The nationally renowned women-owned consultancy focused on innovative building solutions, Cerami & Associates Inc., has announced its completion of a new headquarters for the American Society of Interior Designers (ASID), the first space in the world to achieve both top certifications for occupant health and wellness as well as green building. Cerami’s role as acoustics expert and a leader in wellness design helped ensure that the new office space, designed by Perkins+Will, incorporates the most innovative health and sustainability design features possible today.
According to the senior associate in Cerami’s Washington, D.C. office, Robby Deem, LEED AP BD+C, the 8,500-square-foot headquarters for the American Society of Interior Designers is the first space of any kind to be awarded WELL Certified Platinum under the WELL Building Standard v1 and also LEED Certified Platinum, distinctions given by the International WELL Building Institute and the U.S. Green Building Council, respectively.
“ASID is proud to champion great design and demonstrate how it directly impacts lives,” said ASID CEO Randy W. Fiser, Hon. FASID. “Our new headquarters’ Platinum Certification is the result of commitment from our organization, staff, and construction partners and consultants, like Cerami, to create a sustainable and healthy space.”
As part of the project team, Cerami led the incorporation of best practices in acoustics, one of the essential if invisible aspects of interior design that contribute to occupant wellness. Among the workplace project’s main challenges was to incorporate innovative strategies to improve occupant comfort while also meeting sustainability requirements for room finishes – which impact acoustics significantly, says Deem.
Although good acoustic design is invisible, Cerami’s goal is to “make the invisible visible,” by using modeling techniques and other approaches for visualizing and hearing how spaces will sound before they are built.
"The WELL standard highlights principles that are already best practice in great architecture and design,” says Deem. “These include designing for good speech privacy by using partitions, mitigating noise from mechanical equipment and the outdoors, and adding absorptive finishes to control how noise builds up in a space, which improves speech intelligibility on a conference call, for example.”
For ASID and the design team led by Perkins+Will’s Ken Wilson, ASID, FAIA, LEED Fellow, and David Cordell, ASID, LEED AP, WELL AP, the new headquarters project in downtown Washington, D.C. has been an opportunity to showcase the many ways that design can positively affect the health and well-being of employees while boosting resource efficiency.