Orinda's new City Hall likely to be a gold-standard green building

The most novel features in Orinda's snew City Hall aren't the cork floor tiles, or the ceiling fans, or the bathroom partitions made of recycled yogurt containers.

What's unique is a series of wall signs that bear the words "open windows." They light up when City Hall's cooling system snaps off, alerting workers to take advantage of the building's potential for natural ventilation.


"It's a social experiment," said Henry Siegel, a partner in Siegel & Strain Architects, the building's designer. "It requires users to interact more with a building than usual."

The signs are part of an aggressive attention to environmental details that is expected to make the 14,000-square-foot structure the first City Hall in California to win a coveted Gold rating from the U.S. Green Building Council for Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design. But Orinda City Hall demonstrates something else as well: how the newfangled craze for sustainability can translate into comfortable, even homey buildings.


When Orinda in early 2004 selected Siegel & Strain to design city offices that emphasized conservation, this affluent Contra Costa suburb was ahead of the curve. Increasingly, though, such efforts color all facets of the development landscape - driven in some cases by government edict, in others by the quest for a badge of honor or a marketing tool.

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