This edition of the Phius Project Spotlight Series highlights the Fahy Commons educational facility in Allentown, Pennsylvania.
Our monthly Project Spotlights highlight the cutting-edge work being done by Phius professionals and provide examples of successful design and construction strategies. We feature projects of various sizes, typologies, and climate zones, offering you a peek behind the curtain of each. The Project Spotlight series appears in e-blasts to our mailing list (be sure to join if you haven’t already) as well as right here in the Klingenblog.
Our March Project Spotlight is: Fahy Commons in Allentown, Pennsylvania! Fahy Commons, located at Muhlenberg College, is the only Phius Certified educational non-dormitory building in Pennsylvania and the largest non-residential Phius Certified building in the state.
The first new building constructed on campus since 2006, Muhlenberg College’s Fahy Commons is an embodiment of the institution’s deep commitment to sustainability. Fahy Commons is one of the few buildings to attain Phius, LEED, and Living Building Certifications. This triple-certification milestone was made possible in part by using passive building methodology to achieve the energy efficiency, indoor air quality, and construction phase testing targets required for LEED Platinum and LBC CORE certifications.
Rooted in biophilic design, the multi-purpose 20,000 square-foot building brings visitors in touch with nature through both direct and indirect experiences. Visitors enter Fahy Commons via a half hectare of carbon-sequestering meadow and experience sweeping views through the daylit building toward a wooded hill descending to Lake Muhlenberg. The interior contains a mix of classrooms, offices, art studios, and semi-public study and meeting spaces. Interior materials were chosen to exhibit a mix of warmth and transparency with special attention paid to low to no toxicity and embodied carbon.
Other building features include a 73 kW rooftop photovoltaic array with infrastructure in place for an expanded future site-mounted PV system. Rainwater and snowmelt are diverted to a 10,000-gallon cistern that is used for flushing toilets, which has achieved an 84% reduction in potable water use. A high-efficiency Swegon DOAS supplies continuous 100% filtered fresh air ventilation for comfortable and healthy interior air quality. Fahy Commons also features bird-safe glazing and bee bricks in an effort to be a good steward not just for human life, but all life. The building envelope achieved 0.055 CFM/sf during blower door testing, and the building management system indicates a verified EUI of 8.9 kBTU/sf, which represents an energy savings of more than 75% when compared to a code-minimum building baseline.
Creative signage throughout Fahy Commons highlights these features and more. A building management system feeds real-time energy use and other performance information to a dashboard at the building’s entry and intentional design choices such as locating the catchwater filtration system in a public place rather than hiding it in a mechanical room, reinforce Muhlenberg College’s pedagogical mission. For Muhlenberg, pursuing above-code standards such as Phius was an easy choice as it aligned with their sustainability plan and created an engaging, educational, future-forward environment for faculty, students, recruits, and the community at-large.
Want to learn more about non-residential Phius Certification? Register for the Phius Non-Res Summit 2025!
Top image by Marco Calderon