The Story of Pennsylvania's First Green Building: DEP South Central Office Building

Video, 28 minutes. Produced by the Environmental Fund of Pennsylvania for the “GreenWorks for Pennsylvania” television show. Available on the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection Web site.

This new video tells the story of creating the new South Central Office Building in Pennsylvania, a privately owned, 73,000-square-foot (6,800 m²) office building leased by the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania for the Department of Environmental Protection. In many respects this is a remarkable building (a few of the features are listed below), but what is perhaps most noteworthy is the extent to which the state government of Pennsylvania has made this building a learning tool, as told in—and demonstrated by—this superb video.

The Story of Pennsylvania’s First Green Building describes the integrated planning and design process used in creating the building—a process that is a model for how the Commonwealth plans to do business from now on, according to Jim Toothaker, director of Office Systems and Services for the Pennsylvania DEP. A number of the 24 Green Team members who participated in the design process are interviewed in the video, including developer, project architect, and various green building consultants. One of these is energy expert Stephen Lee, AIA of Carnegie Mellon University, whose daylighting and energy modeling helped generate a design in which annual energy costs were dropped from $1.54 per square foot for the base-case building to $0.74 per square foot ($16.58/m² to $7.97/m²).

What is most enjoyable about the video, however, is the wonderful footage showing both the construction of the building—from remediation of the brownfield it was built on to time-lapse photography showing installation of the access floors and carpet tiles—and how some of the green materials used in the building were produced. We’re shown, for example, a Nucor electric-arc furnace making structural steel, Environ^® manufacturing at Phoenix Biocomposites, the production of workstation fabrics from PET soda bottles, and carpet looms at Interface Flooring. In addition, the filmmakers interviewed many of the people behind these products: from company CEOs like Ray Anderson of Interface to environmental champions like Rick Fedrizzi of Carrier.

Some green features of the South Central Office Building:

•13-acre (5.3 ha) brownfield site requiring remediation, methane recovery, leachate collection, and methane barrier;

•Energy-efficient building envelope, including argon-filled, low-e windows;

•Access floors used for conditioned air supply;

•Highly reflective ceiling tiles, coupled with light shelves for daylight penetration and high-

efficiency indirect lighting;

•Gas-fired absorption chillers;

•Removable carpet tiles;

•Recycled-content workstation fabric and natural-fiber upholstery fabric;

•Occupancy-sensing power strips and lighting controls;

•Recycled-content entry floor tiles (from window glass) and wall panels (from straw and Environ);

•Indigenous landscaping and xeriscaping planned by a committee of employees;

•Hard construction costs—excluding site costs—of just $78 per square foot ($840/m²);

•Projected annual energy savings of $50,000 compared with a base-case building modeled on the standard state office building specifications.