The new digs of the Coro Center for Civic Leadership look a lot like other office interiors in historic buildings -- rows of cubicles corralled by exposed brick walls.

	The Coro Center for Civic Leadership earned gold status in the U.S. Green Building Council's LEED program for its energy-efficient features. The project, whose reception area is pictured, was designed by Renaissance 3 Architects' Deepak Wadhwani. Click photo for larger image.

But when executive director Diana Bucco opens the door to the training room and its lights automatically come on, you know you've either entered the Twilight Zone or something radically different is going on.

Different it is: An office where the lights react to motion and daylight, where the cubicles are paneled in translucent fiberglass to allow natural light to pass through them, and where all of the electricity comes from green, renewable sources. An office where 82 percent of the materials were salvaged or reused, including the raised floor, carpet squares, doors and their frames, the latter from St. Francis Hospital.

Chalk up another first for Pittsburgh's vanguard green building movement: the U.S. Green Building Council's first Gold LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) award in Pennsylvania for a commercial interior. Council board member Rebecca Flora, director of Pittsburgh's Green Building Alliance, presented the award Thursday to the Coro Center for its renovation of a 11,000-square-foot space at the South Side's riverfront Terminal Buildings.

"It's one of those little projects that can have a big impact," Flora said. "It gives us a guide to follow" for building tenant space.

Leaving Downtown's Regional Enterprise Tower for a green space in a historic building felt like the right move for the nonprofit Coro Center, which has trained 600 people, known as fellows, since opening an office here five years ago. Coro was invited to come to Pittsburgh for the purpose of attracting and retaining primarily young talent to the region.

"This seemed more representative of what we try to teach," Bucco said after leading a tour of the space. "We try to teach people to think creatively, take risks and make decisions in the interest of the greater good." And, she added, to be agents of change.

Completed in 1906 as warehouse space with access to rail, road and water transit, the two Terminal Buildings, divided and united by the shared street known as Terminal Way, have evolved in recent years into the kind of community that attracts start-ups, creative businesses and non-profits. Soon, the buildings also will have direct access to the Three Rivers Heritage Trail, which is another reason the Coro Center wanted to move there, to give its 12 employees and 16 fellows another transportation option.

Designed by Charles Bickel, the red-brick buildings since 1963 have been owned by eight families who had businesses there. Pittsburgh Terminal Properties soon will add a roof garden above the Coro Center space, with views of Downtown, said vice president and general manager Mark Bibro.

The LEED green building rating system is a national standard for developing high-performance, sustainable buildings, with points that can be earned for site selection, water and energy savings, materials selection and indoor environmental quality. Certification for commercial interiors is one of the Green Building Council's most recent LEED efforts, with about 100 projects nationwide in the pilot program. Criteria also have been developed for new commercial construction, existing buildings and homes.

Coming next, Flora said, is LEED for neighborhood development, combining green building design with smart growth principles such as density, proximity to transit, mixed housing type and pedestrian- and bicycle-friendly design. The Green Building Council is partnering with the Congress for New Urbanism and the National Resources Defense Council on the initiative, and development of the J&L site in Hazelwood could become a pilot project.

Achieving LEED Gold for the Coro project was a team effort by Jendoco Construction, Renaissance 3 Architects, Ferry Electric, the Green Building Alliance and Coro Center staffers. Together they made a warm and welcoming space, with lavender, lemon and cinnamon walls at the entrance, opposite a long row of operable windows overlooking the shared, block-long street, which dead-ends at the river.

On the other end of the office, the windows of the fellows lounge, with its pool table purchased with American Express points, look out onto the Panhandle Bridge and the gritty kinetic sculpture that is the neighboring cement plant, where a giant shovel lifts sand from a barge, swivels and dumps it into a great gaping maw.

Now that's city living.