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Image by Steve Devol // Flickr
Most sustainable buildings announce themselves. The solar panels are the first thing you see. The green certification is listed on the website before the address. The sustainability is the headline, and everything else follows at a distance.
The Robert Redford Building does not work that way. It sits on a commercial block a few minutes from the Third Street Promenade, close enough to the ocean that the design team spent considerable effort protecting the water quality of Santa Monica Bay during construction. From the street it reads as a well-made, thoughtful urban building. Walk in and spend twenty minutes inside, and then you start to understand what you are actually standing in.
What it is
The Santa Monica office of the Natural Resources Defense Council opened in 2003 as a model of sustainable design and construction. The organization remodeled an existing 1920s building as a demonstration project using environmentally sound materials, solar energy, and water conservation technology. According to the Santa Monica Conservancy, it received one of the first LEED Platinum ratings in the country, the highest level of sustainable design awarded by the Green Building Council.
The project, documented in detail by MP Architects, is an extensive remodel of an existing 15,000-square-foot commercial building into an office with a ground floor educational and retail space. Solar panels produce on-site energy, and large operable windows and a series of light wells naturally illuminate the building. Building materials include renewable and recycled materials such as bamboo, poplar, partitions made from recycled water bottles, and carpet made from recycled nylon. Over half of the materials are locally harvested and over 90% are recyclable.
Those numbers would be significant in a new building. In a 1920s structure that a design team chose to work with rather than demolish, they represent something more considered. The most sustainable building material is the one that already exists.
The Systems Inside the Walls
The water story is where the building earns its reputation most completely. As BuildingGreen has noted, water use is minimized by low-flow fixtures and a graywater reuse system. Graywater from showers and sinks is treated and reused for flushing toilets and watering plants. Since the building sits only blocks from the shoreline of Santa Monica Bay, the design team worked especially hard to protect surface-water quality, collecting and treating rainwater and integrating it into the building's graywater reuse system.
The building uses 60 to 75% less energy than conventional buildings through strategies including maximizing natural light, occupancy sensors, and passive cooling. Over 80% of water is recycled through the rainwater capture and graywater system, saving an estimated 40,000 gallons per year.
The three light wells that run vertically through the building are the design detail that makes all of it feel like more than engineering. They create airflow, they move daylight through every floor, and they produce a quality of interior space that most offices built specifically for comfort never achieve. The sustainability and the experience are the same thing. That is the rarest outcome in architecture.
Why it Still Matters in 2026
The Robert Redford Building turned 23 this year. The building it remodeled was already eight decades old when the NRDC took it on. In a city that regularly demolishes structures to start over, the decision to preserve and transform carries its own argument about what sustainable practice actually requires.
A recent renovation, documented by Studio EA, has restored the building to the forefront of sustainability in practice, introducing regenerative design techniques and sustainable best practices that emerged in the two decades since it was first built. Biophilic interventions throughout the interior enhance occupant experience, and an expanded ground floor mercantile space promotes public engagement with the NRDC and their environmentalist values by reactivating the street.
The ground floor Environmental Action Center is open to the public during business hours. This matters more than it might seem. Most buildings that achieve this level of certification exist primarily as internal achievements: the tenants know, the certification body knows, and the rest of the city passes by without any way to engage. The Robert Redford Building was designed from the beginning to be a public argument. The exhibition space on the ground floor, the real-time energy monitoring made accessible to visitors, the choice to put the most ambitious green building in Los Angeles on a commercial street rather than behind a campus gate: these are design decisions about who sustainability is for.
The answer the building gives is: everyone. The technology is not locked away. The building is not a private demonstration. It sits on Second Street where anyone can walk in, look up at the light wells, feel the difference between this air and the air outside, and understand something about what a building can be when the people who make it decide to take the question seriously all the way down to the doorknobs.
Where to Find it
1314 Second Street, Santa Monica. A few blocks from the beach, a few blocks from the Promenade. The Environmental Action Center on the ground floor is open to the public during standard business hours. No appointment needed. Walk in.