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The Moore Foundation pushes Gensler for the greenest headquarters
possible. Despite the hype for sustainable design, the limitations
remain daunting.
By John King
Photography by Todd Hido for Metropolis
November 2002
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This conference room--with walls made of reclaimed wood from an old
barn--is a prominent element of Gensler's green design for the Gordon
and Betty Moore Foundation offices in San Francisco.
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In addition to reclaimed wood, the second-floor conference room has
glass walls in keeping with the Moore Foundation's preference for
openness.
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The foundation's first sustainable design decision
was to move into a 1938 building (left) in San Francisco's Presidio, a
former military base, rather than building from the ground up. A
conference table (right) was hewn from a bay laurel tree that fell
naturally at a nearby yoga retreat.
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Stairs in the reception area (left) are made of
wood from madrone trees downed in the area. Other woods came from
farther afield--such as the certified Pennsylvanian oak veneer of the
workstation partitions (right).
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In the reception area (left), visitors trigger the image of a "virtual
receptionist" by pressing a red button; they then communicate via
microphone with someone inside the offices. In contrast, the largely
unair-conditioned offices also benefit from low technology, such as
ceiling fans and operable windows in the veranda (right), a space where
employees can relax.
Photography by Todd Hido for Metropolis
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Elsewhere on the Site:
The Sustainable Metropolis
Offsite:
Moore Foundation building, www.moore.org/gb/stories/08_15/news_story.asp.
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Outside there's a view of century-old brick buildings nestled against green
eucalyptus and pine, with the Golden Gate Bridge rising up behind. But Sherry
Bartolucci is focused on the tiny metal beads of the drapery cord that she
holds between her fingers. "We went through a debate on these,
whether or not they were recyclable," she says, rubbing them softly.
Then she looks at the hemp window shades and shrugs. "You can say they're
cool, or that they look like sacks hanging. But there was nothing else as
good."
Bartolucci is the chief administrative officer of the Gordon and Betty
Moore Foundation, created by the legendary Intel cofounder in 2000 with
a $5 billion endowment. The foundation's interests range far beyond the
San Francisco Bay Area, with a global focus on biodiversity and wildlife
preservation. It is too young to have yet made a deep impact in its chief
areas of scientific research, education, and the environment, but it
has already pushed the limits of convention by making sustainable design
the centerpiece of its 34,000-square-foot office designed for 110 employees
in San Francisco's former Presidio military base, now a national park.
Working with architects at the San Francisco office of Gensler, the
foundation set out to see how thoroughly the concept of sustainability could
be integrated into design decisions. Some results are dramatic, such as
the scene when you enter the reception area: behind the front desk is a
conference room framed in bricks that had sat in a warehouse ever since
they fell from a building in the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake. Nearby stands
an armoire for hanging coats, its teak doors salvaged from doomed houses
in Indonesia.
The result is a rough-hewn high tech, demure and distinctive all at once.
It was also, the architects say, a crash course in learning the potential
and limits of what is now possible when a good-size company sets out to
do the right thing. Despite all the hype for green design, the limitations
remain daunting.
"Almost everything was difficult, especially once you evaluated
it based on all components," concedes Collin Burry, the lead designer
for Gensler. "You'd look at some of the complexities, and your head
would start spinning." The first complexity was the building itself.
Rather than start from scratch with a design fine-tuned to climate
patterns and technological needs, the foundation settled in four levels
of a 1938 military building. Its warren of small offices defies
Gordon Moore's belief that workplaces should be as open and interwoven as
possible, but there's a huge environmental benefit in making use of
an existing structure. "The best green thing we can do is reuse what
exists," Burry says. Bartolucci agrees: "The idea of setting down
roots in the Presidio was a good statement, we felt."
In many ways what followed this initial decision was typical designer-client
stuff: meetings, options, budgets, haggling. But the overlay was the edict
from Moore. "We told them, 'We want to do everything we can possibly
do to be green, to build everything we do on our values,'" Bartolucci
says. "Honest to God, we drove them crazy. They didn't realize what
they were going to have to go through." Gensler designers agree that
the follow-through was more intense than they were accustomed to. At least
in retrospect, they also say it was welcome. "We learned a lot more
through this process than we ever expected," Burry acknowledges. "A
lot of this is still uncharted territory."
One tool likely to be used again is the "green scorecard" that
Melissa Mizell of Gensler drew up for the project. Products were compared
by how they ranked in five categories: source of material, manufacturing
process, transportation impacts, energy likely to be consumed in repairs
and maintenance, and "afterlife" of the product. (Is it biodegradable?
Are the parts easy to disassemble and reuse?) In some cases a questionnaire
was sent to suppliers, as when major furniture dealers were asked which
manufacturers were capable of producing 110 custom work spaces to rigorous
but still relatively cost-competitive green guidelines. Once it became clear
that Moore and Gensler were serious about their standards, only two manufacturers
were seen as contenders. ("There's a lot of greenwashing out there,"
Burry says, referring to essentially standard products with one or two touted
"eco-friendly" features.) Vida in San Francisco got the job. The
cubicles are sleek dark-stained oak units with "walls" only a
few inches higher than the work surface, because another of Gordon Moore's
tenets is that sight lines should stay open in an office. Except for
the impossibly stylish Eizo flat computer screens, nothing is higher
than 42 inches from the ground. The wood is from certified forests--located
in Pennsylvania, alas, which meant that shipping the raw materials 3,000
miles for assembly eroded some of the environmental benefits. "None
of the certified sources for [oak] wood veneer are in California,"
Burry says a bit defensively.
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