Working, Naturally

When you walk through the front door of Patagonia Inc.'s modest corporate headquarters, in Ventura, California (one hour north of Los Angeles) , the first thing you see is a whiteboard. Nothing unusual there -- except that this board's main purpose is to give employees a daily update on wave conditions at the beach just a few blocks away. If you're interested, by the way, you can find surfboards stored under a stairway just down the hall.

Everywhere you look, you see signs that Patagonia, a $182 million, 28-year-old maker of rugged, good-looking adventure clothes and equipment, is made up of people who feel slightly uncomfortable indoors. Wet suits are hung out to dry on cars in the parking lot in Ventura. At the company's four-year-old customer-service-and-distribution center near Reno, Nevada, kayaks ride on top of many of the vehicles -- just in case their owners decide to navigate some white water during their lunch hour.

So when a group of employees sat down four years ago to hammer out a corporate mission statement, what emerged was -- well, only natural: "Our purpose: To use business to inspire and implement solutions to the environmental crisis." Far from taking Patagonia outside of its core competency, the mission statement served as a mirror, one that revealed an important failing in the company's performance: Its own environment -- the various buildings where its employees worked each day -- was clearly flunking the newly crafted standard.

Not that the buildings were inhuman, unsightly, or poorly designed. Far from it. In fact, there have never been office cubes in any of Patagonia's buildings, and the company's environment has always featured lots of exposed wood and friendly ocean breezes.

But in a rare display of radical corporate honesty, Patagonia found itself wanting and posted "Louder than Words," a self-indictment, in each of its stores. The statement reads, in part: "In fact, we've come to understand that the [headquarters] building is a monument to superficial satisfaction over environmental priority. We used virgin materials everywhere -- new wood, new fixtures, new gypsum board, carpeting and paint. And the vertical grain fir [ used in the ceiling beams ]? It's made from the old growth forests that groups we now support are fighting to protect. Surrounded by these persistent reminders of our own naïveté, we are committed to a new approach."

That new approach began in Reno, Nevada with a 193,000-square-foot distribution facility and customer-service center that Patagonia opened in 1996. Dave Abeloe, a 22-year veteran of the company and an avid rock climber, oversaw the design-and-construction process. He hired Miller/Hull, a relatively small Seattle-based architecture firm, to help him put it all together. "They didn't have much experience doing anything of this size," says Abeloe, 40. "But they're well-known for quirky residences and small offices that use recycled materials and that employ other sustainable building techniques."

Patagonia was founded in 1973 by Yvon Chouinard as a company committed to the environment. What resulted from the partnership between that company and an architecture firm committed to sustainable building was a systemwide project that actively supports Patagonia's corporate mission statement.

Building With Natural Systems

Nature operates according to a set of interrelated systems. So do buildings. To make the new Patagonia facility more natural, the design team developed several unique systems. For instance, the building's heat comes from white rectangular panels that hang from the ceiling. The panels are connected to copper pipes that carry hot water, which radiates heat down from the panels to warm the area below. A gas-fired boiler pumps hundreds of gallons of water through the building's 15,000 feet of piping. Water leaves the boiler at 160 degrees and returns at a still-toasty 138 degrees, which means that the system uses very little energy to rewarm the water before flushing it through the building again. And, since the water never leaves the system, there is no waste.

By way of comparison, as part of the facility, Patagonia built 22,000 square feet of office space -- an area that has to be heated by conventional methods because of some late design changes. It requires the same amount of energy to heat that 22,000 square feet of office space as it does to heat the entire 171,000 square feet of warehouse space.

The same logic that suggested using water for heat dictated using sun for light. The building operates with 88 skylights in the roof, each with four mirrored panels that are rigged up to photo sensors. As the sun moves across the sky, the sensors order the panels to shift with it, reflecting the maximum amount of light down into the building.