Welcome back to the SERA Workplace series Silver Linings. We took a few months off to fully soak in the new year. And now that 2020 is officially in the record books and vaccines are available, we have nothing but a glorious, sunny, post-pandemic future to look forward to. Right? (gulp.) Rest assured, we will […]
Last summer, SERA Principal in the Hospitality Studio Gary Golla convened a research group to look at mass timber construction in the hotel industry. Mass timber buildings tend to be thought of as beautiful, with warm, welcoming spaces and distinct sustainability advantages, but that doesn’t mean they’re a perfect fit for every use or building […]
The pandemic has disrupted the typical supply-and-demand dynamic in many industries. In the short term, this is especially true for Hospitality. Thus, the topic of converting “distressed properties” to other uses is receiving a great deal of attention lately. While speculation around opportunities for distressed hotels will likely diminish with economic recovery, there will continue […]
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 […]
In this final chapter of our series exploring our Sustainability Action Plan, we address the question, “So how does SERA actually use the plan in the real world?” Remember our Project Compass? SERA’s Project Compass is a tool we designed to note and understand the many aspects of sustainability in our work. We’ve used it […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
This month, the Clackamas County Board of County Commissioners accepted the work of the SERA-led Park Avenue Community Project and approved the effort to move forward into a code amendment process. This is a major success for a community that over the last decade has undergone multiple previous plan efforts never to be approved. Community […]