Last week’s SERF Chicago party celebrating our newest regional office was a raging success.
Some 300 guests gathered at the Green Learning Center of our hosts, DIRTT (that’s Doing It Right This Time for the uninitiated) on the Chicago River next to the Merchandise Mart.
We ate, drank and made merry while celebrating three new Windy City certifications including DIRTT’s space (the first of our new certification for office suites), Norcon Construction’s clever adaptive reuse of an old storage facility on the west side, and 330 N. Wabash—formerly the IBM Building and soon to be the AMA (American Medical Association) Plaza.
DIRTT (www.dirtt.net) is a company—a culture really—after our own heart. They are a Calgary-based global manufacturer of custom architectural interiors. Their 3-D design “ICE” software offers clients seamless—and paperless– flow from design to specifications to manufacturing.
Moreover, their interiors are entirely demountable and reusable. This really speaks to me as an owner of office buildings. Our traditional business model involves shameless waste with office turnover or reconfiguration requiring demolition of walls and retrenching concrete floors—all of which is hauled off to the land fill.
By the way, the tremendous savings in resources afforded by DIRTT’s systems gets you the same point (that’s right—singular point) as a bike rack in LEED. Hmmm…
All I know is that I feel DIRTTy– and I couldn’t be happier about it.
