Holland — The elusive platinum certification for Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design is a first for Haworth Inc. — and a first for a planning process the company is marketing as a service for clients.
United States Green Building Council recently presented Holland-based Haworth with a LEED Platinum certification for its Atlanta showroom. The design and construction of the space involved a team including Holland-based firm GMB Architects, which has worked with Haworth on showrooms in several U.S. cities.
The 8,000-square-foot Atlanta showroom is on the ground floor of Terminus 200, a 25-story tower. The ground-floor showroom features a private entrance, an exterior courtyard and floor-to-ceiling windows with daylight and city views.
The tower as a whole has a LEED Gold certification. But Haworth wanted more.
Meeting with GMB Architects and other companies working on the project, “we said, we would really, really like to obtain the platinum award,” said Lydia Knowles, marketing and social responsibility manager for Haworth.
The group hit the platinum mark without going over budget. But, more to the point, Knowles and Steve Kooy, Haworth’s global sustainability manager, said it did so not by simply chasing points on LEED score card, but by using a Haworth trademarked work process, called mindshift.
Mindshift involves a certain set of design ideals and group collaboration between designers, clients and construction companies early on in the planning process, according to Haworth.
“In a traditional construction model, (the process is) very linear, and … you never have that roundtable effect,” Knowles said. Haworth has the process trademarked as a service for outside clients.
One result of the process, Kooy said, was that the team could design the showroom that needed a limited amount of lighting and that used a heating and cooling system that was efficient at handling energy.
“If you work together at the very beginning, you can design a system,” he said.
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