Insights

SERA Welcomes Senior Workplace Leader Pierre Barral

by | February 11, 2021 0 News + Announcements

Approaching nearly a decade of advancing sustainable design in the Bay Area and Silicon Valley, SERA is excited to meet the challenges of the post-Covid workplace with the hiring of Pierre Barral. Bringing more than 15 years of design experience, Barral joins our Oakland team to champion growth and development of our Workplace practice in […]

SERA x OBBF: Partnering with Our Oakland Neighbors

by | January 18, 2021 0 News + Announcements

Like most American cities, Oakland suffered that one-two punch of 2020 beginning with the COVID 19 shutdowns of March followed by weeks of demonstrations after the death of George Floyd in May. Downtown Oakland is known for its vibrant Black-owned local business community, and many of these shops, restaurants, and service providers were among the […]

SAP Podcast, Ep. 5: Social Sustainability & Equity

by | January 14, 2021 1 Ideas, Sustainability

Energy efficiency, good water management, daylighting, and all the other sustainability strategies we champion are meaningless if they’re not available to everybody. Social sustainability and equity, as explored in this week’s podcast, must be at the core of our work. At SERA, social sustainability has roots in our founders Bing Sheldon and Don Eggleston’s dedication […]

SAP Podcast, Ep. 4: Sustainable Placemaking

Sustainability, when you scale it up beyond buildings to think about neighborhoods, campuses, or regions, isn’t just about stormwater and mini-power grids. Sustainable strategies have to be rooted in the character and identity of their location, and add to its richness—this is what we mean by sustainable placemaking. History, past development patterns, and ongoing community […]

SAP Podcast, Ep. 3: Why Embodied Carbon Counts—and How to Count It

by | December 17, 2020 0 Ideas, Sustainability

As sustainable construction has evolved and our whole industry has made dramatic improvements around energy use and water management, we’ve learned to look more broadly—this is one of the biggest ideas behind SERA’s Sustainability Action Plan and in this latest podcast it extends to embodied carbon—at all the impacts involved with erecting a building, sourcing […]

#11: Welcome Back, Workers

by | December 15, 2020 2 Ideas

Recently, a crack squad of designers and architects in SERA’s Workplace studio took part in an international design competition that asked competitors to envision different aspects of the return to work in an office building environment. (Spoiler alert: we won.) The specific area that we chose to investigate deeply is the first-floor lobby and shared […]

#10: Go Ahead — Rethink Everything!

by | December 7, 2020 0 Ideas

May you live in interesting times.  — Dubious blessing of apocryphal Chinese origin As I write this, the US has surpassed 260,000 Covid-19 deaths, Oregon continues to hit grim milestones for new daily records for both cases and active hospitalizations, and new closures and lockdowns, necessary to contain the spread of the virus, are again […]