Sustainable Office Promotes Company’s Green Practices

BOSTON — Nitsch Engineering, a Boston-based civil engineering firm, recently moved into a new LEED Gold-designed office space at Two Central Plaza.

Boston-based Margulies Perruzzi Architects (MPA) designed the space to reflect the company’s commitment to green design in their own consulting services, as well as to provide a welcoming environment for clients, partners and staff.

“I will say that, unlike a lot of clients, getting the Gold for this client was really important and they were as much, if not more, of a driver than we typically are,” said Dan Perruzzi, a principal for MPA. “They really emphasized that they must achieve Gold, so we were constantly looking for ways to seek out additional points. Having them that deeply committed to it was a huge help throughout the design process.”

Nitsch Engineering was originally located in an office that split up the 80 employees on three different levels, so they looked for a site that would be large enough for everyone to work on the same floor, create more space for collaboration and allow for easy team realignments. The design strategy accommodated all of these by creating two types of zones. One was a private work zone with glass-fronted offices and low-walled workstations that created a lot of warm, natural light. The other was a public space at the front of the office, which was used for reception, technology-enabled conference rooms and training spaces for educational employee and client events.

“We designed a really great space for them that’s a combination of their office kitchen or pantry and training space,” said Perruzzi. “It is situated so it doesn’t disrupt the rest of the office when it’s being used, but because staff goes down there for coffee, they get to see what’s going on. I thought it turned out great because it’s an important part of what they do.”

The primary focus of the reception area is a feature wall made from bamboo wood, a rapidly renewable source. The feature wall makes the first major statement that the office is a sustainable space, while other parts of the design were also incorporated to achieve LEED. The site selection itself was a major part of the goal to attain LEED because it was nearby several public transportation modes, making mass transit much easier for staff. The furniture was reused from the old office, and gained the design a credit for material reuse. Other credits included optimized energy performance for lighting and the use of low-emitting materials. A LEED accredited professional from RM Environmental Consulting was part of the project and helped them get the 61 points the construction team needed to eventually achieve LEED Gold.

Although they recycled 95 percent of the site’s waste, the most difficult LEED points to achieve were the ones related to construction waste management because a lot of it was sorted off site.

“Different waste haulers do things differently. What we want is a tracked ticket for each component of construction waste. The USGBC really prefers everything to be sorted on site. When you don’t, you have to go through a lot of gymnastics to prove that there was a certain amount of tonnage in each of the primary categories,” Perruzzi said. “It’s also more difficult to set up bins on site with smaller projects. It’s tougher for them to do that but you have to carefully chart where all those categories of debris go. It put a lot of pressure on the waste hauler. It should be relatively simple, but I thought that one was pretty onerous frankly.”

Construction began in September 2012 and was completed four months later. Commodore Builders served as the construction manager, and the engineers that worked on the project were from WB Engineers; both companies are based in Boston.