Yesterday PPG announced the Bullitt Center in Seattle, commonly known as the greenest office building, is constructed with PPG glass products. The six story 50,000 sq. ft. office building located in Seattle’s central district was designed by Muller Hill Partnerships to be completely self-sustaining and enable 100 percent of its energy and water harvesting to be conducted on site. The integrated building management system enables energy, water harvesting, water treatment and waste processing. The challenge of the construction is use sun and rain to provide enough electricity and water for the building to use.
The goal of the building’s architects is to meet the Living Building Challenge as governed by the International Living Building Institute. The Living Building Challenge has 20 requirements within seven areas: site, water, energy, health, materials, equity and beauty. The majority of the building was constructed with PPG products: SOLARBAN® 60 solar control, low-emissivity (low-e) glass and STARPHIRE® ultra-clear glass. Only one full floor remains to be leased.
“To allow daylighting deep into the floor plate, we knew we would need large glass areas with high visible light transmittance,” Hanford explained. “To offset the heating load penalty of the large glass areas, we wanted to get the lowest possible heat loss rate,” he said, and that meant using a product such as Solarban 60 glass with argon fill in the insulating glass units (IGUs).
PPG Industries Inc. (NYSE:PPG) has products in many industrial and consumer industries. The Pittsburgh company operates in business segments of performance coatings, industrial coatings, architectural coatings, optical and specialty materials, and glass. Their products are used in automobiles, buildings, military defense equipment, aircrafts and many more.
