Autodesk, Inc. (NASDAQ: ADSK) deepens its investment in sustainable operations, opening five new green office spaces this year in San Francisco, Milan, Beijing and Farnborough, UK. The company is targeting LEED certification for its new facilities, which would bring Autodesk’s total to 13 LEED-certified offices, covering 25 percent of its 1.8 million square foot real estate portfolio.
“At Autodesk, we are focused on accelerating sustainable innovation, and one way we do this to use our own facilities and operations as a testing ground for new ideas, workflows and solutions,” said Joe Chen, vice president of corporate real estate and facilities at Autodesk. “By using our own software to design and build these spaces, we’re not only reducing our greenhouse gas footprint, but also providing real working examples of sustainable design for our customers.”
New Spaces Feature Reduced Energy, Green Power and Repurposed and Recycled Materials
Each of the new office spaces is a major contributor to Autodesk’s environmental impact reduction strategy; most are powered by green energy, bringing renewables to nearly 30 percent of the company’s energy use. The office designs include reduced lighting energy requirements of up to 35 percent and increased ventilation efficiency of up to 30 percent as compared to American Society of Heating, Refrigerating and Air Conditioning Engineers (ASHRAE) standards. Many of the new spaces feature efficient plumbing fixtures, which can reduce water use by more than 40 percent over conventional fixtures. And all offices prioritize
re-used, recycled and locally sourced materials and furnishings, as well as utilize low- or no-VOC finishes. The spaces were all designed to meet or exceed LEED certifications.
Reducing Carbon Impacts through Sustainable Design Choices
Autodesk uses its own 3D design software to design collaborative, open office spaces for its more than 7,000 employees worldwide. Partly through the use of sustainable design in its real estate portfolio, Autodesk has been able to help reduce its greenhouse gas emissions by 33 percent since 2009.
In the company’s newly-opened San Francisco Steuart Tower space, cloud-based energy analysis powered by Green Building Studio within Autodesk Revit software helped ensure efficient design. In the UK’s new Farnborough office, an environmentally-focused design helped Autodesk save $1M in overall costs every two years. The project’s design partner used Autodesk 3ds Max Design visualization software to help create photorealistic renderings that helped educate employees about the new space, resulting in more working from the space than in previous offices. And in Beijing, the company’s new offices were designed with daylighting in mind, which will be modeled in Autodesk Ecotect Analysis to supplement the LEED submission process.
For many of the new office spaces, Autodesk and its design teams employed Building Information Modeling (BIM), an intelligent 3D model-based design process. BIM provides insight for creating and managing building and infrastructure projects faster, more economically, and with less environmental impact.