of the iceberg. He hopes the company can tackle some more aggressive projects in the future, like carbon neutral buildings. “There are people who want to go further than LEED, and as a firm we want to seek out those projects because it’s a great direction for the company.”
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