Many developers would talk about a 356,00-square-foot build-to-suit in the language of net income and lease comps and rates of return. When Boston Properties executives talk about the firm’s Weston Corporate Center, which will become Biogen’s corporate headquarters next summer, they speak about responsibility, history and legacies.
The 75-acre Weston project will feature two eye-popping environmental components. The building’s wastewater will be treated on-site by a treatment plant that will be powered entirely by the state’s largest photovoltaic solar array. The office building intself, meanwhile, will be cooled with water from a giant quarry on the site. It will be the first time in the country that an office building is cooled with naturally cold water from a quarry, instead of a mechanical chiller.
Together, the amount of energy these systems will save will be equivalent to taking a neighborhood of 50 – 60 homes off the electric grid. Boston Properties expects the building’s core and shell to be certified at a LEED Gold level. Biogen is targeting the same distinction for their corporate interior.
Bryan Koop, Boston Properties’ regional manager, told Banker & Tradesman that the Biogen project does more than push the envelope in terms of building sustainable office environments. He believes the project illustrates a new way of constructing buildings – one that allows a development site to shape the buildings that rise atop it, rather than one that plugs standard architectural and engineering features into a site that has to be shaped to meet those standard features. Koop called it looking at development "on a holistic basis."
Highs And Lows
When it bought the Weston site, Boston Properties acquired a development parcel with immediate highway access, situated at the edge of the suburbs’ preeminent submarket. It was a site seemingly ready-made for a corporate headquarters. But the parcel also had significant environmental drawbacks. It was a brownfield. For 100 years, it had been the site of an active mining operation. The granite from its two quarry pits helped form the roadbed sitting under Route 128. Those pits, now filled with 1 billion gallons of fresh water, pockmark the site. Other developers saw them as significant site constraints – impediments that ate 20 acres of development land and needed to be worked around, or even capped with fill.
Boston Properties approached the site differently, Koop said.
The company begins its development projects by searching for opportunities to save electricity, water and solid waste, Koop said. "We start by asking, what do we have on-site? What’s unique? We can come in and be extremely thoughtful about the site. Others saw the quarries as liabilities. We saw 1 billion gallons of water. We asked, how can we use it in a sustainable way?"
Mike Cantalupa, Boston Properties’ senior vice president of development, said the Weston site is unique because, at a certain depth, water in one of the 400-foot-deep pits is consistently 40 degrees, year-round. It’s an ideal temperature for cooling an office building. If Boston Properties could figure a way to draw the water from the quarries to the Biogen building, it could save 1 million gallons of water per day, as well as the electricity a chiller plant would normally use to cool fresh water. The problem was figuring out how to get the water from deep inside the quarry to the offices next door.
Boston Properties looked at half a dozen systems for extracting water from the quarry, said Michael Schumacher, the company’s vice president for construction. None were feasible. They considered running a pipe down into the water from a barge above, but concluded that the force created by extracting the water would likely pull the barge underwater. They brought in a drilling team to look at drilling through the quarry wall 250 feet down; that option would have halted construction of the office building, and if the granite displaced by drilling ever shifted, it would permanently cut off the building’s water supply.
At one point, Koop said, the company was under pressure from its development partners. They wanted to get to work, and Boston Properties had no idea how to harness the quarry-cooled water.
"We were running out of time. They were asking, ‘Why can’t we use the old tried and true system?’" That’s when Dean Larson, Boston Properties’ regional engineering chief, gave a speech to a group of the firm’s young associates.
"He said, ‘There’ll be a point when you will regret not having figured out how to do this,’" Koop said. Within 24 hours, that group produced the design that Boston Properties is employing now: using a large, curved pipe to draw the water out to a pump house the way a straw pulls water out of a cup.
Loopy Idea
Naturally cool water will run from the pump house to the Biogen building and be run through a heat exchanger. That water will then run in a loop through the building. Spent water will return to the quarry cleaner than when it left. It’s a closed, completely renewable, cradle-to-cradle system. "It’s not brilliant technology," Koop argued. "It’s about thinking differently. The best innovations in life are the simplest. Instead of flushing water down the sewers, we can use it, clean it and return it to the environment."
Koop said Larson’s speech "was a good reminder that you don’t want to go back to the site and think, why didn’t we do something with the billion gallons of water? Real estate is tangible. You’re leaving a legacy. Dean touched on that." Koop added that, from his position as regional chief, the so-called straw design was a reminder that leadership in sustainability "can’t just be from the top."
The Weston Corporate Center builds on a pattern of green development for Boston Properties. Its 31-story Atlantic Wharf tower in Boston, also under construction now, will harvest rainwater for cooling and irrigation. 77 CityPoint in Waltham, a LEED Silver building that came online last year, was the region’s first speculative green development. The 210,000-square-foot office building was delivered fully leased.
Green construction, Cantalupa said, is "becoming more and more important to more and more tenants." Younger employees are demanding it of their superiors. Phase Forward, the anchor tenant at 77 CityPoint, uses its building as a recruiting tool. And established firms are incorporating sustainability into their corporate responsibility missions. Wellington Management, the anchor at Atlantic Wharf, was drawn to that building’s sustainable design features. The Weston Corporate Center’s green features mesh perfectly with Biogen’s corporate mission of courageous innovation.
Savings On Savings
And the icing on the cake, Cantalupa said, is that sustainable design drastically cuts buildings’ operating costs. Boston Properties has taken those savings and built them into lower lease rates.
"It’s important to our customers. It’s important to our shareholders and to us as a company. It’s a tremendous way to differentiate ourselves and drive value," Koop said. "But the primary reason is, it’s the right thing to do. We’re not a company that chases fads. This is something that’s very important. And it’s about to change our industry."
Some developers have had difficulty bridging from green building’s higher up-front costs to the long-term savings that sustainable design allows. Boston Properties has bridged that gap by operating the way the company has operated since its inception – as a long-term holder and operator of real estate.
"Our favorite holding period is forever," Koop said. "It allows us to operate our real estate in a different way. If we went in thinking we’d hold the property for two years and then flip it, we’d have to ask, is the hassle of a deep-water cooling system worth it? If you’re only looking at a 24-month payback period, very few things work. If you have a longer ownership period, it opens up the world to you in terms of sustainability."
