Long before transforming into Los Angeles’ first LEED CI Platinum building, our showroom had a past. Located in Culver City, the building began its life as a cloth diaper manufacturer in the mid 1950’s. As the area changed and manufacturing left, the building lay unused until a becoming a warehouse for mens’ suits in the 1980s.

When Herman Miller purchased the building in 2007, the there were few people who questioned the decision. In order to meet our environmental standards, both the structure and the interior required extensive renovation. Design by TVS Design, 20 percent of all materials used were made with 500 miles of the site, and 85 percent of all construction was recycle and diverted from the landfill. These, among many other efforts, resulted in the building being honored with LEED Gold certification and the interiors with Platinum–the first, and still only, Platinum commercial interior in LA.

Herman Miller is the first major contract furniture manufacturer to incorporate ecoScorecard into its product catalog. Its goal is to improve the time it takes to deliver environmental documentation to end users such as building owners, architects, designers, and product specifiers.

Like most of the business world, we see Herman Miller as a leader in sustainable business practices. It recognizes that ecoScorecard can help all manufacturers make the documentation process easier. In fact, the company is working with us to get other firms in the commercial interiors market to use the platform. And this isn’t about just Herman Miller or a competitive advantage. Its President and CEO, Brian Walker, and Environmental team all want the hassle of the documentation process to become a thing of the past for the entire building industry.

This summer and fall, we’ll be visiting architecture and design firms to share more information about the benefits of ecoScorecard. Send us an e-mail if you’d like to know more about these events.

355 11th Street (Aidlin Darling Design) San Francisco: Reuse of a historic industrial building; Califoria’s first LEED Gold Building.

Homer Science & Student Life Center (Leddy Maytum Stacy Architects) Atherton, CA: Natural ventilation, daylighting, a green roof, solar panels, and a virtual dashboard that shows energy and water consumption in real time; LEED Platinum.

King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, Thuwal, Saudi Arabia: The country’s first LEED certified project and the world’s largest LEED Platinum project.

Kroon Hall, (Centerbrook Architects and Planners; Hopkins Architects), Yale University, New Haven, CT: Replaces a brownfield with a net zero energy building.

Manassas Park Elementary School + Pre-K (VMDO Architects, P.C.) Manassas Park, VA: The building is a teaching tool; its sustainable design is integrated with the curriculum.

Manitoba Hydro Place (Smith Carter Architects and Engineers; Kuwabara Payne Mckenna Blumberg Architects) Winnipeg, MB: A “living building” that dynamically responds to the local climate (b-r-r-r).

Omega Center for Sustainable Living (BNIM Architects) Rhinebeck, NY: Environmental education facility and a net zero energy system, featuring natural wastewater treatment.

Special No. 9 House (KieranTimberlake) New Orleans: Affordable housing with customizable, sustainable options for the devastated Lower Ninth ward.

Twelve West (ZGF Architects LLP) Portland, OR: ZGF’s office is a living lab of urban sustainability; expected to earn LEED Platinum.

Watsonville Water Resource Center (WRNS Studio LLP) Watsonville, CA: A functional, educational, and visual extension of the water recycling plant it supports.

The nutshell idea for Programmable Environments (PE) is to use technology to fill new or existing buildings with intelligence. The building becomes a digital network so that permanent fixtures become adaptable. You can make them do exactly what you need them to do at any moment, change them instantly, and gather real time information about how they are used.

And it’s easy. Here’s the story:

In 2007, Herman Miller established a subsidiary called Convia, which serves as a platform for PE. Convia offers a modular electrical distribution system that can be programmed—a fundamental breakthrough in how power is distributed and managed in buildings. The Convia system enables the virtual “rewiring” of a room, floor, or building in just minutes.

With Convia, it’s simple to control energy consumption and ambient effects, including lighting, climate, acoustics, security, and data management. It’s like a digital nervous system that senses human presence, automatically generates appropriate responses, and provides reports that quantify performance, efficiency, and energy consumption and expenditure.

Those reports will show that you save energy and money. Convia controls typically cut electrical usage in half. As a result, Convia can help your project qualify for American Reinvestment and Recovery Act funds—in other words, stimulus money. Plus, Convia may contribute up to 23 points toward LEED Certification.

Convia is making buildings smarter all over the country, including the U.S. Green Buildings Council headquarters in Washington, DC—a showcase for resource-efficient, sustainable design.

Horst is the senior VP for certification at the U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC). It’s the nonprofit that administers the LEED program. Measuring a building’s performance once it’s built is an “absolute priority” for Horst and the USGBC. Speaking to The New York Times, he said, “Ultimately, where we want to be is, once you’re performing at a certain level, you continue to be recertified.”

The emphasis on measuring a building’s energy performance follows the release of the LEED v3 standard earlier this year. It requires that all new projects report actual performance data. Until v3, LEED certification was based solely on models that predicted the building’s energy performance. How to bring those existing certified buildings into the measurement fold is a thornier question that will take time for the USGBC and its members to sort out.

Meantime, the USGBC is walking its talk. Its recently completed headquarters building in Washington, DC, uses Herman Miller’s Convia products. They measure, monitor, and track the building’s energy consumption in real-time. Another way others are measuring is with Energy Manager. It controls two of the four circuits of power in a cluster of Herman Miller workstations, turning anything plugged into them off when people leave.

Tools like these are essential if LEED is to address a problem its own study uncovered last year. Of 121 new buildings certified through 2006, 53 percent didn’t qualify for the Environmental Protection Agency’s Energy Star label.

By Randall Braaksma

In 1985, Herman Miller decided to combine all of its design and development-related activities, then scattered in four different buildings, in one facility. Good idea. But where?

One executive proposed casually that we build on a 40-acre rural site we owned. “That’s a perfectly good cornfield,” came the stern reply. “We had better be sure we know exactly what we’re doing before we mess it up.”

After a good deal of soul searching and with help from architect Jeff Scherer, we did decide to build in the country. The question became, What form should this “office complex” take?

It became Scherer’s job to help us find a way to fit in. The final design became something that evoked a Midwestern farmyard. Like the schoolyard and the shipyard, the farmyard is a place where learning and work have coexisted productively for centuries. We wanted to honor that tradition.

Then came the construction. Having been mindful of our neighbors and the land, we also wanted to build smart. The Design Yard, as it was dubbed, cost $52 per square foot to build, inexpensive by any standard.

As popular with employees today as it was when it opened, the complex is also an award-winner (Progressive Architecture magazine, one of the top 15 designs of 1988). In 2005, an addition called the Front Door brought executive leadership to the site so that they could be closer to the design and development action. It earned LEED Gold Certification from the U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC).