Office’s ‘Showroom of Design’ honored with award that recognizes excellence in high-performance building design, environmental stewardship, and community impact.
The University of Maryland, Baltimore’s (UMB) Office of Design and Construction (D&C) has been honored with a U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC) Maryland 2020 Wintergreen Leadership Award. The award recognizes excellence in high-performance building design, environmental stewardship, and community impact while highlighting the green building initiatives and achievements of projects, businesses, and community members in Maryland.
UMB’s entry won in the category of Green Schools-Higher Education, highlighting D&C’s 15,450-square-foot office suite that’s located on the sixth floor of the Lexington Building. The suite, built in 2018, serves as a “Showroom of Design” to inspire D&C’s clients at UMB and four other University System of Maryland schools (Coppin State, Towson, University of Baltimore, and University of Maryland, Baltimore County).
UMB University Architect Anthony Consoli, AIA, LEED AP, says D&C was thrilled to win the award, and he thanked the project’s Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) consultant, Diana Gutierrez of Straughan Environmental, for encouraging the office to apply for it. “Her team worked back and forth with us on the application with multiple drafts and photos,” Consoli says. “This was a very pleasant surprise because there were several very deserving and noteworthy entries submitted for the USGBC Maryland 2020 Wintergreen Leadership Awards.”
In its application, D&C highlighted the sustainable strategies it used in the project, including a self-watering green wall that turbo-filters the air in that part of the office, a layout that maximized shared daylight, energy-saving LED lamps in light fixtures, and floors that are made of cork, bamboo, non-vinyl linoleum, concrete, and recycled rubber. (Read more about the office and see photos here.)
“The office relocation project’s primary educational goal was to create an inspiring showroom of design and sustainability, and it has been extremely successful,” the application noted. “This is evident from the positive and energized reactions of UMB’s university clients and colleagues who have toured the new D&C offices since the summer of 2018.”
In the award presentation, USGBC noted that the D&C’s office’s layout “shares daylight throughout the space, which also features an interior green wall and renewable or recycled finish materials. The campus’ energy monitoring system has shown that the daylighting and smart LED lighting systems have significantly reduced energy use in the finished space.”
Office space, while always an investment, is meanwhile the place we spend more than a half of our waking hours and, crucially, a much higher share of our daylight hours — a place too commonly ill-adapted for basic human wellness, or likewise for coherent forms of interaction: in short, ill-adapted for “habitation.”
D&C Executive Director Terry Morse, MS, was invested in creating an office that would foster collegiality by providing daylit open spaces, ample collaborative areas, and a department-wide meeting venue. Beginning with that vision, the goal of the design was to address qualitative needs by providing a space with shared access to daylight, natural and tactile materials, relatable spatial organization, access to areas conducive to collaboration, and other areas for quiet, concentrative work: features well-adapted to wellness, collegiality, and productivity. The USGBC award is a welcome validation of the design conceptualization and process.
(In photo, from left: Anthony Consoli, Maria Prawirodihardjo, Andrew Mundroff, and Terry Morse)