The Robert Redford Building: NRDC Practices What It Preaches
The Robert Redford Building, in downtown Santa Monica, provides showers and bicycle racks to encourage responsible transportation. The storefront houses the David Family Environmental Action Center and the Leonardo DiCaprio e-Activism Zone.
Photo: Tim Street-Porter
Photovoltaic panels atop the Robert Redford Building provide 20% of its energy needs, while light-wells (left of the PV array) daylight the building’s interior.
Photo: Tim Street-Porter
NRDC’s rooftop patio offers views of the Santa Monica Bay. Just inside is a fully equipped kitchen and a set of cabinets salvaged from a movie set.
Photo: Tim Street-Porter When NRDC (Natural Resources Defense Council) opened its new office in Santa Monica, California on November 13, 2003, they had a lot to celebrate. After years of bouncing from one rented office space to another, NRDC now has a permanent Southern California office—named after Robert Redford, actor, Santa Monica native, and NRDC board member since 1975. The real celebration, though, began in January, when the U.S. Green Building Council announced the project’s Platinum rating under version 2 of the LEED® Rating System. It is the second building in the U.S. to achieve LEED v2 Platinum, following the Audubon Center at Debs Park (see page 1), which is located only 20 miles (32 km) inland from the Robert Redford Building.
In addition to NRDC’s office space, the 15,000 ft
2 (1,400 m
2), 3-story building houses the new David Family Environmental Action Center (EAC) and the Leonardo DiCaprio e-Activism Zone, both of which are open to the public. The EAC (named in honor of Larry David, a creator of the television show
Seinfeld, and his wife, Laurie, an NRDC board member) displays exhibits on a variety of environmental and social issues, and sells clothing and accessories made from green materials. The EAC’s Green Building Kiosk, which includes real-time data on the building’s operations, helped NRDC earn an innovation point in LEED for green building education. The e-Activism Zone (named in honor of DiCaprio, actor and NRDC board member) includes Internet terminals linked to NRDC’s activist network, encouraging users to investigate environmental issues and engage in public debate by contacting government and corporate officials. The building cost about $8.3 million—$3.2 million for the property and $5.1 million ($340/ft
2, $3,660/m
2) for design, construction, and other expenses.
According to Heather Rosenberg, who worked on the LEED design and documentation for CTG Energetics, Inc., NRDC led the push for sustainable design and LEED certification. “The decision to go for Platinum was made at the earliest possible time,” she told
EBN, “and NRDC selected a team that they knew could respond to those demands.” Even with a goal established at the outset and a committed project team, though, she noted, “Platinum is challenging.” NRDC remained involved throughout design and construction. Rosenberg says one of the biggest lessons learned in the project is that the owner “really needs to be reiterating that goal—especially at the Platinum level. If the message is not coming from the owner, details will fall through the cracks.”
The design of the Redford Building was “every bit as challenging as a much, much larger facility would be,” according to Erik Ring, who worked as a project manager for NRDC’s mechanical, electrical, and plumbing engineer, Syska Hennessy Group, until July 2003. He now works for CTG and is involved in the commissioning process, which is about 90% complete. “Some rules of thumb break down with such a small building going for such aggressive goals,” he said. Although he believes that “the process took longer and was more complicated than the design team anticipated,” the project benefited from synergy and the common goal of achieving Platinum. “Everyone stepped up,” he says.
With a mission “to safeguard the Earth: its people, its plants and animals, and the natural systems on which all life depends,” NRDC often operates at a national and even global scale. But with its Santa Monica office, the organization is working to be a good local neighbor as well. Led by Moule & Polyzoides Architects and Urbanists of Pasadena, California, NRDC chose a downtown location with good proximity to public transportation, utility lines, and neighborhood amenities. Lead architect Elizabeth Moule, who also serves on the Congress for the New Urbanism board of directors, made sure that the building would fit responsibly within its urban context.
Showers and bicycle racks encourage employees and visitors to bike, walk, or jog to the building. Hoping to encourage other forms of alternative transportation, NRDC is working with Southern California Edison and Southern California Gas to place alternative fuel vehicle charging stations in the parking garage across the street. Light-colored roofing and shading from plants and overhangs keep the building and its surroundings cool. This reduces not only the building’s demand for air-conditioning energy but also its contribution to the urban heat-island effect. The building’s outdoor light fixtures were designed to prevent light pollution at night. In order to encourage a long life for the building, the design team chose a classic, vernacular style that is “outside the cycles of fashion,” Moule told
EBN.
The Redford Building was designed to minimize use of potable water, and it earned all five LEED points as well as an innovation point for water efficiency. Dual-flush toilets (from Caroma USA, Inc.—see
Vol. 11, No. 2) help keep water use low. (Currently, water-free urinals are permissible in Santa Monica but against code at the Audubon Center in nearby Los Angeles.) Graywater from showers and sinks is treated and reused for flushing toilets and watering plants. As the building is only blocks from the shoreline of the Santa Monica Bay, the design team worked especially hard to protect surface-water quality. Since urban runoff is the main polluter of the Bay, NRDC collects and treats rainwater and then integrates it into the building’s graywater reuse system. In the courtyards, porous paving allows stormwater to infiltrate instead of running down storm drains.
Although the design team had virtually no choice over placement or orientation of the building, they were still able to take advantage of daylighting and natural ventilation. A series of light-wells, in addition to clerestories and architectural glass, provide daylighting throughout the building and reduce the need for electric lighting. Energy use is further reduced by efficient computers and equipment, plus occupancy and photo sensors that dim or shut off lights when they aren’t needed. “Most offices use the cookie-cutter strategy of uniform lighting” says NRDC, so that “even the garbage cans in the corner get 70 foot-candles!” The Redford building saves energy by matching lighting levels to specific tasks.
Natural ventilation provides the foundation of the building’s cooling and ventilation needs, and every office has at least one operable window, according to Ring. Seven direct-expansion, split-system air-conditioning units (from the Carrier Corporation) cool the building using non-ozone-depleting HFC refrigerants. The system relies on multi-staged, low-velocity displacement ventilation, focusing cool air where it can be most effective. “Certain intermittently operated areas, such as storerooms, are neither air conditioned nor actively ventilated,” explains Ring, but all occupied space is heated. “For the most part,” says Ring, “the heating system is hydronic.” Each office has an individual thermostat control, but the system is set up so that opening a window disables the heating coil. “The challenge was to design an HVAC system that would be efficient, effective, affordable, and easy for occupants to control,
while maximizing LEED points,” Ring told
EBN. The building earned all ten LEED points for optimizing energy performance.
A 7.5 kW, grid-connected solar electric array produces approximately 37.5 kWh of electricity per day, enough to supply about 20% of the building’s electricity demand and to obtain all three LEED credits for renewable energy. To meet the rest of the building’s energy needs, NRDC purchases renewable energy credits for wind generation. As a result, the office also achieved the LEED credit for green power (one that the Audubon Center at Debs Park, which produces all of its power on-site, had to forgo) and can claim to be run entirely on renewable energy.
The project team had hoped to save considerable material resources by reusing an existing building, but they were disappointed to find much of the original frame rotten. In Moule’s opinion, “grappling with a highly deficient building” posed the biggest challenge of the project. “The lesson from this,” she told
EBN, is that, if you plan to salvage an existing building, “be sure that you secure a building that has some structural and architectural integrity.” While most of the original structure had to be torn down, 98% of the waste generated during demolition and construction was reused or recycled.
Some materials and equipment salvaged from old movie sets were incorporated into the building. Low-mercury fluorescent lamps (from the Philips Lighting Company) will minimize mercury emissions after disposal. Where possible, other materials were substituted for wood; the building uses bamboo flooring (from the Smith & Fong Company) and fiber-cement siding, for example. Nearly all of the new wood used in the project came from forests certified according to FSC standards. “A lot of projects pursue that LEED credit [MR7, for FSC-certified wood] because they don’t have a lot of wood,” notes Rosenberg. “This is a wood-frame building.” The team worked hard with lumber yards and subcontractors to ensure FSC certification, she continued, adding that documentation was especially challenging.
“The entire building is meant to be a superior place to work,” said Moule. Daylighting, views to the outdoors, and natural ventilation were high priorities in the building’s design. The project team made sure the building was buffered by landscaping, says Ring, “so people will look out and see some plantings, not just the blank wall of the adjacent building.” Prime locations within the building are reserved not for private corner offices, but for common spaces, such as a library, a roof terrace, conference rooms, and shared administrative spaces.
Indoor materials were selected for their low emissions of volatile organic compounds (VOCs); the building is entirely free of added urea formaldehyde and all but free of vinyl (PVC). Ring acknowledges that devices with factory-provided wiring, such as HVAC units, use PVC insulation on the wires, but notes that NRDC made a “deliberate choice” to specify polyethylene insulation instead of PVC on all power and data conductors installed in the building. Areas where harmful substances are present, such as copy rooms, were designed with negative pressure and exhaust ventilation. A climate-control system maintains optimal indoor conditions while minimizing energy use. Carbon dioxide levels are constantly monitored, and occupants have control over the temperature, ventilation, and lighting in their work spaces. The project earned an innovation point in LEED for its green housekeeping policies, which aim to reduce occupant exposure to toxic chemicals.
Moule said she was proud to have worked on the Robert Redford Building. The objectives of sustainability, she explained, “are really about making a better quality of life for all of us, and, on a single-project basis, for the people who work there. It is especially meaningful to me to have made a comfortable and inspiring workplace for the employees of the NRDC, who spend their lives making our own lives better.”
A detailed case study of the Robert Redford Building, listing additional design team members, is available in the case studies database at www.BuildingGreen.com.
(2004, February 1). The Robert Redford Building: NRDC Practices What It Preaches. Retrieved from https://www.buildinggreen.com/feature/robert-redford-building-nrdc-practices-what-it-preaches
