Architect Magazine lists SERA Architects as nation's #3 green architecture firm, ZGF as #7 firm overall

Edith Green-Wendell Wyatt Federal Building renovation, rendering by Scott Baumberger and Baumberger Studio 

The May issue of Architect Magazine has come out with two lists: its second annual Architect 50, listing the nation's top firms, and a separate list of the top green architecture firms specifically.

Portland firms had a substantial presence on both lists. Most notably, SERA Architects was listed at #3, just behind the giant Chicago firm Perkins + Will and EYP Architecture & Engineering of Albany, New York.

Also on the top 10 green firms list was Portland firm ZGF Architects at #10. And DLR Group, which is based in Omaha but has a Portland office, was listed at #9.

Then there was the Architect 50 list, which had ZGF listed as the #7 firm in the country. "ZGF is as green as its Pacific Northwest roots would suggest," the listing text reads, "while its strength in health care, infrastructure, and government work has kept it chugging through the recession." New York-based Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, which previously operated a Portland office and designed local landmarks like Memorial Coliseum, the US Bancorp Tower ("Big Pink"), Autzen Stadium and the Standard Insurance Center, was listed as the nation's top firm.

The Architect 50 list is a little different from other lists of top national architecture firms in that it "recognizes ecological commitment and design quality as much as profitability when measuring the country’s very best A, AE, and AEC firms."

Meanwhile, yesterday I spoke with SERA Architects' principal Clark Brockman about the listing as America's #3 green architecture firm.

Brockman likes the fact that Architect Magazine didn't just add up the number of LEED-rated projects and LEED-accredited professionals to compile the list; also included was a "firm culture" metric, for which SERA earned a high ranking. "I’d hope we keep finding new measures," Brockman said. "What we really want is to inspire more and more firms to be going green faster and faster. But this is a move in the right direction."

Today SERA has about 85 employees, which is about the same number the firm employed two years ago, when the Great Recession was beginning to take its toll. Just breaking even in terms of employee growth during the worst economic climate since the 1930s is pretty impressive. The obvious conclusion to draw is that SERA's focus on green is what allowed the firm to prosper amidst the tough times. 

But Brockman says it's not that simple. He points to SERA's diverse portfolio of both public and private clients. The firm is also an employee-owned company, which he says helps them retain talent and keep people motivated. "I sure wouldn’t want the message to be that SERA thinks we are where we ware because of green," he says. "I think of being sustainable in a broad sense. We want to be financially sustainable, protecting and saving staff, and working on green design."

Another key for SERA, Brockman argues, has been the development over the past two years of the firm's  in-house Sustainability Resources Group (SURG), comprised of employees with specific areas of sustainable expertise. "We’ve got a mechanical engineer, skin experts, daylighting and lighting experts," he adds. "Two years ago we had two people in that group amongst 85 people on staff and now it’s seven. We’re busy as heck and providing a lot of service to all the projects in the firm.  But it’s constantly changing."

Right now SERA is engaged in three major projects: the Oregon Sustainability Center (in partnership with GBD Architects) and a renovation of the Edith Green-Wendell Wyatt Federal Building (in partnership with Cutler Anderson Architects), both in Portland, as well as an extensive sustainable master-planning process for the city of Liwa in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates.

The Oregon Sustainability Center, as its website describes, is "a first-of-a-kind synthesis of unparalleled environmental performance with an integrated sustainability agenda, serving both as a technological model and as a hub for sustainable practices, policy, education, research and entrepreneurship." Located on the edge of the Portland State University campus in downtown Portland, the OSC will bring together academic, government, nonprofit and business sectors. It is being designed to achieve triple net-zero performance in energy and water use and carbon emissions, and to meet the world’s most stringent green building criteria, the Cascadia Region Green Building Council’s Living Building Challenge.

Oregon Sustainability Center, rendering courtesy oregonsustainabilitycenter.org

The OSC would be upon completion perhaps America's greenest office tower, and that is a hugely impressive achievement for SERA, GBD and developer Gerding Edlen. The only criticism I would personally make is that, to my eyes at least, from a visual, aesthetic standpoint it seems ugly, like a banal office building with a mismatched top. But this is also not a final design, so there is still time to change that. And if I'm critical of the look of the building based on the renderings released so far, let me be absolutely clear in saying that doing any Living Building office is hugely impressive. It's just that architecture is, at its ideal, a marriage of the practical and scientific with art and beauty.

I also wonder if an even greener move would be to build the Oregon Sustainability Center in an existing building, such as the empty US Customs House, which the GSA is currently seeking a tenant for via online auction, or the nearly empty Gus Solomon United States Courthouse downtown on Broadway, just a few blocks from the OSC site. But this is neither SERA's decision nor GBD's to make. That said, SERA has extensive renovation experience with landmark projects like City Hall in Portland. What better way to combine the firm's talents?

For the Abu Dhabi project, SERA and the other firms involved have engaged in what's called "energy-mapping", which Brockman says has "allowed us to map climate effects at a city scale. We’ve been siting and massing the buildings in a way that creates a comfortable place in a harsh environment. To be creating district scale tools that function in real time and allow us to design in real time based on climate and comfort, that’s a whole new world. Which I also think is a theme. It feels more and more like the projects we’re working on are all research, and they’re feeding other projects. The city-scale tool we're using in Abu Dhabi is going to be invaluable with all the eco-district work that will be happening in Portland."

The $133 million Wyatt building project (pictured at the top of this post) has been high profile, earning a feature in the Washington Post. The ultra-green retrofit will include rooftop solar panels supplying up to 15% of the building’s power needs, a new overhanging roof to provide shade, and a water collection and reuse system combined with low-flow fixtures that will reduce potable water consumption by as much as 68%. The big buzz surrounding this project, though, is a 250-foot vertical green wall that will cover the entire western facade of the office tower. Plants will grow on facade ‘fins’ that act like garden trellises during the spring and summer, shading the building to reduce energy bills. In the colder months, the plants will naturally drop their foliage and sunlight can once again penetrate the building to provide warmth.

Hopefully the green wall will actually happen, though. A May 4 report Daily Journal of Commerce report by Nathalie Weinstein suggests the GSA may wind up scrapping the wall due to budget concerns.

Brockman says lessons learned on the Oregon Sustainability Center and the Wyatt building are influencing each other. "We’re designing a new building a few blocks from an existing building retrofit a few blocks from each other, so we can share lessons back and forth," he says. "We learned something on OSC and took it to the Wyatt a week later. And the façade research on Wyatt will very much inform the way we move on the OSC's envelope design. It’s a huge privilege but exciting too."

Comments

[poncho]

Why not the promotion of preserving the Custom House or Solomon Courthouse to the fullest extent possible (like many here strongly advocate for the Memorial Coliseum) instead of trying to shoehorn it into something radically different and destroying its design integrity?

[Brian Libby]

Poncho,

Great question. My thinking on this was that the Custom House and Solomon Courthouse were more or less office buildings, and thus could be renovated in a way that was, while highly sustainable, also would preserve the architectural integrity and history. If I'm wrong about that, and turning either of these into the OSC home would necessitate gutting them, than I'd back off my suggestion. But that's the key question to me on a renovation: would it preserve and celebrate what originally was good about the building? In the case of Memorial Coliseum, it's a little different because the bowl-in-the-box design is so fundamentally a part of the building's architectural character.

[kane]

what about ZGF? Can you explain to us how ZGF found their way into the list of the elite? You seem to have focused on SERA. For the OSC, that has to be the worse image of the project I have seen, and your personal opinions aside, this project is so much more.

[Brian Libby]

Kane,

You're right that I focused on SERA here much more than ZGF. Originally I was going to write specifically about SERA based on having interviewed Clark Brockman about his firm getting on the list, but wanted to include ZGF as well.

Perhaps I shouldn't have have called the OSC in that rendering "ugly". Believe me, I understand that this is a special project that is about much, much more than aesthetics. And I don't mean to take away from the achievement these architects are making in designing an office building that meets Living Building Challenge standards. That is HUGELY impressive!

But the reason I love architecture is that it is always a marriage of the practical and the poetic, of science and art. There's no doubt in my mind that the OSC is hitting an absolute home run when it comes to the science. I just worry that, based on the renderings we've been shown so far, that the project may be lacking when it comes to the artful, poetic side of architecture. Naturally, visual aesthetics aren't strictly quantifiable, so this is all my opinion. I'm not the only one, though.

If there's another rendering that reveals the OSC to be more aesthetically compelling than I've given it credit for, I'm more than happy to change it out. But I got the rendering you see in this post from the front page of the OSC website. If it's an outdated image, it's the one they're making the face of the outreach effort.

[Scott Tice]

Congratz!!!

[kane]

Hey Brian,
Thanks for the response. I am not sure why the OSC group would use that image as their moniker. I personally prefer the helicopter view looking North. Eventually the architects will have to realize the synthesis of the science and the art and I personally can't wait to see that when more time is given. As far as ZGF goes, I am not as familiar with the green work that they have done that would put them in such standing - aside from 12W? As well, this is not an unbiased survey by any means - the design firms that are on this list pursued it. This takes a marketing campaign that many other firms could not afford or chose not to.

[Mo]

Helicopter views are great (for hiding ugly designs).

[Jo]

haha Mo - you are funny! They are also good for showing the level of resolution.

[billb]

If one wants to be 'sustainable'
one should start with re-purposing
an existing structure. The U of O
showed us how to do it in Old Town.
Building a new structure demands huge amounts of embodied energy , that will take centuries to earn back with efficient toilets....

[Money Is Green Too]

They actually are pretty darn ugly- like mechanical engineers designing palaces. I can't understand how heavily subsidized buildings pricing out at $500+/sf are sustainable. As test-beds they have merit, but let's not bruise ourselves just yet with all of the pats on the back. I'll be interested to see how meaningful technology and conceptually rigorous design can synthesize into something a little more compelling.

[kane]

I love both designs and I am sure the real projects built will bring a huge opportunity for the "designers" and local economy to benefit from. If you are not an architect then you cannot appreciate the challenge both the Edith Green and Oregon Sustainability REALLY represent, so the opinions of "ugly" could be better focused to the crap that is built and lacks the intellegence of a well integrated design approach. Go big and go green, which will bring green to the city. What else in the urban core can you point to that is aspiring to this?

[truth]

careful getting off that high-horse Kane.
regardless of the "well integrated design approach" the design for the OSC is still f-ugly...or maybe it's because of. Green doesn't make it good.

[kane]

i am blown away by your enlighted insight. Then again, you should know everything - truth and lies. Seems we are a little full of ourselves. Good thing for the rest of us your truth does not have to be the real truth, but only within your own galaxy. Green does not make it good! You should try better to understand a new language to architecture. This is not form driven architecture of the resurrected post-modern, but rather an environmental response to sustain itself. Small steps in the right direction, and when we chose to make buildings more integrated into their place we will realize new forms to deliver it - I don't see the engineer driven solution, but then again you seem to know the truth.

[Andy]

One should note that the arbitrary metrics for these lists Architect publishes are a little... arbitrary. VJAA as most decorated in the US? Pretty sure Office dA has them beat, but didn't report correctly or something. Olson Kundig or Kieran Timberlake not even ranking? I think it's all in how/when an office decides to participate in these things. But whatever, it serves for heated discussion. It's like when a media magazine published a most essential album list every year.

[Mo]

The "new language" of green doesn't excuse poor proportions, lack of scale, awkward palettes, and forced solutions...but marketing departments are great for covering those things up.

[truth]

Kane, it's unfortunate if you consider some basic tenets of architecture like scale and proportion simply "form driven architecture of the resurrected post-modern." I want no part of any "new language" that considers those factors unnecessary. Perhaps you are getting lost in your own rhetoric. Intelligence is not required to create nor should it be required to understand or "appreciate" good architecture, as you seem to imply in your earlier post.

[truth]

I should clarify/edit that last statement a bit...it does take intelligence to create a complete piece of architecture...that is beautiful, functions well etc...but understanding and experiencing that work should not require the same intelligence or any for that matter.

[JJay]

This has been interesting exchange to read. On one hand I don't think this design is world class, and not sure Kane is suggesting so. And truth spouts elementary architecture like a student. ouch - you can't handle the truth! I think the building is fine, especially given what stage it is at. Lighten up truth. I would guess there is plenty of other crap to piss on this wonderous city.

[HB]

I'm with JJay here - this exchange is interesting to read and at the same time ignores the inherent vagaries and deficiencies in the early phases of any design. For a facility that will answer to so many public interests, to have it actually meet high energy efficiency and aesthetic goals will be a huge achievement. I look forward to seeing what will come of this process; budgets will prevail regardless of the idealism at hand, so the timeline may be extremely protracted.

[kyle]

Inhabitat did a short and more informative story on the OSC project with some different images.

http://inhabitat.com/2010/06/01/oregons-zero-energy-office-tower