150 Second St., a LEED-CS v3 Platinum certified office building in Kendall Sq. has been named as a finalist in the Best Green Practices category for the Boston Business Journal's Best in Boston Real Estate Awards. Copley Wolff Design Group designed the landscape for the building which resulted in optimum contextual design within the surrounding neighborhood. The sustainable landscape designed by Copley Wolff includes sustainable Ipe benches, drought tolerant plantings and rain gardens to collect storm water. In addition, Copley Wolff provided streetscape treatments by lining adjacent sidewalks with Honey Locust and Red Maple trees. Elkus Manfredi provided the core and shell design services for the facility, which is the first commercial lab project certified Platinum under LEED v3 in New England. The project team incorporated a number of sustainable strategies including a heat recovery loop, extensive solar control and daylighting controls, an innovative structural design that uses steel trusses to reduce the building's weight and cost, and high performance HVAC systems produce more than 30 percent energy cost savings over a baseline reference.
Located in the heart of Cambridge's high tech district, the three-story, 123,000 s/f lab and office facility was initially developed by Skanska USA Commercial Development Inc. Notably, in December 2013 Skanska USA sold the building to Alexandria Real Estate Equities, Inc. for $94.5 million, or about $766 per s/f.