LEED recaps

I was rooting around in the case study part of the USGBC website.  If you haven't been there in a while or ever, check it out - www.usgbc.org.  I found that looking at how other people have designed their spaces opens your eyes to the creativity in the world of green building.  The project approaches vary, the way the project accumulates points vary and the purposes of the projects are really quite different, other than the part that they are all green projects.

One of the projects obtaining LEED-CI stated that they used movable walls to "reduce financial and environmental costs of churn and reorganization".  The case studies are all about a page long so there really isn't a lot of room to talk about the project details so the fact that this company chose to talk about the strategy of their space stuck out in my mind.   Very different from the other case studies which concentrated more on why they chose to build a LEED project and then how they obtained points and what decisions they made along the way.  

Of course there was a pattern in the LEED-CI case studies.  Day lighting and views were talked about by all of the projects.  They all obtained the openness of the offices in a similar way.  Put the offices in the core of the space and workstations around the window walls.  Or, eliminate offices all together and stick to low panels/low workstations.  Maybe it was me but it seems like this was all stated like it was the newest idea in the world, eliminate the private offices around the exterior of the space.  Well, not to date myself but the first time I saw this design layout it was stated as revolutionary too, and that was for the Quaker Oats project in Chicago designed by GHK in 1986 or so.   I guess if you think about it, culturally those perimeter offices are still highly coveted by the executive C-suite crew and therefore are prolific in space design making this still a revolutionary or at least controversial design concept.

The other couple of ideas I found employed by others were to eliminate trash can liners in the office building.  Thomas Properties talked about this as it relates to their LEED project in Sacramento for CAL/EPA.  For some reason, I found this to be wonderful.  So simple yet I know that my Irvine Company building puts trash can liners in our trash cans and now even in our blue recycling cans.  It makes me crazy.  The leadership and learning that would need to accompany a change like this is astoundingly high.  And it seems so simple, but alas I think that it would be quite an effort.  I wonder if I can get The Irvine Company to change, HA.

Lastly, lose the lawn!!  Using native landscaping for water conservation here in San Diego is a no-brainer.  But the case study about our local LEED project mentioned satellite irrigation technology that automatically schedules irrigation based on the needs of the landscaping and local weather conditions!  How cool is that.  I always love the scene of the building watering their landscaping when it is raining outside.  Unbelievable.  

So check out the projects, you might get inspired.