120 San Pedro

BUCK and Residence's commitment to sustainability, design, and the health and wellbeing of its employees was a key focus as the company set out to find their new home. Located in Los Angeles’s Little Tokyo, the 48,000 sq ft global headquarters reflects this with its LEED Gold-certification, and innovative features on all 4 floors of flexible work, play, and collaborative spaces for 150+ employees, creative partners, and clients.

120 San Pedro is an interior office projected that uses a portion of an existing building (the top free floors as well as MDF rooms on the lower floors). This project boasts reduced embodied carbon, reduced energy and water consumption, enhanced lighting performance, and many other features that all contributed to the project being awarded LEED Gold.

The largest way the project contributed to reducing its embodied carbon is by opting to reuse an existing building rather than constructing a new building. Reusing a building saves on average 55-85% of the upfront carbon for a project. In addition to the building reuse, the project underwent a Life Cycle Assessment to account for the embodied carbon of the interior renovation. Collecting Environmental Product Declarations demonstrated the carbon footprint of each material. The project’s embodied carbon is 206,877.74 kg CO2e or ~19 kg CO2e/ m2. The average newly constructed office building has an embodied carbon of 230-320 kg CO2e/ m2. Through building reuse and sustainable materials, the project was able to achieve a large carbon reduction from benchmark values.

Located in downtown Los Angeles, the project is accessible by sustainable means of transportation. With bike facilities also provided, the team was able to reduce their parking footprint. These factors contribute to fewer single person vehicles, therefore lowering the emissions related to the building.

The mechanical, electrical, and plumbing systems have been optimized to reduce consumption. Through LEED v4 energy modeling, it was found that the project’s energy use is projected to be 21% lower than the ASHRAE baseline. Additionally, the project had an energy cost savings of 19%! Heating, cooling, fans, and interior lighting contributed to the savings. The project uses an existing water-cooled chiller and tower, in addition to new high performance heat pumps. The office’s fans and pumps are equipped with variable frequency drives (VFDs), allowing control of the amount of air and water to eliminate unnecessary consumption. Through all of these features the project achieves an EUI of 30 kBtu/ sqft.

Photo captions:

Image 1: The Winter Garden is an indoor-outdoor environment unlike any other part of the studio. Located at the highest level of the building, the space opens to long views of the Los Angeles skyline and beyond.

Enclosed by glassy walls and generously sized bi-folding doors, the Winter Garden is porous and transparent, visually connecting the workspace to the surrounding neighborhood. The suspended wood slat ceiling combined with generous planting envelopes occupants in an indoor garden.

Image 2: Open spaces filled with workstations feature throughout the can be seen adjacent to the Winter Garden.

Image 3: The Coffee Bar on Level 6 is positioned close to the communicating stair for employees to easily access from other floors. Open and informal, the Coffee Bar is a destination for taking breaks, gathering, and people watching. Its central position provides dynamic city views from multiple sides of the building. Acoustical felt ceiling baffles and a lush planter along the counter help define the space in an open work area. The communal table is sized to accommodate several people at once in a casual, easy manner.

Image 4: The communicating stair begins on L4 and exits on L6 adjacent to the Coffee Bar. The lush tiled planter that forms a backsplash at the Coffee Bar counter doubles as the separator to the stairs. Ample natural light and wrap-around views greet occupants as they ascend from L5 to L6. Generously sized, the stairs can comfortably accommodate people

moving in opposite directions. Steel plate guardrails though heavy and opaque appear to float since structural supports are recessed out of view.

Image 5: The communicating stair begins on L4 and exits on L6 adjacent to the Coffee Bar. The lush tiled planter that forms a backsplash at the Coffee Bar counter doubles as separator to the stair. Ample natural light and wrap-around views greet occupants as they ascend from L5 to L6. Generously sized, the stair can comfortably accommodate people

moving in opposite directions. Steel plate guardrails though heavy and opaque appear to float since structural supports are recessed out of view.