The new campus for Dunbar High School in Washington, DC, which opened in 2013, has received the highest level of recognition for environmentally friendly design from the U.S. Green Building Council--a LEED Platinum rating.
Perkins Eastman, which designed the 280,000-square-foot school in association with Moody•Nolan, says Dunbar earned 91 points, out of 100 base points possible for LEED—the highest-scoring school in the world certified under USGBC’s LEED for Schools-New Construction system.
The new Dunbar replaced a facility that opened in 1977. The earliest incarnation of the school opened in 1870 as the first public high school for African Americans. The design of the new Dunbar is inspired by a version of Dunbar that opened in 1917 and was a source of pride for the community until it was razed in the 1970s.
Among the green features of the campus: a geothermal system for heating and cooling, an array of solar panels, and two 20,000-gallon cisterns for collecting rainwater.
