Verde Offices
Verde Offices is part of a two-tower, mixed-use development in Dubai’s Maritime City. The sustainable, high-performance project, created to achieve a LEED Gold rating, will be the first-built of several new sustainable developments in a green community across from Port Rashid, one of the largest ports in the region.
Verde Offices is a trapezoidal-shaped, 32-story office tower featuring 820,000 square feet of space, including verdant sky gardens and podium offices. There are also four levels of offices along Ahmed Bin Majid Road.
The tower is also shaped to minimize the impact of solar and wind forces. Its orientation on the site allows the tower to shield itself from the strongest solar gain with its minimal west and east facades. Other sustainability features include a green roof deck with indigenous landscaping to minimize water consumption; a district cooling system; roof-mounted and facade-integrated photovoltaic cells, which also provide exterior shading; solar hot water collectors for solar cooling; and environmentally responsive interior shading and lighting controls.
The project’s green strategies include high-performance glass; energy-efficient lighting equipment and appliances; a gray-water collection and re-use system; and two trash chutes to pre-sort recyclables. Verde Offices will be accessible by light rail, water taxi and bus and bicycle lanes.
On-site-generated energy from renewable sources reduces energy demand in the office tower by 50 percent compared to typical buildings of the same size. Energy produced by Verde Offices will reduce carbon emissions by more than 18 metric tons, equivalent to planting about 300,000 trees or removing 340 cars off the road yearly.
Verde’s sustainable design features have been endorsed by the renowned environmental scientist Dr. R.K. Pachauri, co-winner of the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize and chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change, who participated in the project launch on March 26, 2008.
