Corporate: One Premier Place, Now Taco Bell Headquarters

In early 2000, Ford Motor Company announced that it was constructing a 300,000-square-foot Class A facility and moving its Premier Automotive Group (PAG) headquarters to Irvine, California. The new facility, named One Premier Place, would include a 181,000-square-foot office tower, 90,000-square-foot product development wing, conference center, vehicle display area, fitness center and cafeteria. The facility would also be the first completed LEED-NC project in the U.S. and includes the following:

• A natural gas fuel cell, which will provide 25 percent of the building’s power and hot water.
• Raised-floor air distribution system, which allows the company to garner substantial savings on energy costs.
• Green roof on the product development wing, with rooftop landscaping used to create a home to more than 30 categories of vegetation, will help save on future roofing costs due to insulation.
• Green trellises and screens shade the top level of the structure and provide insulation to the spaces inside. The green façade helps return vegetation that was displaced when the building was constructed.
• 35 electric vehicle stations powered by the building’s main source.
• Use of recycled and recyclable materials – used in the carpet throughout the building and in parts of the furniture.

One Premier Place was completed in 2001 at a cost of $68 million and today is considered one of the largest green façade wall installations ever undertaken. The project consists of 16,241 square feet of greenscreen trellis panels in three specific applications.

A 24’ tall freestanding installation surrounds a storage area of the product development wing and connects the green roof with at-grade planting beds. Fully vegetated panels effectively screen the storage area from an adjacent access road and provide an attractive buffer in a narrow planting strip.

An additional installation extends 300 feet across an entire elevation, effectively screening surface vehicular circulation from the cafeteria area, ground floor and second-story offices. This freestanding application reaches 20’ tall and also provides a secure area for on-site daycare operations.

A third installation is incorporated into a wall-mounted, steel support structure attached to a four-story parking facility. The 24’ tall stacked panels tone down the monolithic architecture of typical parking structures and provide a vertical “green ribbon” visual aesthetic that thematically ties the building programming to the landscape.

By incorporating green façade wall technology into the project scope, designers were able to achieve additional LEED® credits, contribute to the energy efficiency of the building envelope and extend the landscape programming to the vertical plane.

Project Update: In 2010, after selling off the Aston Martin, Land Rover and Jaguar brands, the Ford Motor Company leased the 181,000-square-foot office tower to Yum! Brands, Inc. of Louisville, Kentucky, and the space is now home to the corporate headquarters of Taco Bell.

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