Enermodal Engineering’s headquarters, A Grander View, has become the first LEED Canada triple Platinum building with certifications in the New Construction (NC), Commercial Interiors (CI), and Existing Buildings: Operations & Maintenance (EB:O&M) rating systems. This is also the first ever LEED Canada EB:O&M Platinum certified project.
A Grander View received its NC and CI Platinum certifications in June 2011. A Grander View was awarded 61 of 70 NC points and 50 of 57 CI points – this is the most CI points ever achieved by a Canadian project. The building also achieved all 10 LEED NC Optimize Energy Performance points and an Energy Star score of 100 (meaning it performed better than 100 per cent of its peers in the Energy Star database of hundreds of North American buildings).
The EB:O&M Platinum certification was received in November 2011 since buildings are not eligible for this rating system until they have been operation for at least a year. EB:O&M certifications must be renewed at least every five years. A Grander View received 88 of a possible 110 EB:O&M points.
Enermodal also recently won the 2011 Livable Building Award from the Center for the Built Environment (CBE) at the University of California, Berkeley. The award was based on two elements: results from an occupancy survey of Enermodal employees working at A Grander View (with the results compared to a database of hundreds of occupancy survey results from buildings across North America) and an award submission that outlined the green building features.
Research Specialist John Goins, who leads the Indoor Environmental Quality research at CBE, says that “the scores for the finalist buildings this year were exceptional, they compare well against all the buildings that have been surveyed in the past.” He observed that building industry professionals are increasingly making a greater effort to provide good workplace environments, and that the CBE survey is a useful tool for getting feedback about buildings. “I saw a recent article entitled ‘buildings are for people,’ that sums it up for me,” he says.
The project has won several other awards in the past year, including
- selected as one of two buildings that represent Canada at the Sustainable Buildings Challenge in Helsinki in October 2011
- Tree for Life award from the Association of Consulting Engineering Companies
- Award of Distinction from the Ontario Building Envelope Council
- Livable Building Award from the Center for the Built Environment
- Urban Design Award from the City of Kitchener
- Healthy Workplace Gold Award from the Region of Waterloo’s Project Health program