commentArmstrong Achieves LEED-EB Platinum at Pennsylvania Headquarters
The presence of Rick Fedrizzi, the president and CEO of the U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC), at the LEED certification ceremony for Armstrong’s corporate headquarters suggested more than business as usual.
The central atrium of Armstrong's corporate headquarters in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, ties together two wings of offices spread out across three stories of building.
All offices have access to views across the surrounding Pennsylvania Dutch countryside. The shallow floorplate ensures that daylighting reaches each office area.
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Organized as a major public event, the June 21 ceremony marked the completion of a renovation project for Armstrong’s 1998 corporate headquarters in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, that resulted in the building achieving Platinum status in the LEED for Existing Buildings (LEED-EB) rating program. Armstrong has been a major supporter of the USGBC since its inception, which partly explains Fedrizzi’s presence (note: Armstrong is an advertiser in GreenSource, but did not contribute to the costs of reporting this article). But there were other reasons for the big show: there are only 57 buildings certified thus far in the existing buildings program and, out of all LEED categories, there are only 53 certified Platinum projects. For LEED-EB, there are only 7 certified Platinum.
“From a climate perspective, the existing building is the single largest opportunity in front of us,” says Fedrizzi, adding that the USGBC focused on new buildings first in order to start a market change.
Armstrong’s building, originally designed by Gensler’s Baltimore office, was reconfigured by a team including Re:Vision Architecture as the LEED consultant, Bala Consulting Engineers for commissioning, Johnson Controls, and SKANSKA as construction manager. The original building is an elegant three-story, 126,000-square-foot structure with two wings wrapped in glass and steel and oriented around a central atrium. A relatively shallow floorplate ensures views out to the rolling hills of the Pennsylvania Dutch countryside, not to mention the well-manicured grounds of Armstrong’s world headquarters.
Dan Tisak, with Bala Engineering, says not every building is capable of undergoing the LEED-EB process. “LEED-EB is the recognition of a well-built building,” Tisak says. “If you don’t meet the prerequisites, you’ll have to first upgrade your building to meet current construction standards.” While the original building was built to a considerably high standard of construction, the new team implemented a number of sustainable design strategies to meet the requirements of the Platinum certification. Jim Baker, Armstrong’s facilities director, says it was critical to have the maintenance staff that knew the building participate heavily in the process. “We could really define the issues,” Baker says.
With commissioning and tuning, the team was able to keep the energy use to less than 1.5 watts per square foot, which they estimate to be half the average of comparable office buildings nationwide. With new plumbing fixtures, they reduced water consumption from 800,000 to 420,000 gallons per year. Kirsten Ritchie, Gensler’s San Francisco-based director of sustainability, says the EB program is focused on the behavior of the occupant, much more than construction, and that results are quantifiable, as opposed to merely predictable. Thus operational issues became paramount. In that regard, Armstrong implemented a green power purchasing program that provides 75 percent of the building’s electricity from wind energy sources, as well as a cleaning regimen that relies on Green Seal certified products. Additionally, Armstrong installed a new acoustical tile ceiling system—manufactured by Armstrong—that qualified for an Innovation and Design credit for acoustical quality.
These strategies pushed the building toward Platinum status, something Armstrong feels will help their green products, such as ceiling tiles and flooring, carry more weight in the industry, as well as challenge more corporations to upgrade their own building stock. “LEED is a leadership standard focused at the top 25 percent performance of the marketplace,” Fedrizzi says. “When you take that top level and the go to the top of that, it takes some heavy lifting to get there and then it pulls the rest of the industry up. Teams will stretch higher to try to meet Platinum.”
While Armstrong doesn’t have an official corporate policy toward upgrading all of its building stock, the headquarters project has been a learning curve for its staff. Armstrong’s Baker says sharing the results with the company’s other facilities will be the next step.
For more information:
www.armstrong.com
www.usgbc.org
For more on Armstrong in Architectural Record:
Green Building: Essential Design Strategies for a Sustainable Future
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