LEEDing the Way

Caltrans goes green for its new Marysville district headquarters

By Greg Aragon

Caltrans is known for roadwork improvement, but when the agency’s new $65 million District 3 headquarters opens this summer in Marysville, it will bring green features to town instead of black asphalt.

“Energywise, this building is currently about 21% better than Title 24 requirements,” says Richard Myren, project director for the State Department of General Services, which is in charge of construction. “For a standard office building that is a pretty good number.”

The 202,000-sq-ft design-build project is being led by the Sacramento office of New York-based Turner Construction Co. and Los Angeles-based AC Martin Partners, along with Clark Pacific of Sacramento. Construction broke ground in December 2006.

When complete in August, the project will replace the district’s 45,000-sq-ft, 71-year-old current headquarters building, located on the same site. Plans call for the old building to be demolished and a daycare center built in its place.

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The new five-story structure will facilitate 776 employees in loft-like open offices with high ceilings. There will also be a cafe, 200-seat auditorium, teleconferencing rooms and an outdoor surface parking lot with 350 spaces.

To fit in with the rustic motif of Marysville, which is located about 50 mi north of Sacramento, the building’s facade was covered with earth-toned brick and scaled down to three stories where it fronts the city street.

“The building is a bit more modern than most of Marysville, which is Gold Rush style, but we have nodded to that design by the use of brick on the wing that faces the public,” Myren says. “This is not downtown Los Angeles or San Francisco, so it needed to be something with a little more warmth and character.”

The facade may give the building a warm look, but the structure’s precast moment-frame design should keep things cool on warm days.

“The entire structure is pre-cast concrete beams, columns and floor plankings, so we have a lot of solar mass to even out temperature swings in the building,” Myren says.

He adds that this cooling aspect, along with a series of other environmentally friendly features, will help the building receive a LEED silver rating.

Other LEED elements include mature tree shading along the main entrance; recycled carpeting; and extensive daylighting with the help of high-performance glazing, light cells and a 4,800-sq-ft, four-story atrium canyon in the center of the building.

The atrium has a south-facing window system at the top to filter in natural lighting throughout the interior. It also utilizes exhaust fans to perform night flushing of air to increase air quality and cut down on air-conditioning usage.

“The [atrium] is probably the main attraction of the building,” says Doug Gearman, Turner project manager. He says it wasn’t necessarily difficult to construct, “but getting the right shoring in and building scaffolding all the way up to do the fifth floor had it challenges.”

The Project Team
Owner: Caltrans, Sacramento
General Contractor: Turner Construction, Sacramento office
Architect: AC Martin Partners, Los Angeles Moment Frame, Structural
Concrete: Clark Pacific, Sacramento
Structural Engineer: Englekirk and Sabol, Los Angeles
Plumbing HVAC: ACCO, Glendale
Electrical: Helix, San Diego