Technology company Advanced Micro Devices’ (AMD) new “Lone Star” campus – located at 7171 Southwest Parkway in Austin – has been awarded LEED Gold certification from the U.S. Green Building Council, making it the largest LEED-certified corporate campus in Texas. The $190 million, 870,000-square-foot campus opened in January 2008 on a 59-acre tract in south Austin. Project elements include four four-story office buildings, three recessed parking garages and the Lone Star building, which features an employee fitness center, cafeteria, gourmet coffee bar, casual meeting space, outdoor decks and a gaming center with table tennis, billiards tables and video game consoles.
Austin-based Graeber, Simmons & Cowan served as the lead architect; Texas-based TBG Partners provided programming, site planning and landscape architecture services; Austin-based Paul Koehler Brown and Austin-based Jaster-Quintanilla served as the structural engineers; Austin-based Michael E. James &Associates served as the civil engineer; and Dallas-based Austin Commercial served as the general contractor.
AMD’s new Austin campus was designed to fit the specific needs of its employees and the local environment. To create the innovative site development plan, the project team embarked on an intensive design process known as a “charrette” and created a site plan based on three key tenets: reducing site impact, protecting water quality and using innovative sustainable design.
Some of the innovative design features resulting from this unique development process include:
- Green Site Planning & Building Materials: Site plans called for structured garages instead of open lots and compact buildings with limited footprints, reducing the amount of impervious cover used to 20 percent below the amount legally entitled. Its exterior consists of native stone and metal panels, providing aesthetic continuity for the campus, while expansive glass with solar shading allows daylight to penetrate the open office areas and provides employees with visual access to the natural setting. Approximately 43 percent of the land was left undeveloped.
- 100 Percent Texas Native Landscaping: AMD partnered with TBG Partners and Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center to identify ecological areas and to salvage the native trees, shrubs and grasses within the footprint of the campus’ roads and buildings. This natural vegetation was harvested prior to the project’s groundbreaking and replanted at the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center during construction of the AMD project. TBG’s design incorporated the salvaged plants to maximize preservation of the existing environment and to restore disturbed and failing ecological systems.
- Rainwater Collection: An innovative rainwater harvesting system was designed to collect rainfall from all roof surfaces, including the structured parking garages. The rainwater is collected, filtered and stored in two underground tanks equaling two million gallons. The collected rainwater is used to irrigate the site’s native landscaping and to supplement the potable water used in the campus’ energy-efficient cooling system.
- Sustainable Products: The design team utilized products that feature high amounts of recycled content and rapidly renewable materials to reduce energy, such as bamboo, certified wood grown in ecologically maintained forests, and concrete with a large percentage of fly ash, a waste byproduct of the coal industry. Finish materials and treatments were simplified throughout the campus in order to reduce waste, chemical pollutants and maintenance. Wherever possible, stains or clear coats were used instead of laminates, paints and coverings. In all, 75 percent of its construction waste was recycled.
Founded in Sunnyvale, Calif., in 1969, AMD came to Austin in 1979, building the company’s first U.S. chip manufacturing facility outside Silicon Valley. Today, Austin is home to AMD’s largest non-manufacturing campus and employs more than 2,500 people. AMD has a long history of environmental stewardship and corporate responsibility and has been recognized for its efforts by some of the most prestigious institutions. In 2008, the company received the annual Climate Protection Award from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency for continued commitment to energy-efficient product innovation, facility design and management and industry education.
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this seems kind of out of place, while LEED standards are worth recognizing it doesn’t change the fact that these are just another group of soulless corporate boxes. Maybe appropriate on a green building site for the technical accomplishment but little to no design merit that I can see
Boring work. This is a great example of “sensitive” corporate architecture. Twenty years ago it would have been a mirrored glass box in a golfcourse-like landscape. Now it’s a kind of neo-vernacular set of boxes.
This is a huge step up for a corporate campus. True, it might look banal or “soulless” compared to some A-List architecture, and its not stylistically revolutionary or hip (and for that I expect it will get its share of bashing on this site). That said, as an architect who frequently works for corporate clients, I am immensely glad that even a small number of projects are headed this way. Even his level of design and sustainable planning is rarely built in corporate America…and for that this project gets my praise.
I agree wholeheartedly that it is an important step to get corporate clients to invest in green building strategies, especially in the states where we are so far behind the curve. However I think even more than before that it is the responsibility of architects to be extremely critical of the design merits of LEED certified work, just because it is conscious of the environment does not mean it is improving the status of architecture as a design field in the US. If we were to take the standpoint that being green gets buildings off the hook for uninspired design we might as well throw in the towel all together and just hire engineers to run some optimization tools on a box and call it a day.
This gargantuan turdfest takes the proverbial cake in terms of banal tomfoolry. As someone who works with corporate clients on a daily basis, I say this architect was unwilling to push, nor even nudge the client in the right direction. Close this rat hole down before somebody calls the aesthetic police.
agree with plots and Gary…
I suspect that being LEED certified done in USA sacrifice inspiring piece of architecture…
for this issue we can look at some interesting works from Behnisch
I’d also say take a look at morphosis’ work on the San Francisco Federal Building. Naturally ventilated, employs a skip stop elevator, lighting energy draw reduced by natural lighting strategies, and use of recycled/green building materials at a truly large scale and all without sacrificing design.
As someone else who works with corporate clients on a daily basis, I know just how hard it is to achieve this level of design. I’m speaking strictly of aesthetics here, not environmental design. Aesthetic matters come down to opinions. When you call the “aesthetic police”, would you be surprised to learn that anyone can join that force? Like the people who work in and pay for those buildings? Its tempting to think that because we do this for a living and may have studied design for years, we should be the arbiters of ‘what looks good’. Keep in mind that aesthetic reactions are subjective.
there is a huge difference between aesthetics and good design. I’d reference Gehry’s building at MIT in this case, I personally find it to be one of the ugliest buildings I’ve ever seen, and it’s falling apart at the seams but the users of that building love it because of the intricate and careful way in which he organized and employed the space and the circulation.
There are plenty of beautiful algorithmic projects emerging from research firms and universities right now but many of them end up being simply beautiful math objects without any thought to the human condition. I will agree that aesthetics is a matter of opinion but only to a point, a masterfully designed building reaches that status because it is functional, beautiful, and well incorporated spatially and programmatically and there is simply no way to argue about it.
Furthermore the concept that we shouldn’t be arbiters of, “what looks good,” I also disagree with. If we based all our decisions on what the average person thought architecture was we’d be building neo-classical banks and contractor catalogue homes. It is exactly because we have committed ourselves to furthering architectural design that we are qualified to introduce them to new forms and spaces. Does that mean they will like them? No, of course not, but if they are well done the average person will likely be surprised by what they like and that, in my opinion, is when our job is done.
And the harm in having neoclassical banks would be ?
Yes, I too personally like more innovative solutions, but I
only have one vote. Like I said, I realize that in matters
of aesthetics we are merely voicing opinions.
In instances of mass-produced design there is generally an
effort to find out what the market wants, in terms of an
image. However, for most ‘one-off’work it comes down to what the owner and designer arrive at.
Don’t get me wrong, I love innovation, but many architects
take an arrogant and cavalier attitude toward most people’s
appreciation of what we would consider traditional or even
banal.
to the above:
“what look’s good” doesn’t have anything to do with architecture.
LEEDS of no LEEDS, this is so uninspiring.. 80′s architecture. easy to build, easy to design, boring.
The building was old fashioned. Try to have tacky modern touches. It’s insulting to spend much money on copying designs of the Bauhaus. With the amount of land have been some dead lying on the ground.
Pacoasako.
We’re getting caught up here in a great deal of pointless discussion, although plots seems to have a good handle on the issues thus far. I’d like to introduce another. Without getting into the discussion of whether LEED in general does more good than harm, does it not bother anyone else that we’re still building on these kinds of sites? And in this mode of programming (i.e. one use, office, built at least a considerable distance away from the city)? It seems this immediate failure is the biggest problem here. Banal design or not, this doesn’t belong here. How do people get here? how do they go get lunch? There are a lot of banal projects in, for instance, NY, but it doesn’t matter all that much because the city begins to work as a whole whether the design sucks or not. Even w/out being LEED accredited, the mere location does more towards that end than any possible budget here could recreate. I think that LEED really needs to address the site issue more seriously. At the extreme end, perhaps any non-urban site must immediately disqualify a project. I know, it’s the only way this office gets built. Land is too expensive in the city. But for LEED to be taken seriously, it cannot compromise on the real issues. Maybe if there was more of a reward for building this way, then these extreme measures could be taken. Maybe there are big LEED real estate tax breaks. Why not? it’s expensive for the city to maintain development far from the center, so tax breaks might make sense. or maybe, even better, there’s a new federal real estate tax on non-LEED projects that guarantees the success of the program even if the bar is raised considerably, as it needs to be. sorry for the lack of structure, this one really burned me up, and even more when i saw none of the comments discussed this.