International Project Highlight - Armstrong World Industries, Building 701

This month, we are pleased to highlight Armstrong World Industries' corporate headquarters in the USA; an existing building from 1998 which was refurbished to best practice standards. The corporate HQ for Armstrong, who are also GBCA members, is also known as Building 701 and is located on a 700-acre campus in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. The three-storey, 11,705 square metre building houses 225 employees. Originally constructed in 1998, the glass and steel building consists of two wings connected by a daylit atrium. In 2006 the project earned an Energy Star label from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, and in 2007 it earned a Platinum rating in the U.S. Green Building Council's LEED for Existing Buildings Rating System.
Read more about this project on the USGBC website here.

One of the goals for the LEED certification process was to reduce the building's use of water. As a result, the project team installed waterless urinals, dual-flush toilets, and water sensors for the taps. The team also discovered a malfunction in the humidification process that was wasting more than 106,000 litres of water each year. In all, the project team nearly halved the building's use of potable water, reducing annual use from over 3,000,000 litres to just over 1,589,000 litres.

The building's narrow floorplate, combined with both interior and exterior lightshelves, allow daylight to reach more than half of the building's regularly occupied spaces, and occupancy sensors ensure that electric lighting is used only when rooms are occupied. The LEED certification was aided by the double-paned, argon-filled, low-emissivity glazing that covers 80% of the building's exterior. A campus-wide building automation system optimises energy use and provides continuous feedback on the building's performance. Armstrong purchases two million kilowatt-hours of wind power each year, enough to provide 75% of the project's electricity use.

Building 701 is landscaped with plants that require little maintenance and no irrigation, and a catch basin slows the rate at which stormwater is released into the adjoining wetlands. Armstrong invested US$138,000 on the strategies it implemented while pursuing LEED. Thanks largely to energy savings resulting from the process, however, the company believes it will recoup its investment within three years.