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Rand Corporation Headquarters

Santa Monica, California

The new headquarters for the Rand Corporation, a non-profit research organization, is a 309,000 square foot, five-story elliptical building in the City of Santa Monica in close proximity to the Pacific Ocean. The facility replaces Rand 's 50-year-old outdated structure with a modern, energy-efficient, flexible, and technologically advanced headquarters. The $100 million construction provides offices for about 1,200 researchers, support specialists, and graduate students. In the center of the elliptical ‘donut' are terraces at various levels and landscaping at the ground level to assist in shading the large gathering plaza. Working in collaboration with DMJM Design, HLB provided the lighting design services for both the interior and exterior spaces, including the offices, library, café, lobbies, conference rooms, multi-purpose room, exterior courtyard and site.

The building a model energy saving “green building” with funding from the local energy companies. HLB was involved in extensive daylighting harvesting system studies for the project. The project team studied the most efficient methods of shading the building from direct glare while at the same time taking advantage of the abundant sunlight by providing daylighting to the building through carefully designed windows and openings.

This project has received the US Green Building Council's Gold Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) certification.