News: Arch Nexus SAC is LEED Double Platinum
Arch Nexus SAC, the adaptive reuse of a former print shop and warehouse and now home of our Sacramento office has become the first and only LEED Version 4 double Platinum certified project on the planet. This significant achievement was announced by the U.S. Green Building Council at the Green Building Hard Hat Awards hosted by Architectural Nexus, an annual USGBC celebration recognizing key policy leaders who drive forward California’s vision of healthy, efficient and high-performance buildings.
In 2017 the Arch Nexus SAC team earned LEED Version 4 Platinum certification for New Construction and Major Renovations (LEEDv4 BD+C). This month the project team and building occupants earned LEED Version 4 Platinum certification for Existing Buildings Operations and Maintenance (LEEDv4 EBOM). Different from LEED for New Construction, LEED EBOM requires teams to demonstrate actual performance by providing utility bills and other documents.
Platinum is the highest certification level in the LEED green building rating system. The current LEEDv4, is appreciably more difficult to achieve than the previous versions of LEED and raises the bar for LEED certification of the design, construction and operation of high performance buildings. “What in the former LEED version 3.0 would have been a LEED Platinum building would now be a LEED Gold building under LEED version 4.0”, says Patty Karapinar, Director of Sustainability at Architectural Nexus. Arch Nexus utilized the new Arc platform for its LEEDv4 EBOM submittal, a state of the art platform for visualizing and comparing the metrics and effectiveness of green building strategies and improvements over time.
The Arch | Nexus SAC Arc Dashboard utilized for tracking and visualizing performance of various sustainable metrics.
Brian Cassil, Director of Communications for Arch Nexus notes that “Through our experience with designing and occupying our own office in Salt Lake City, we knew that occupant engagement would be a critical aspect to achieving the verifiable performance needed for LEED for Exising Buildings and Operations in our Sacramento office. It was to ensure that we achieved our performance goals that we developed and employed the InHABIT platform”. InHABIT is a training platform that Arch Nexus developed in partnership with Sustain3 that “game-ifies” sustainable practices to create a culture of stewardship within an organization. Through use of InHABIT Arch Nexus’s occupants became the high performance occupants needed to keep a high performance building operating as designed. Without engaged occupants, it would be impossible to reach and maintain the highest levels of sustainability possible over the building’s life.
In May of 2018 Arch Nexus SAC became the first Living Building in California to be certified by the International Living Future Institute. Like LEED EBOM, Living Building certification requires proven performance. Arch Nexus President Kenner Kingston comments that “Many LEED buildings under-perform as compared to the optimistic energy models that are generated during design, but the pursuit of performance-based certifications such as Living Building and LEED EBOM help to create a realistic environment in which to test high-performance design ideas. What’s more, they prove that they actually work.”