Located in Los Angeles’ Little Tokyo neighborhood, this 48,000-square-foot global headquarters reflects BUCK’s commitment to sustainability with its LEED Gold certification, and boasts innovative features on all 4 floors of flexible work, play, and collaborative spaces for 150+ employees, creative partners, and clients.

Verdical Group provided: 

• LEED Project Management (ID+C v4 Gold Certified)
• Energy Modeling
• Daylight Modeling
• Life Cycle Assessment (LCA)
• LEED Feasibility Assessment
• WELL Feasibility Assessment
• Fitwel Feasibility Assessment

This is an interior office project that uses a portion of an existing building (the top free floors as well as MDF rooms on the lower floors). This project boasts reduced embodied carbon, reduced energy and water consumption, enhanced lighting performance, and many other features that all contributed to the project being awarded LEED Gold.

The largest way the project contributed to reducing its embodied carbon is by opting to reuse an existing building rather than constructing a new building. Reusing a building saves on average 55-85% of the upfront carbon for a project. In addition to the building reuse, the project underwent a Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) to account for the embodied carbon of the interior renovation. Collecting Environmental Product Declarations (EPDs) demonstrated the carbon footprint of each material. By using an existing building, the project’s embodied carbon is 206,877.74 kg CO2e or ~19 kg CO2e/ m2. The average newly constructed office building has an embodied carbon of 230-320 kg CO2e/ m2. Through building reuse and sustainable materials, the project was able to achieve a large carbon reduction from benchmark values.

Located in downtown Los Angeles, the project is accessible by more sustainable means of transportation. With bike facilities also provided, the team was able to reduce their parking footprint. All these factors contribute to fewer single person vehicles, therefore lowering the emissions related to the building.

The mechanical, electrical, and plumbing systems have been optimized to reduce consumption. Through LEED v4 energy modeling, it was found that the project’s energy use is projected to be 21% lower than the ASHRAE baseline. Additionally, the project had an energy cost savings of 19%! Heating, cooling, fans, and interior lighting contributed to the savings. The project uses an existing water-cooled chiller and tower, in addition to new high performance heat pumps. The office’s fans and pumps are equipped with variable frequency drives (VFDs), allowing control of the amount of air and water to eliminate unnecessary consumption. Through all of these features the project achieves an EUI of 30 kBtu/ sqft.

This project was the recipient of a 2024 USGBC California Green Building Merit Award in the Energy / Operational Category and was recognized as the Jury Winner in the Archello Awards 2025 Office Interior of the Year – Large category.