843 North Spring Street

A renovated and expanded 843 N. Spring Street leverages its existing infrastructure as the foundation of a highly-sustainable creative office development that features cross-laminated timber, indoor-outdoor landscaping and an innovative rainwater harvesting system.

Envisioned to set new standards for low-impact development in downtown Los Angeles, and to connect this dense Chinatown neighborhood with nature, 843 North Spring Street has been reimagined as a unique collection of flexible spaces for use by creative office and retail tenants. Four new floors prominently feature cross-laminated timber and are built above the existing structure of a single story commercial building and its underground parking garage, resulting in one of the city’s first and largest CLT office structures. A tiered vertical garden connects a landscaped public plaza with each floor of the building above, merging indoor and outdoor spaces and maximizing natural light and open space.

Sherwood served as civil engineers on the award-winning adaptive reuse project. A holistic review of existing utility services confirmed that most could be reused, greatly minimizing the need for new services and allowing the utility budget to be redirected to other project costs. Sherwood also led the development of the project’s sustainable water strategy, including the strategic placement of a 17,300 gallon cistern to be placed within an otherwise unused volume of space in the parking garage. This innovative harvesting system captures rainwater from rooftops and other hard surfaces and treats it for purity and safety before it’s used for onsite irrigation and toilet flushing, reducing reliance on municipal water supplies, lowering utility costs, and promoting sustainability.