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18 April 2019
AGU Honored with the First Clean Energy DC Award
As the leader of an innovative, forward looking organization, I am proud to share that AGU received the very first Clean Energy DC Award to honor its commitment to sustainability through our newly renovated headquarters building, the first net-zero energy commercial renovation in Washington, D.C. This award was presented to AGU during the District Sustainability Awards ceremony on 17 April 2019. Each year, the Washington, D.C., Department of Energy and …
12 October 2018
Robust Investment in Natural Hazards Research is Essential to Our Safety and Security
Tomorrow, 13 October, is International Day for Disaster Reduction, created by the United Nations in 1989 to promote risk-awareness and natural disaster reduction. Now, as then, the need for proactive action is clear to help save lives and reduce devastating economic losses. Since 13 October last year, the United States has seen flooding from Tropical Storm Lane in Hawaii and Hurricane Florence in North and South Carolina, the latter causing …
19 June 2018
100 Years of AGU: Our Building Legacy
By Janice Lachance, Executive Vice President of Strategic and Operational Excellence Editor’s Note: This blog post was originally shared on AGU’s building blog. While AGU will formally kick off our Centennial in December of this year, we are building excitement this week by sharing information on the many programs Centennial will touch during our 2019 celebration. AGU’s building renovation project is one of those. Our existing headquarters was built in …
23 April 2018
The EPA – Secret Science and Transparency
Today, AGU submitted a letter to Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Administrator Scott Pruitt in which we voiced a number of concerns about upcoming policy changes at the agency related to the transparency and accuracy of scientific information. (Read the full letter here.) Specifically, the letter calls out the problems with a proposed policy mandating that the EPA consider only publicly available scientific data and information when crafting rule-making. These proposed …
19 March 2018
Lessons from the Tohoku-Oki Earthquake
Seven years ago on 11 March 2011, the magnitude 9.0 Tohoku-Oki earthquake ripped hundreds kilometers of fault northeast of the island of Honshu, spawning a 38-meter-high tsunami that devastated a 1000 km-long stretch of coastline that had been described in the 1700s by Bashō as the most beautiful in all Japan (Ehrlich, 2013). The meltdown of the damaged Fukushima Daiichi nuclear reactor further exacerbated what would already have been an …
22 November 2017
Video: November Building Progress
This post first appeared on Building.AGU.org. By Janice Lachance, AGU’s Chief Operating Officer. It is our pleasure to share with you some of the progress being made on AGU Headquarters’ renovation. As you may know, demolition on the building began in April and we’re now seven months into construction. Watch our video showcasing the changes to the building this year and our vision for the future. As construction continues, we’re …
4 May 2017
Video: Renovating AGU’s Headquarters
“A building is a physical structure, but there’s no reason why a building as a physical structure can’t embody the vision of the organization.” – Chris McEntee, AGU Executive Director and CEO. Interior demolition of AGU’s headquarters has begun and AGU Executive Director and CEO Chris McEntee reflects on the reasons why the organization is undertaking a net zero energy building renovation and outlines some of the top net zero …
12 December 2016
AGU Board of Directors Approves Groundbreaking Building Renovation to Start in Early 2017
Today, I am delighted to announce that our project team has reached the final stage and approval for the renovation of AGU’s headquarters building. This weekend, after a multiyear process, the project received final approval from AGU’s Board of Directors and is now ready to begin construction in March 2017. As I have shared previously, it had become clear to us that our aging building and infrastructure was reaching the end …
19 July 2016
AGU Receives City Zoning Approval to Move Forward with Final Project Planning Stages
When AGU undertook the project to renovate our headquarters building nearly two years ago we had three goals in mind to ensure that the project would provide the highest level of benefit to our members: 1) to enhance visibility of and create a destination attraction for Earth and space science; 2) to advance the adoption of science-based solutions; and 3) to provide state-of-the-art meeting and conference space and increase productivity …
7 June 2016
Major Milestone Achieved in Path to AGU Headquarters Renovation Approval
Earlier this Spring I shared a progress report on our plans to renovate AGU’s headquarters, with the goal of having the building become a living representation of our mission and the sciences we represent, celebrate and help to advance. I’m pleased to let you know that in late May we took a significant step forward when the Historic Preservation Review Board (HPRB) of the District of Columbia unanimously supported our …
28 March 2016
AGU’s Mission and Science Drive Recently Approved Conceptual Design for Headquarters Renovation
From ocean sciences and geology to seismology and planetary sciences, when our headquarters building was designed in the early 90s every effort was made to have the structure be representative of the broad array of sciences comprised by AGU’s membership. More than 20 years later, with that building’s critical infrastructure reaching the end of its useful life and a renovation becoming necessary, the Board realized that they had a choice …
9 November 2015
Renovating AGU’s Headquarters: Advancing our Mission; Serving As A Role Model
AGU has occupied our current 62,000-square foot, five-story headquarters building, located in the Dupont Circle neighborhood in Washington, D.C., since 1994. While the building has served us well for more than two decades, many of its systems are reaching the end of their useful life, making them unreliable and less efficient. Not only does this have a negative impact on the day-to-day operations of the organization—and our ability to provide …
