The Bottom Line: A Breath of Fresh Air, DPR Construction’s San Diego Headquarters Exemplify Green Building
Imagine you’ve just finished a long day
of meetings in a cooped-up conference room with stale, air-conditioned air and
are now stepping out into the fresh air and sunshine. Now imagine this happens
in reverse: this is how you begin
every day as you enter the office. Not bad for morale, eh?
This is what all 60+ employees who work in DPR Construction's net-zero energy regional headquarters in San Diego experience every day. The building itself is a prototype for one of the company’s own areas of specialty: “high-performance green building retrofits.”
Over post-work drinks recently at the office wine bar (not a bad perk either!), several DPR employees could themselves attest to howmuch the access to fresh air and natural light in the office impacts their morale, loyalty and productivity. The numbers reinforce that statement: in an independently conducted survey by the University of California/Berkeley’s Center for the Built Environment, employees rated the air quality and thermal comfort 98% and 96% satisfied. Additionally, they rated their personal workspace, office layout and overall building satisfaction above 94 percent – all well above national averages for other surveys conducted on similar building types.
And that impacts the bottom line.
No Cubicle Farms Here, Thank You
At DPR’s San Diego headquarters, operable
windows allow for outside air cross-ventilation, natural daylight is channeled
through “Solatubes” skylights (from Poway-based Solatube) and minimal interior walls
with views of the outside create an open, high-quality work environment that is
also extremely energy efficient.
The link between green office buildings and employee morale and productivity is proven. According to the U.S. Green Building Council, “green” buildings can drive an increase in employee productivity of up to 16 percent (see “Current Research: Occupant Experience”).
At DPR, employee enthusiasm and engagement itself is even channeled into further energy use reductions through real-time energy consumption awareness. A centrally located digital dashboard charts the building’s energy usage at all times to motivate and encourage employees to do their part in cutting energy waste and saving company dollars. (Click here to see the dashboard yourself: http://www.buildingdashboard.com/clients/dpr/sandiego/.)
Nature’s Air Conditioning Comes Free
Office buildings are the single largest
energy users in California’s commercial sector. Given San Diego’s temperate
climate, it might surprise you to learn where most of that energy consumption
comes from: the HVAC (heating, ventilation and air conditioning) system.
DPR’s unique naturally-ventilatedapproach not only ensures employees all-day access to fresh air and natural light, butalso helps the company avoid a more traditional forced air, constant volume, HVAC system with its hefty energy demand.
Meanwhile, solar paneling generates more than 12,000 kilowatt-hours above and beyond the building’s actual energy needlast year, helping the company further reduce energy costs.
Recognizing that the most environmentally sustainable construction of all is not to build new, but to rehabilitate inefficient old buildings, the 24,000-square-foot University Cityoffice space is actually a retrofit of an inefficient old commercial office space. DPR won’t reveal what they paid for the real estate but assure us it was “a steal.” The company was able to further reduce waste and cut building costs byincorporating materials such asworkstations, doors, frames and steel from other sites. In total, these measures saved the company an estimated 5 percent of the total retrofit cost.
Not Convinced Yet?
Many of the benefits DPR has seen from its
own green building retrofit construction and that of its clients is to be expected:
utility savings (both energy and water), tax rebates, expedited permitting,
healthier workplace environments, higher rental rates, increased property
values. But some additional happy
surprises include discounted
insurance rates and reduced absenteeism.
Meanwhile, in a few years DPR Construction's net-zero office construction will more than pay for itself in energy savings alone.
If you’d like to see this unique office space with your own eyes, DPR offers tours of its San Diego headquarters by reservation.
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