Amazon Blocks
Seattle, WA
Seattle’s largest employer continues the sustainable development of South Lake Union targeting LEED Gold® for its office buildings
Amazon.com, one of Seattle’s largest employers, has been consolidating its offices in the South Lake Union area of Seattle since 2006. Building on many years of work on the sustainable development of South Lake Union, Vulcan Real Estate and Amazon.com set a goal of achieving LEED® Core and Shell (LEED-CS) Gold Certification for all buildings in the first 2 phases of the project. O’Brien360 was the LEED and sustainability consultant for all five buildings in those phases, all of which successfully earned LEED Gold certification under v2.0.
O’Brien360 then partnered with Vulcan to work on the next three buildings on the Vulcan/Amazon.com campus. For the first of those buildings, O’Brien360 conducted an analysis of the first round of buildings certified and how the new projects could continue to earn LEED Gold under LEED v3.
All three building projects used an integrated team approach, bringing the design teams together for design planning sessions, emphasizing energy efficiency, and conducting detailed Energy Efficiency Measure analyses early in design. All three projects earned LEED Gold in 2015 and 2016.
The buildings in the first two phases were designed by Callison and NBBJ and built by GLY Construction. The next three buildings were designed by ZGF, Graphite Design Group, and NBBJ and constructed by GLY and Turner.