Long Beach Civic Center and Port of Long Beach Headquarters, Long Beach, CA

The new Long Beach Civic Center project is a game-changing development that will bring a revitalized civic core to serve local residents, businesses and visitors.

It is also an important development because when complete, its building operating costs and carbon footprint are designed to be 50% lower than standard office building.

The $520 million, design-build-finance-operate-maintain (P3FOM) civic center will replace the outdated city hall and feature a new city library, a retail marketplace and efficient new offices for the Port of Long Beach, as well as three parking garages, a 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 of Long Beach limit the upfront cost shed significant risk with a design-build public private partnership delivery method.
To achieve low cost and high efficiency MEP 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 decrease the center’s energy demand and introduce renewable sources. To save money and significantly improve energy efficiency, an underfloor system will provide heating and cooling. By increasing floor-to-ceiling heights, daylight will penetrate deeper into the narrow floor plate, decreasing the need for artificial light during much of the day.

We have designed the building to achieve LEED Gold® certification, and all buildings will exceed ASHRAE 90.1-2007 by at least 22% before, and 34% after, renewables are taken into account.

Our solution incorporated on-site 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.