GLUMAC - Engineers for a sustainable future

Glenn Claycomb, P.E., LEED^® AP,
San Francisco Associate Principal

When Swinerton, Inc., a San Francisco-based construction and management company, purchased the building at 260 Townsend Street in San Francisco for its corporate headquarters, Glumac was its doubly natural choice for utilities and tenant improvement engineering. Glumac is a leader in sustainable engineering, and designed the original building twenty-five years ago.

Swinerton wanted to apply their sustainable building expertise to their own project. They used sustainable demolition and construction techniques, encouraged the use of renewable materials and finishes, and supported utilities improvements to reduce energy consumption. Since the LEED^®-EB program was in its pilot phase, the design and construction team of Swinerton Builders, IA Interior Architects, and Glumac worked closely together to explore opportunities in this new field.

Glumac modeled the building’s energy consumption, compared it to the benchmark for similar buildings, and established that its energy efficiency and performance beat the benchmark by 12 percent. It also, naturally, met California’s energy requirements for new buildings.

We designed a separate cooling tower and condensing water system to support spot cooling needs, allowing the main building air conditioning system to use San Francisco’s naturally cool air for the building, and to be turned down or off during unoccupied hours.

We also designed charging stations for electric vehicles, separate metering systems for monitoring power consumption, and provided calculations and documentation of indoor air quality performance, thermal comfort standards, and lighting performance.

Actually, it was not hard for the utilities systems to earn the points leading to LEED^®-EB Gold certification, because they had been so well designed in the first place. We have always engineered for energy efficiency and sustainability as a matter of course.

Glumac now has 42 LEED^®Accedited Professionals. We are proud to compare ourselves to the July 2004, Building Design & Construction Survey, where 15% was the highest reported nationwide. Our employees are committed to sustainable engineering!