Construction on a new headquarters for the Houston Advanced Research Center is expected to be complete next spring at Research Forest Drive and Gosling Road in The Woodlands.

HARC broke ground in mid-April on the new 18,000-square-foot facility adjacent to its existing building at Lone Star College System’s headquarters, where the nonprofit has rented space since the mid-1980s.

“[The previous building was] a wonderful facility, but it was developed for HARC when it was a much different organization,” HARC President Lisa Gonzales said.

HARC was created by Woodlands founder George Mitchell in 1982 as a nonprofit technology incubator to perform basic research. However, the organization shifted its focus in 2001 to sustainability programs for air, energy and water.

“[Mitchell] developed a passion in the early 1970s for sustainability before that was even a term that was used as much as it is today,” Gonzales said. “He liked to say, ‘If we can’t support 6 million people on this planet, what are we going to do when we have 9 million people?’ in terms of our ecological systems and society in general.”

Roughly 35 HARC employees will work in the new facility, which was designed to accommodate interdisciplinary work and collaboration across programs, Gonzales said.

“We’re also going to have a large meeting room to facilitate meetings with 60 people,” she said. “We are hoping HARC can become a center for meetings for other nonprofits working on sustainability issues.”

The new facility will be the first Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design, or LEED, Platinum certified building in The Woodlands and will be highly energy- and water-efficient with an outdoor solar energy installation, Gonzales said.

“We see HARC as a sustainability organization walking the walk by not only promoting energy efficiency and sustainability, but actually putting it into day-to-day practice and showing others how they can do that when constructing commercial buildings and operating them,” Gonzales said.

Prior to beginning design work, HARC had an ecologist survey the 3.5-acre site to determine the greatest diversity and habitat value, which became off-limits for development.

“We’re going to come back in and—for the spaces we had to clear—we’re going to do restoration with native plants,” she said.

Gonzales said the new building will be a great way to support HARC’s programs.

“We see it as an integral part of the organization as we move forward,” she said. “We’re excited about the potential we have in making an impact in terms of promoting sustainability science and policies based on that information.”