LEED interior certification slow to catch on

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In LHB Inc.’s new office in the Loose-Wiles Building in Minneapolis, a wall of windows bathes part of the room in a warm glow of natural light. On a ceiling above the architecture firm’s office are a series of sensors that dim and brighten lights based on whether employees are at their desks or gone.

LHB is attempting to earn a platinum level LEED for Commercial Interiors (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) certification from the Washington D.C.-based U.S. Green Building Council. Rick Carter, commercial focus leader, says the office has energy efficient lighting, furniture and carpets made partly of recycled materials and, perhaps most important, a location in a densely populated neighborhood near transit lines.

“We were at the Traffic Zone (Center for Visual Art) for 15 years and after we decided to move into this space we decided to try for LEED Platinum,” Carter said. “Since we have designed many LEED buildings, it just made sense that our office should be LEED certified.”

LEED certification has taken off for new construction and for renovations.  But the designation for interior design hasn’t made much headway in Minnesota.

Sheri Brezinski, executive director of the Green Building Council’s Minnesota chapter (which actually resides in LHB’s space), said only 29 offices have been certified, a tiny slice of the LEED pie.

“I think there is some interest in it but there are far fewer people who are certified under that LEED system,” she said. “It depends upon who owns the building, what condition it’s in and how it’s configured.”

Not all office tenants have much control over office design, heating or lighting, Brezinski said. LEED-CI works best when an office is undergoing a renovation or when a tenant is first moving in, she added, as was the case with LHB.

To really make LEED work a tenant has to have a willing building owner, a good architect and an urban location, she said. In most cases the cost compared to a traditional office is minimal, at most 2 percent to 3 percent more than a standard  renovation, with some of the budget required to pay for the paperwork involved in a LEED submission, she said.

The KPMG experience

Darren McGann, associate director of sustainability at KPMG, said the audit, tax and advisory firm has 47,000 square feet on two and a half floors of the Wells Fargo Center at 90 S. Seventh St. in Minneapolis, itself a LEED-certified building.  KPMG has a commitment to achieve LEED for all its offices, he said, with the Minneapolis branch being the 19th to receive certification.

The gold certification came last year after the company’s architectural firm, Perkins & Will, helped deploy a number of energy-efficient strategies. Some executive offices were moved away from the windows to allow for light to travel deeper into the firm’s floors. Natural lighting now reaches 68 percent of its workspaces, McGann said.

Occupancy sensors with built-in noise monitors cover nearly all the office and helped decrease electricity use by 42 percent, he said, while removing the need for anyone to clap their hands to get the lights back on. Low-flow water fixtures contributed to a 35 percent reduction in water use, he said, and more than 80 percent of the construction waste was recycled. A quarter of the building products purchased had recycled content, McGann said.

The recycling theme extends to the office, which has many stations for recycling by employees. Adding to all those efforts was the simple fact that cemented the LEED designation – a location in the transit-rich central business district. That advantage adds points to the LEED total, McGann said.

The green push extended to business practices. To decrease air travel, which accounts for nearly half of KPMG’s carbon footprint, the firm installed videophones on desks and added high definition screens to conference rooms, he said. Air travel declined 35 percent as a result, he said.

While earning LEED is well and good, what did it mean to the 389 employees who work in the office?

“We have environmental questions built into our national employee surveys and we found 92 percent of the Minneapolis office employees felt the office was an environmentally friendly workplace,” he said. “That’s significantly higher than the industry average. And it’s gone up from the year before.”

Clients noticed, too. “Every week, I get an email or a phone call from a client asking about sustainability,” McGann said. “Our clients are interested in it.”

LHB and DLR

LHB’s office at 700 N. Washington Ave. in the North Loop was once a cracker maker’s factory and later the office of HGA Architects and Engineers. The $1 million renovation of the office involved many approaches to reducing energy and water use, among them building pod-like conference rooms from salvaged wood as well as using recycled and low-VOC materials.

Pointing to an air duct above the office constructed from cloth rather than the more common aluminum, Carter notes fresh air is distributed quietly and evenly throughout the floor. LEDs attached to sensors add or subtract illumination throughout the day based on how much natural light is available in the office.

LHB has a meter measuring energy used by the entire office — the bill for heating, cooling and lighting — that is not common in multitenant buildings.  And the firm went a step further and decided to sub-meter the energy required of all the equipment it uses.

In 1970 office appliances amounted to 2 percent of an energy bill, he said, with the rest representing the costs of heating, cooling and lighting. Today the “plug load” — all that equipment plugged into outlets — accounts for up to 25 percent of energy costs, said Carter.

Sub-metering the plug loads will give LHB a better idea of how much energy all those monitors, phones and other appliances use, he said, and that gets recognition in LEED-CI.

Other approaches in LHB’s office include water sensors that should reduce use by 35 percent and a location in the building offering bike storage and lockers, all helpful in achieving LEED certification, he said.

Bloomington-based United Properties, which owns the Loose-Wiles, also plans to try for a LEED “core and shell” certification in the future, Carter noted.

Carter said LHB was one of the earliest supporters of the U.S. Green Building Council in Minnesota and has etched out a reputation for designing LEED buildings but had never done a LEED-CI project. The results have been good so far and Carter believes it might someday help persuade other clients looking for a renovation to go LEED.

Phil Stien, senior associate at Minneapolis-based DLR Group, said his 520 Nicollet Mall office employed many of the same strategies as LHB and KPMG — improved ventilation, daylighting, and the use of regional and recycled materials.

Creating a more efficient office is definitely part of the LEED equation, Stien said, but so is the value of the certification for the architecture firm, especially one that needs to walk the walk.

“We did this as much for marketing as anything else,” he said. “Having a LEED office helps show that we are a leader in LEED design.”

See below for a slideshow of FHB Inc. by F&C staff photographer Bill Klotz: