Houston Skyscrapers Take the LEED

By Georgiana Mihaila, Associate Editor

While no more than four months ago Hines’ 33-story tower at 717 Milam became the first Texas skyscraper to achieve LEED Platinum for Existing Buildings certification from the U.S. Green Building Council, Post Oak Central soon followed it up with Houston’s first LEED Gold for Existing Buildings certification.

The three-building Post Oak Central office campus is situated in the heart of the Galleria, Houston’s premier shopping and business district. The 24-story buildings make for 1.4 million square feet of Class A office and retail space. The oldest building, 1 Post Oak Central, dating back to 1975, is now the headquarters of the Apache Corp., and 2 Post Oak Central hosts The Stewart Title Guaranty Co. The third building is home to four consulates: those of India, Qatar, South Korea and Turkey.

And Post Oak Boulevard will soon host a new corporate office building designed to meet all LEED® Gold requirements. 2200 Post Oak Blvd. will serve as a centralized operations center for BBVA Compass Houston, which will occupy 150,000 square feet out of a total of 380,000. The bank’s holding company—Compass Bancshares—will also have its headquarters there. Redstone Real Estate is the developer and Manhattan Construction is to manage the building project. BBVA Compass hopes to start occupying its new office by March 2013.

The Leadership in Energy & Environmental Design, or LEED, program is an internationally recognized green building certification system developed by the U.S. Green Building Council  and providing third-party verification that a building or community was designed and built using strategies intended to improve performance in metrics such as energy savings, water efficiency, carbon dioxide emissions reduction, improved indoor environmental quality and stewardship of resources and sensitivity to their impacts.