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New York City — April 30, 2015 — Federal Center South, a Seattle project for which the international engineering firm WSP provided mechanical, plumbing, high-performance design, technology, and architectural lighting design services, has won the 2015 Top Ten Plus award from the American Institute of Architects (AIA) and its Committee on the Environment (COTE).
According to the AIA, the Top Ten Plus award “recognizes one past AIA COTE Top Ten Project Award recipient which has quantifiable metrics that demonstrate the true impact the sustainable design has achieved.”
Completed in 2012, and an AIA COTE Top Ten project award winner in 2013, the 209,000-square-foot Federal Center South building serves as the Seattle headquarters of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. The new building “transformed a previously toxic brownfield into a new standard for a high-performance, cost-effective, and sustainable workplace environment,” explained the AIA, which also noted that the building’s annual energy performance had met its contractual operational performance target, putting it in the top 1 percent of similarly sized office buildings in the country.
Tom Marseille, senior vice president and managing director of WSP’s Seattle office, served as the project director. Charles Chaloeicheep, senior associate in the San Francisco office, led the contributions of WSP’s Built Ecology practice.
“Federal Center South was an ideal project for us, since it leveraged our broad range of skills and our ability to integrate them into holistic solutions,” said Steve Burrows, the U.S. Director for WSP Buildings. “Furthermore, we are strong advocates for energy efficiency design, so the goals for Federal Center South were perfectly aligned with our own.”
Among the methods WSP used to attain the ambitious goals for energy efficiency were:
• A high-performance building façade to reduce the need for heating and cooling.
• Passive chilled sails and perimeter radiators that are served by an efficient “high temperature cooling/low temperature heating” system.
• Natural light through 90 percent of the building and advanced daylighting controls.
• Thermal storage tanks with a phase-change material that collects and stores waste heat from the building during occupied hours that then can be used for building heating at night and in the early morning.
• Geoexchange heating and cooling systems that were cost-effectively integrated into structural-steel-pipe piles.
• Ventilation air through five rooftop-dedicated outdoor-air systems, each with exhaust-air heat recovery and distribution via an underfloor air system.
For more information on the project, visit www.aiatopten.org/node/397.
