After making a set of reasonable criticisms of the proposed replacement for the Eugene Bradbury 1913 Compton House in a sharply-worded Letter to the Editor of The Daily Progress, University professor Daniel Bluestone challenges the rainwater harvesting aims of VMDO Architects, the designers of the complex in which Jefferson Scholars Foundation plans to cloister its fellows, writing, “VMDO prides itself on being environmental and green, and using tilted roofs to catch rainwater to flush building toilets. Will there be enough flushes in the lifetime of this mediocre building to make up for resources wasted in, and the environmental irresponsibility represented by, the Compton House demolition?.”
The question is an open one. There is a lot of roof on display in VMDO’s design. If all of it is capturing rainwater for non-potable uses, which may indeed be restricted to supplying water closets, depending on the local building code official’s interpretation of the plumbing code, it will more than fill the annual demand for toilet flushing at the Foundation. The design probably uses dual flush toilets, too, perhaps even of the newest design that calculates exactly how much water the toilet will require to dispose of the type of waste most likely just deposited into the bowl (don’t ask). Such a decision would extend the supply capacity of the project’s cisterns. But, Mr. Bluestone assumes that the Compton House roof was not good, as it stood, for rainwater harvest. In fact, rainwater harvesting features could have easily been incorporated into a redesign of the Compton House roof gutter system. Every drop of water that fell on the existing steeply-sloped red clay tile roof could have been filtered and stored in exactly the same fashion as the water that will fall on VMDO’s new vee-shaped roofs. And, as an extra benefit, according to the USGBC’s LEED 2.2 Reference Guide, a red clay tile roof meets the criteria for LEED credit SSc7.2 Heat Island Effect, Roof. Just like the new roofs that VMDO is apparently planning to specify.
