The California Air Resources Board’s (CARB) goals—eliminate all new vehicle carbon emissions in the state of California in thirty years or less, and render themselves obsolete in less than sixty—are aggressive, and its vision for an unprecedented new carbon emissions testing facility is no less ambitious.

Consolidating two existing testing facilities and five testing and research departments, the new facility will achieve several historic firsts: the first LEED v4 platinum carbon emission testing facility. The first zero net energy / zero carbon campus. And, upon completion, it will establish ARB as the first regulatory agency to build a state-of-the-art testing facility from the ground up.

As master architect, HED partnered with the ZGF/Hensel Phelps design build team and ARB to determine programmatic and performance criteria for the new facility. Leveraging expertise from each of HED’s five offices—from almost a century of automotive experience in Detroit to our Los Angeles’ office—we worked to define, capture and communicate ARB’s vision for the project: a state-of-the-art testing facility that will raise the bar for carbon emissions testing; build community through transparency, collaboration and education; and serve as a powerful example of sustainable design in action.