Page 62 - Green Building Through Integrated Design

OTHER GREEN BUILDING RATING SYSTEMS 39

other stakeholders. For owner-occupied buildings, these savings alone are often
enough to justify the extra costs of such projects. Considering that 70 percent or more
of the operating costs of service companies (which most are) relate to employee
salaries and benefits, it just makes good business sense to pay attention to productivity,
comfort, and health in building design and operations.
Consider what Ben Weeks of Denver’s Aardex says on this subject about the benefits
of their Signature Centre office project.*

In one specific case, in Albuquerque, New Mexico, we built an office space, and
the Social Security Administration’s Office of Hearings and Appeals occupies
about 28,000 feet of a facility designed for their specific use. They had come out
a previous space where they had been disjointedly housed in several different
locations within the same building. From before and after analysis of their case
management, we identified that by going from that location to the new facility
their productivity increase was 78 percent, an enormous increase. That is almost
incredible. When you think that business devotes between 80 and 90 percent of
its total operating expense to people and roughly 5 percent to office rent, if the
space can influence the productivity of the tenants—even just a little, it makes an
enormous difference.
Typically, businesses will pay anywhere from $300 to $600 per square foot for its peo-
ple. And they’ll pay $15 to $20 per square foot for the office space. If a building can
increase the productivity of the people by even 5 percent, that’s significantly more than
the total cost of the office rent. We realized this effect and that’s why we developed
the name “User Effective Buildings” for our approach to real estate development. It
describes the design relationship between a building design, the people that occupy the
building and the effect on productivity.
We have done a lot research into the aspects of buildings like daylight harvesting
(Fig. 2.8), internal artificial light management, environmental controls, indoor air
quality controls and those sorts of things, considering the impact that those design
elements have on the human experience and thereby productivity of the occupants.
We’ve incorporated optimal outcome thresholds into our guiding principles for our
design strategies. When that is done, we believe we can develop a building in such
a way that it will house the current and future occupants effectively far into the
future. They should be able to maximize their useful and productive enjoyment of
those buildings. We believe that the numbers, the financials, the mechanics of it, are
such that the information and the data are irrefutable. Although the example of the
Social Security Office of Hearings and Appeals and their 78 percent increase in pro-
ductivity is one that we will anecdotally discuss when talking to people, we don’t
ever suggest that any company might have the potential to increase by 78 percent
because leaders don’t like to think that their people are currently working at 22 percent
or less of capacity.

*Interview with Ben Weeks, Aardex, March 2008.