‘Green’ resource center receives hefty grant from City Hall
WATER GARDEN While green can be an agreeable color for office furnishings, it’s an even more attractive hue when it comes to the rooms that showcase those workplace desks and chairs.
Allsteel Inc., an office furniture designer, recently received a $25,000 grant through City Hall’s Green Building Program for constructing a resource center that possessed enough sustainable design qualities to earn an environmental designation by the United States Green Building Council. The Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) designation certifies the resource center, which essentially serves as a showroom displaying the company’s products, as having an ecologically friendly interior.
The resource center, which opened in the Water Garden last summer, received LEED Silver certification in December. City Hall awarded the grant to Allsteel last week.
“The company itself has a strong commitment to sustainability,” Brenden McEneaney, the Green Building Programs advisor, said.
The resource center adds to the growing list of LEED certifications in Santa Monica, where there are eight such projects and six more in the pipeline, according to McEneaney.
Based in Muscatine, Iowa, Allsteel runs four resource centers around the country that have all achieved LEED certification. The Water Garden was specifically chosen as the site for the Santa Monica showroom because it already lent several “green” qualities that could translate into LEED credits since the certification process looks at the development holistically, including the surrounding area, said Greg Dunlop, the national manager of architecture and design for Allsteel.
“We think it’s the right thing to do,” Dunlop said. “Many of our clients are trying to achieve (LEED) certification as well, so many clients coming to us want to know what they could do to achieve certification.”
In addition to using graywater system for the site, the Water Garden is also close to public transportation and has bike racks, encouraging employees in the building to use alternative means of transportation to get to work, Lori Selcer, the LEED project administrator for HOK, the architectural firm that designed the resource center, said. The office complex also has an underground parking garage, which also results in LEED credits because it does not take up extra outside space, minimizing the disturbance, she added.
“The availability of public transportation was very advantageous to us,” she said.
Within the resource center, the showroom was constructed out of recycled materials and about 95 percent of the construction materials was diverted from landfills. The resource center also takes advantage of natural light, its windows designed with a sensor system so that when it detects a certain amount of daylight,it automatically adjusts the usage of electrical lighting, Selcer said.
While the grant is typically meant to be a reimbursement for the “green” elements that dictated the design of the resource center, Allsteel intends to use the $25,000 toward promoting education of environmentalism and sustainability, funding research on different opportunities to make the workplace more sustainable, Dunlop said. The grant will also help the company educate its clients on ways they could make their own businesses more green.
“We’re looking for ways we can reinvest that money into the city of Santa Monica in initiatives that have some connection to green causes,” Dunlop said. “It wasn’t so much for getting money as it was an opportunity for us to say we support this effort and initiative.”
Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on February 7, 2008. Read the original PDF.