2011 Who’s Who of Green Miami Office Buildings

Last year in September 2010, I wrote a blog about green buildings in Miami and frankly, the list was short.  Now just over a year later, the number of office buildings that have earned their LEED certification has risen exponentially.  Here is the new list for 2011 of LEED-certified office buildings in Miami.

Let’s quickly recap what the two main types of LEED-certification we have for office buildings in Miami.  The first is Core & Shell (C&S).  This is for new building construction.  According to U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC), “Core and shell covers base building elements such as structure, envelope and the HVAC system. LEED for Core & Shell is designed to be complementary to the LEED for Commercial Interiors rating system, as both rating systems establish green building criteria for developers, owners and tenants.” This means that the interior build-out (aka the tenants’ offices) could be green, but don’t have to be. It also does not address how the building is operated on a day-to-day basis. For that, we go to our next definition.

Existing Building Operations & Maintenance (EB) according to USGBC  “addresses whole-building cleaning and maintenance issues (including chemical use), recycling programs, exterior maintenance programs, and systems upgrades. It can be applied both to existing buildings seeking LEED certification for the first time and to projects previously certified under LEED for New Construction, Schools, or Core & Shell.” That’s interesting. A new building could be LEED certified in two different categories.  Typically a building first obtains its Energy Star rating and monitors its systems for at least a year for benchmarking before beginning this process.

These buildings have one common element – good design.  Good design enables buildings to run efficiently and easily obtain to these certifications.  Congratulations to all those property managers who put in a lot of hard work towards these awards.