Region Archives: US West

Google’s Sunnyvale facility promises 96% carbon reduction compared to traditional construction methods, marking shift in Silicon Valley architecture. Google has entered its third decade of environmental initiatives as the technology company pursues its target to eliminate carbon emissions from its global operations by 2030. …”We’re in our third decade of climate action and our programme and our plans are always evolving,” Adam Elman, Head of Sustainability EMEA at Google said. “We’re aiming for net zero by 2030 that’s supported by our goal to move to what we call 24/7 carbon-free energy.” …The latest demonstration of Google’s environmental strategy has emerged in Sunnyvale, California, where the company has unveiled its first mass timber office building. The facility represents a departure from Silicon Valley’s conventional glass and steel structures, and demonstrates the company’s evolving approach to sustainable construction. …Google sourced all structural timber from Forest Stewardship Council certified forests.

…Theresa Whitlock-Wild, whose husband Matt Wild was diagnosed with ALS about 10 years ago realized that one of their top needs was a safe, affordable environment that improved the quality of life for those afflicted with this degenerative disease. With the aim of advocating for and supporting people with ALS, they established the Matt’s Place Foundation. …”We learned something from [building Matt’s Place as a traditional stick-built house],” she says. “So we started the process of building Matt’s Place 2.0 in 2019 in Spokane, using CLT. The idea was to make it scalable and shippable anywhere around the country.” …Nevertheless, Matt’s Place 2.0 is only a milestone on a much longer road. Matt’s Place Foundation and its partners are already working on iteration 3.0, which will apply the same advanced materials and modular concepts to a multi-family building. The prototype unit will be a direct neighbor to the 2.0 house in Spokane.

My first reaction upon being invited to Denver’s Populus, which claims to be the country’s first “carbon-positive” hotel, was, admittedly, one of skepticism. After all, the transport, construction, and hospitality industries are among the most damaging to the environment, and the 265-room hotel, designed by award-winning firm Studio Gang and developed by Urban Villages, covers all those bases. …Another immediately confusing design choice was the building material: concrete, one of most carbon-intensive materials on the planet. …The concrete used for Populus is the proprietary ECOPact low-carbon mix by Holcim, which claims to have 30 percent lower carbon emissions compared to standard concrete. But why use concrete at all—particularly when mass timber, for example, is more sustainable, and often more durable? …But the existing building code did not allow timber for a 13-floor structure and the city was ultimately not comfortable issuing a variance.

San Diego — Unlike many of the prefabricated accessory dwelling units (ADUs) flooding the California market, the Polyhaus does not fit on a flatbed truck fully assembled. The polyhedron-shaped house was conceived by Daniel López-Pérez as a solution for expediently producing quality housing at scale in the smallest footprint possible, rather than as a rectangular box for ease of shipping. With his wife and Polyhaus LLC cofounder, Celine Vargas, López-Pérez built the first two-story, 540-square-foot proof-of-concept in 2024 in San Diego. López-Pérez, who is professor and architecture-program director at the University of San Diego, developed the Polyhaus system by starting with a simple cube and then repeatedly truncating the edges until he optimized the form for the largest volume and smallest footprint. The 440-square-foot ground floor includes a living room, kitchen, bathroom, and nook for a desk and washer/dryer, with the bedroom on the 100-square-foot mezzanine.

Los Angeles, California — US architecture studio Lever Architecture has renovated a former 1980s warehouse in Los Angeles, placing a new cross-laminated timber and steel office building atop its parking garage foundation. At 145,000 square feet 843 N Spring Street is located near Dodger Stadium in Chinatown and contains offices as well as retail space. “Technically a renovation, the project takes a windowless, 1980s-era retail warehouse with a parking garage underneath and grafts a new structure on top of it, creating one of the first and largest hybrid cross-laminated timber (CLT) buildings in Los Angeles,” said Lever Architecture. The building consists of two, four-storey wings placed on top of the garage. The wings flank an interior courtyard, atrium and walking path through its centre, with landscape design by Field Operations. …The building’s facade is clad almost entirely in glass, while its structure consists of 3- and 5-ply CLT panels and concrete slabs.

A material that’s been around since people built shelters – wood – is increasingly being proposed for low- and mid-rise buildings. …One way that researchers assess the environmental footprint of a product or service is called a life-cycle analysis, which calculates the cradle-to-grave impact. One life-cycle analysis found that using mass timber in a 12-story building in Oregon had an 18% lower global warming impact compared with constructing the building with steel-reinforced concrete. The carbon emissions benefits are even greater when comparing timber with steel. …Tree cutting is one of the most widespread disturbances in forests, yet, after accounting for all harvesting, fires, land use change and other disturbances, forests in the United States still remove a net 754 million tons of CO2 per year from the atmosphere, an amount equivalent to 13.5 percent of U.S. emissions. …To examine whether wood is sustainably sourced it is instructive to consider the economics of forest management.