The N&R has a front-pager on the Greensboro Transit Authority’s phat new maintenance and operations building:

Welcome to the city of Greensboro’s new green roof.

The 16,500-square-foot garden is just one of the items city officials hope will help earn the $18 million facility a U.S. Green Building Council Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design, or LEED, gold certification.

….Its water is heated by the sun. Its rooms are cooled, in part, with giant ice cubes. No, really.

The flashy zinc and muted terra-cotta panels that wrap the building serve as a rain screen, a system that keeps the elements out while helping to regulate the internal temperature of the building better than an ordinary wall.

“A lot of the parts and pieces to the building are very European,” said the building’s designer Brian Slevar, the same Moser Mayer Phoenix architect who designed Center Pointe.

A municipal ‘maintenance and operations building’ as paen to environmentalism. It’s government’s world —-we only live in it.