by Russell Boniface
Associate Editor

How do you . . . design a sustainable, architecturally appealing facility to house a city’s water lab, utility network, and emergency operations center?

Summary: Pasadena, Calif.-based Gonzalez│Goodale Architects is seeking LEED® Gold certification for the 35,000-square-foot Pasadena Department of Water & Power Building, now under construction on a maintenance yard owned by the city. The $10 million facility will house the city’s water quality lab and utility network, as well as an emergency operations center. Gonzalez│Goodale’s design has received a Merit Award from the AIA Pasadena and Foothills chapter.

Gonzalez│Goodale Architects designed the Pasadena Department of Water & Power Building to meet LEED Gold criteria. The building will include the city’s relocated water quality lab and utility network. Also in the facility will be an expanded emergency operations center, where police and fire department officials can meet in the event of a disaster. The building, the second phase of a project, complements the first-phase project: a renovated, 1940s brick and plaster warehouse directly opposite.

Site constraints; complementing the warehouse
The Pasadena Department of Water & Power Building is sited on a maintenance yard that stores cranes and cables. “The site posed constraints,” says Jaime Olmos, Assoc. AIA, the project designer. “In addition to the existing warehouse and office space, to the east there are houses, to the north needed to be the parking, to the south is a public works building, and to the west we needed to maintain a thoroughfare for fire department trucks. That essentially shaped the shell design of the new building. We maxed out the box shape in all dimensions, even the height limitation.”

Olmos says the architects enhanced the relationship with the existing warehouse building by directly lining up the new building with it and creating a pedestrian space between the two structures. ”We like to think of the new building as a ghost of the existing warehouse, in that it picks up and reinterprets the vertical proportions,” he explains. “We used perforated metal screens to dissolve the building around the edges and blend it with white plaster and panels for a subtle camouflage coloring and patterning. It provides visual interest and also filters the light and creates different levels of depth and perceptions, even though it’s a simple box.”

Sustainable strategies for LEED Gold
Olmos says that the City of Pasadena wanted the Power and Light Building to be a sustainable pilot project that would serve as a role model employing LEED Gold design strategies. Its features include a perforated photovoltaic canopy that provides shelter for trucks and offsets 10 percent of the building’s energy consumption, a light-colored pervious paving to capture rainwater and reflect heat, native trees and landscaping around the building, a green roof, extensive daylighting, light shelves that can go through the perforated metal, skylighted atrium spaces, and a clerestory in the conference room with roll-down shades. “At the entry, as a symbol of water and power, we have a perforated screen that will drip rainwater into a pool,” Olmos says. “It has symbolic resonance, and provides cooling and visual interest.”

To promote sustainable transportation, bicycle racks will be installed and preferred parking is provided for vanpools, carpools, and hybrid vehicles Thirty percent of the project’s materials will have recycled content, and 10 percent will come from within 500 miles of Pasadena. Half of the wood will come from sustainably harvested trees, and 75 percent of construction waste will be recycled.