Sowing a SEED Classroom for Sustainability
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Richard Piacentini stands in front of the SEED classroom on the Phipps Conservatory campus. Photo: Kathy Zhao
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A rainwater cistern and exposed wiring are part of the students' education while inside the classroom. Photo: Kathy Zhao
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Natural light is maximized by windows and solar tubes, allowing the classroom to be well-lit even without lights on. Photo courtesy of Phipps Conservatory.
May 1, 2015
By Kathy Zhao
They can be referred to by many names: trailers, portables, modulars. What they all have in common is they’re temporary buildings that can be put together and taken apart easily.
School districts build them to accommodate increases in student enrollment, and there are over 250,000 in use nationwide.
A new model of portable has been introduced in the city of Pittsburgh this spring, the first one of its kind on the entire east coast. These portables are different, in large part due to what happened after Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans in 2005. Many victims were being moved into temporary housing units, and quickly started getting sick.
The health risk is derived from how the portables are made. The pieces are manufactured elsewhere and then put together on site, like a bookshelf or a crib. The builders need a specific glue to attach the ceiling to the walls, and they also usually coat the entire building with a flame-retardant. Those glues and coatings can release hazardous chemicals into the air after they dry in a process called “off-gassing.”
Richard Piacentini, executive director of Phipps Conservatory and Botanical Gardens, says that these modular buildings aren’t healthy places to be, but it’s where some parents are letting their kids learn every day.
“They have big problems with things like formaldehyde and volatile organic compounds that come out, which are really not healthy for kids to be breathing,” says Piacentini
Piacentini’s modular classroom is different because it won’t be using any toxic construction materials. The model is a SEED classroom, based off a portable classroom in Seattle. SEED stands for Sustainable Education Every Day. The classrooms were originally designed by Stacy Smedley, an architect in Seattle. She showed Piacentini her prototype at a conference a few years ago.
Piacentini says he was impressed with her design, and was inspired to bring the idea not only to Phipps and Pittsburgh, but also this side of the nation. As of April 2015, there are only two other SEED classrooms in existence—the original in Seattle and one other in Canada.
Aside from being non-toxic, the SEED classroom is also green in how it functions as a building. It produces all of its own energy for heating, cooling and electric. Plus, water is recycled on site and the all of the equipment is exposed, giving kids inside the building the chance to learn how they work.
“[The students] can see how the water flows, how we capture rainwater, treat it, reuse it for flushing toilets or for using for some of the sinks and things like that,” says Piacentini.
The students can also learn about the electrical paths within the classroom, and how the buildings stays well-lit.
On a tour of the classroom, Piacentini points to what looks like porthole shaped-window in the ceiling. They’re actually solar tubes, and the glass inside them is a grid of concentric circles and squares. These shapes help the tubes concentrate sunlight, so the light they give off is just like a fluorescent bulb—only it’s directly from the sun. 
“You can see how bright it is,” Piacentini says after he turns off the lights inside the room. “You really don’t even need the lights on, just from the windows and these solar tubes, which, they’re so bright they actually look like lights in the ceiling.”
On sunny days, the SEED classroom at Phipps won’t have any lights turned on—they’ll just use natural light from the solar tubes and windows. Furthermore, the roof is lined with solar panels, which store extra energy for cloudy days.
“We also have batteries on site, we can store two weeks worth of energy if we get into a period of a lot of overcast days,” says Piacentini.
He says that the building will exist “essentially off the grid.”
For most modular buildings, the idea is to put up something quickly and cheaply, but building this classroom—with its solar tube lights and toxin free building materials—is costly.
Piacentini says if people are worried about expenses, they should heed the fact that the building will never have any bills—for energy or water. Plus, while other portables usually start falling apart after 20 years, the SEED classrooms are designed to last over 100 years.
“At some point in time, if you decide you don’t need it anymore, you can always take it apart and sell it because it is a portable,” says Piacentini. “It just happens to be a really good portable.”
The SEED classroom at Phipps will open soon for summer camps and other classes.
Photo of central seam of SEED classroom, where two individual pieces were joined together, by Kathy Zhao. Photo of solar tube in daylight by Kathy Zhao.
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