| Sweet Sound of Building Green |
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By Kathleen Quilligan Once construction is completed on the new headquarters of Sweetwater Sound, Inc., it will be the first Gold-Level Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) Green Building in northeast Indiana.When our ancestors imagined the future, they pictured flying cars, teleporting ... and waterless urinals. Well, okay, maybe they didn’t imagine waterless urinals or those toilets that flush in two different ways to conserve water. But in one local company’s headquarters, the urinals and toilets are helping the building do its part to help the environment. We’re talking about the headquarters of Sweetwater Sound, Inc., located along U.S. 30 just west of Fort Wayne. It isn’t exactly a building of the future, but it comes pretty close. Once construction is completed at the end of 2007 and the certification process is complete, this will be the first Gold-Level Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) Green Building in northeastern Indiana. “Chuck [Surack, the company’s founder] has always been interested in green initiatives for his company. He was doing recycling and things before it was cool,” says Christopher Guerin, Sweetwater’s director of program development. LEED is a nationally accepted benchmark for the design, construction and operation of environmentally friendly buildings. Certification comes in a variety of levels, achieved by accumulating a certain number of points based on things like waterless urinals, environmentally friendly paint and carpet and motion-sensing lights — all of which the Sweetwater building has. Sweetwater, in case you don’t know, is a music equipment company that Surack started 28 years ago in his VW bus, before moving to a more permanent location. The actual address changed several times in the ’80s and ’90s. Two and a half years ago, the company decided to look for a new home and found it along U.S. 30, in half of the old North American Van Lines campus. From day one, Surack wanted a green building, and that’s exactly what he’s getting. When construction is complete, along with offices, a warehouse and store, the building will have recording studios, a glass-enclosed atrium, a 250-seat training theater, a restaurant and a health club.  Fourteen giant cylinders on the southwest side of the building store ice that’s made at night and used to cool the building during the day. Twenty percent of the building materials and 50 percent of the wood used in construction come from within a short distance of Fort Wayne, and much of the wood is either bamboo or other woods that regenerate quickly.Everything on the Sweetwater campus has been designed to accumulate enough points for the LEED certification, and while Surack has been able to include most of what he wanted in the building, he hasn’t gotten everything. Windmills, for example. “There’s just not enough wind in northeast Indiana to offset the cost. But that’s okay, I’ll do other things,” Surack says. While the initial cost of the building and the certification are expensive, Guerin says the company will make up the cost in a few years from savings in energy, water and electricity bills. Sweetwater is using nature in other ways to run the building, making Mother Nature a proud mom. For example, the offices are primarily lit with skylights. “It’s very creative and imaginative, using some technology that’s been around forever in a sophisticated way to make it work for us,” Guerin says. Jerry Noble, a partner with MSKTD Associates, the firm that designed the building, says the Sweetwater headquarters is the first LEED-certified building he’s worked on. “Now I kind of stare at Hummers a little more fiercely,” he says. Noble now brings up LEED aspects with his other clients. Some are receptive, and some aren’t; Noble says he’s pleased to be involved in a project that provides good stewardship. Surack has carried some of the building’s environmental friendliness over to his personal life. He’s renovating his home and is using bamboo in the process. The company gets points for educating the building’s users about the LEED certification, which is why visitors will see a sign by each bathroom that reads “Bathroom of the Future!” “It changes your approach to things,” Noble says. “We put in waterless urinals, and that made me not water my lawn this summer.” As Sweetwater’s new headquarters have shown, constructing a LEED-certified building impacts everyone who has a relationship with that building, not just because they’re working in rooms lit by sunlight or cooled by ice, but more because they’re confronted with a need to change the way they think about the environment as a whole. |
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| Last Updated ( Friday, 14 March 2008 09:18 ) |