SAN FRANCISCO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--The San Francisco Public Utilities Commission’s new environmentally sustainable headquarters building at 525 Golden Gate Avenue, designed in joint venture by KMD Architects and Stevens Architects, provides a poster-child of sustainability innovation for urban office buildings, and reflects the mission of the PUC as a provider and manager of water and energy for San Francisco. All told, 525 Golden Gate in comparison to similarly-sized office buildings features 50% less of a carbon footprint, uses 32% less energy, and consumes 60% less water. The 13-level, 277,511 gross-square-foot, $190 million SFPUC headquarters building is one of the greenest urban office buildings of its kind, bringing together in a modern, contextually-designed office tower some of the most innovative new technologies at the forefront of building design. Given the SFPUC’s objective to create a physical demonstration of resource-conservation and sustainability, KMD set out to design a sleek, memorable structure that also responded to functional components inside and outside this next-step advancement of green design. Among the SFPUC headquarters’ design and performance attributes are: -- Design. -- Energy. -- Water-conservation. -- Earthquake-performance to survive a Maximum Credible Earthquake. The building is designed to achieve LEED-Platinum certification by the US Green Building Council, and will exceed California’s recently-instituted Title 24 requirements for energy efficiency in new office buildings by 55 percent, according to SFPUC estimates.
