Metropolis - January Sample 2008

Building #1 is a simple box with an open plan subdivided by wooden focus rooms. Three additional buildings are under construction.

we were looking for: a building where employees are pleased to come to work in the morning and still smiling when they leave at night.”

This wasn’t just kindness but corporate necessity. At the time, Navy Federal’s turnover rate for telephone operators surpassed 60 percent annually. Ebbesen’s primary task for the new building was to turn that around. But he had no corporate checklist for environmental happiness—until he realized that LEED would be close enough. “Once we started going down through the point structure, it helped us make decisions that would continually reflect on this idea of ‘employee focus,’” Ebbesen explains. “We used the LEED template for discipline.” Today Navy Federal’s Heritage Oaks campus, in Pensacola, Florida, has a turnover rate of 17 percent and is expanding so fast that Ebbesen has his superiors eyeing the property next door.

When did this become the story of green? Architects and corporate facilities managers will often

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Ebbesen had never even heard of LEED. “But I knew what we were looking for,” he says. “A building where employees are pleased to come to work in the morning and still smiling when they leave at night.”

look across a table and—garnishing their declarations with an anecdote about a trip to the rain forests or something desperate their teenage daughter said—proclaim that green is the right thing to do, that green will pay for itself in energy savings, that green will serve as a highly visible symbol of their organization’s commitment to an optimistic future (and their shareholders too). All are undoubtedly valid motivations. But the confounding surprise of Navy Federal’s Heritage Oaks campus—designed by Atlanta’s ASD—is that they are saying none of those things while doing all of them. In an attempt to improve the quality of the work

Above: Light sensors adjust dim-mable Lutron fluorescent ballasts and automatic shades.

Far left: The focus rooms help break up the huge expanse of open-plan workstations. Left: As part of the employee-centered design, the campus includes outdoor seating areas and a walking trail.