Long Beach Civic Center, Port of Long Beach Headquarters, and Billie Jean King Main Library, Long Beach, CA

The New Long Beach Civic Center Project is a game changing development that revitalized civic core to serve local residents, businesses and visitors. It is also an important development because building operating costs and carbon footprint is designed to be 50% lower than standard office building.

The $520 million, design-build-finance-operate-maintain civic center replaces the old city hall and provides efficient new offices for the Port of Long Beach, a new city library, a retail marketplace, three parking garages, including a new subterranean garage, public park and related infrastructure and landscaping.

Syska teamed-up with SOM, Clark Construction Group, LLC, Plenary Group and Johnson Controls International to help the City limit the upfront cost shed significant risk with a P3FOM (Public Private Partnership with Facilities Operation Maintenance) delivery method.

To achieve lowest cost MEP with highly efficient systems and distributions, Syska provided preliminary energy modeling, solar studies and system sketches to inform the overall architectural and programmatic concept.
Our high performance team developed whole building strategies to lower the energy needed and introduce renewable sources.

To save money and significantly improve energy efficiency, heating and cooling was supplied from under the floor, eliminating many ceilings, increasing floor to ceiling heights so daylight would penetrate deeper into the narrow floor plate enabling the lights to be turned off a significant duration of the day. LEED Gold certification was targeted and all buildings are exceeding ASHRAE 90.1-2007 by at least 22% before, and 34% after renewables are taken into account.

Our solution encompassed onsite renewable generation solutions for two of the hi-rise towers, which have to be very energy efficient to achieve EIR’s requirement to generate 25% of energy required on an average sunny day.