ALEXANDRIA, VA-Clarion Partners’ Metro Park VI, a newly-delivered 330,589-square foot office tower here has been awarded LEED Platinum certification by USGBC. The building, developed by The Evans Co., and designed by KlingStubbins, is partly pre-leased to Booz Allen & Hamilton, which has inked a ten-year, $40 million lease for 88,000 square feet. It is the final building within the 1.2 million-square foot Metro Park office park, which is located close to Metrorail, the VRE commuter train, Fort Belvoir, and the newly relocated National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency.

The building’s energy efficient features include its design: it has a lozenge-shaped tower with “pinched” east and west ends to keep the buildings cool at those exposures. The glass curtain wall, which covers most of the building’s exterior, consists of double-pane Low-E glazing filled with Argon. Some of the glazing is silk screened to help reduce solar radiation transmitted into the space The heating and cooling system divides each floor into an east zone and a west zone, with each zone served by a variable air volume air-handling unit (AHU). Each of these units receives outdoor air that is preconditioned by energy recovery wheels within the outdoor AHUs. There are two 500-ton cooling towers on the roof. All of these features reduce the building’s energy consumption by more than 35% compared with that of a similar, conventional building, according to Clarion Partners. The building also reduces water use by 50% in outdoor landscaping using and 30% indoors.

“Metro Park VI demonstrates that developers do not have to make radical changes to conventional modern office building design,” Marc C. DeLuca, managing director, Clarion Partners, said in a prepared statement. “Nor do they have to spend lavishly, in order to achieve substantial reductions in building energy and water use, along with greatly improved indoor air quality that can optimize tenants’ productivity and health.”