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June 18, 1999



King Street Center demonstrates environmentally friendly design, construction and operations features

  • King Street Center is a 327,000 square foot office building — with retail space and a parking garage—located at 201 S. Jackson Street, Seattle, WA 98104.
  • The building is the first public-private development project undertaken in King County. King County Department of Natural Resources (DNR) and Department of Transportation (DOT) are tenants for the new building, developed by Wright Runstad. Lease Crutcher Lewis is the general contractor. DCFM was King County project lead.
  • The building is Seattle's "greenest" structure to date.
  • DNR, along with DOT and DCFM, took the lead in ensuring that progressive, environmentally friendly approaches were used in the King Street Center's design, building, and operation, despite the fact that none of these features were included in budget or preliminary design.
  • The building interior will be completed this summer, although employees have started moving in to completed floors.
  • The public agency and private partnership has resulted in a project on the cutting-edge of resource conservation that will create greater public awareness about the benefits of reused and recycled materials in construction projects.
  • The building will accommodate approximately 1,450 employees and provide 500 parking spaces.
  • Lighting is sensor-controlled, using sweep and occupancy sensors, and dims or brightens according to outside natural light. This system is the most energy-efficient to date in Seattle, using a maximum of .86 watts per square foot — 28.4% under the energy code levels.
  • Other recycled building materials include the West coast's largest installation of renewed carpet tile (32,000 square yards), recycled glass-content flooring, and concrete tile made with recycled glass from Mexican beer bottles.
  • The paint is recycled and/or low VOC (Volatile Organic Compound). The recycled paint is made with 50-80%-recycled material from leftover commercial and residential sources through community hazardous waste collection programs.
  • Low VOC adhesives, furnishings finishes, and cleaning supplies have been utilized.
  • Elevator lobbies will serve as "laboratories" to test product performance, including numerous brands and types of recycled-content floor coverings and paints.
  • Rainwater is collected by an on-site water reclamation system and stored in three water tanks in the basement. Normally, this site storm runoff and groundwater would go into the sewer system, but instead is reused for flushing toilets. Once collected and stored, the water is filtered and pumped up to toilets throughout the building. The annual water savings is estimated at 1.4 million gallons, and county analysts predict that rainwater will supply 60 to 80 percent of water used for flushing.
  • Building recycling and waste prevention programs and employee education will focus on resource conservation, including the facilitation of recycling mixed paper, metals, plastics, glass, printer cartridges and polystyrene.
  • Dishwashers exist in every employee breakroom to encourage reduction of paper waste in the building.
  • Bicycle storage room has rack space for 80 bikes to encourage pollution-free commuting.
  • A high-efficiency air filtration system is used. Main rooftop air handling units are provided with enhanced, 60% capability outside air filtration over the 30% commonly used.
  • Carbon dioxide sensors provided in system to allow indoor/outdoor air mixture to be more closely monitored by building engineers.
  • Copy rooms are stacked, and the exhaust is continually moved outside the building to eliminate particulates from copier toners.

Recycled Materials

80 % of the construction and site materials were recycled, including:

Concrete without Rebar 3,832 tons

Contaminated Soil 2,351 tons

Steel 44 tons

Railroad Ties 1 ton

Used imported crushed concrete for temporary roads 1,000 tons

Granite 668 tons

Masonry 150 cubic yards

Wood waste 136 tons

Shotcrete 50 yards

Misc. Metals 98 tons





Updated: June 22, 1999

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