111 S. Wacker

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Location

111 S. Wacker Map

Developer
The John Buck Company

Architect
Goettsch Partners

111 S. Wacker is a 53-story, 1.46 million sf speculative office tower completed in 2005 and was the first building ever to receive LEED for Core and Shell Gold certification. The project has won several awards and been the subject of varied media coverage. The building was sold earlier this year to a German investment fund, reportedly for a Chicago record-breaking $400/sf. Although the green building community would like to tout the building's greenness as contributing to this sales prices, Buck has stated they do not believe this is the case. Rather, the developer sees LEED certification here as a test case for future projects.

Like 1 S. Dearbon, this project demonstrates that the highest-qualiity commercial office buildings can easily earn LEED certification. The developer has made a point of stating that they did not go to any great ends, or significant added expense, to earn the certification. However, I believe this simply displays the wide disparity in the building market - there's a big difference in expectations for a retail strip mall or big box store and Class A+ downtown office space. To some extent, green building is about raising expectations for some of the smaller buildings at the bottom of the food chain (yes, there's more to it, but it's a start).

Notably, there are no real gee-whiz green features on this project; instead there are typical features such as green roofs, low-flow faucets and urinals, native plantings, recycled-content materials, and low-VOC paints and carpeting. Like any new office tower, the glass is energy-efficient and a reasonably efficient (but not exotic) mechanical system is used. Of course, also like most new office towers in downtown Chicago, irresponsible electric resistance heating is used (see 1 S. Dearbon for my rant).

The building's foundation reuses existing caissons from the USG building formerly on this site - to some extent this is a green feature because it does save large amounts of concrete. Obviously this is a major cost saver as well - building reuse is one place where being green usually contributes to the bottom line on day one. The tenant spaces have very large column-free spans, helping to maximize the potential for daylight and views (tenants still have to provide an appropriate interior design to take advantage of this).

Joe Cliggott of Goettsch Partners points out that one challenge of green high-rise projects is the rate at which green products are evolving - a project like this is more than 3 years in design and construction, and there are now many products available that weren't three years ago. In addition, the project does include a green roof at a very high elevation - many developers question Chicago's green roof requirements for projects of this height. Here, the design team did additional research to make sure the green roof could withstand the winds at this elevation. Considering that many plants selected for green roofs have alpine origins, it's reasonable to expect that with appropriate design, a survivable green roof is possible.

Other project team members include general contractor Bovis Lend Lease, MEP consultant ESD, LEED consultant Drew George & Partners, and MEP design-build subcontractors Hill, Gibson, and Great Lakes.

Comments

[Kevin Pierce]

Erik, There are lots of interesting things about this building, but the notion that column-free spans do much for daylighting opportunities seems wrong. The lease spans (distance from core to windows) on buildings like this are typically 35 to 40 feet. Office ceilings top out at about 9 feet and that further impedes light penetration. Even with light shelves (not present here) and tall ceilings (are they much taller here?), penetration at a usable level is unlikely to be more than 25 feet. Columns are also unlikely to interfere with LEED points related to views since all that is required is a straight-line shot to some amount of vision glass.

[Erik Olsen]

Thanks Kevin for your comments - thanks for calling me on this, I feel I wrote this bit in haste pulling from other materials. I'd say the main idea, not unique to this building, is that in most floor-to-ceiling glass towers, there is some opportunity for daylighting in that first 25 feet, and even then the tenant must design the interior space carefully to control the available light.

And let's not forgot most serious daylighting techniques, like cool daylighting, avoid too much glass.