Last week, San Francisco’s Knoll Furniture Gallery opened its doors to reveal the first ever LEED Certified Showroom. Why go through the trouble of LEED certification if your product is furniture, you might ask? It’s all part of the ‘doing good by being good’ incentive that so many corporations, including many non-profits, are adopting in recent years. The Audubon Society, Sierra Club, and the NRDC, to name a few, all have LEED Certified Headquarters. Knoll, not exactly a non-profit, shows they care about more than just about the tactile materiality of their designer pieces, but of the overall environment in which they inhabit… now if only those Frank Gehry woven maple chairs came in cost competitive FSC-certified wood…
This is good news for Knoll! But I have a question on the “First LEED showroom”… What about the Knoll LEED Certified spaces in other cities (i.e. the one I’m familiar with in Philadelphia). Those don’t count?