May Lee State Office Complex

The May Lee State Office Complex anchors Sacramento’s River District as a major state workplace campus for the California Department of General Services. Designed for more than 5,000 employees across four mid-rise office buildings, the roughly 17.5-acre campus is documented as the largest all-electric, zero-carbon workplace campus in the United States, with LEED Gold and SITES Gold certifications.

RELM’s landscape architecture celebrates the meeting of river and city, overlaying the orthogonal urban grid with a more sinuous river vernacular. A Green Pathway forms the campus spine, connecting three parcels, the street network to the south, light rail access to the north, and ultimately toward the American River. The open-space network functions as an ecological corridor linking river habitat, pollinators, and sheet flows to open lands south of the site. It aims to maximize biodiversity within a flood-prone context while treating stormwater on site through permeable surfaces, bioswales, and detention capable of handling significant rainfall events.

Native and climate-adaptive plantings restore habitat on previously industrial land, reduce irrigation demand, and support long-term carbon sequestration. Site strategies documented by the project team include soil remediation after industrial contamination, recycled and salvaged materials such as crushed concrete road base and timber log benches, and furniture designed for adaptability and disassembly. Workplace amenities and publicly accessible courtyards and pathways help the campus act as civic connective tissue rather than a closed compound.

As the first major development in the revitalized River District, the landscape stitches offices, plazas, and micro-mobility routes into Sacramento’s evolving urban fabric while keeping the grounds open as a neighborhood resource.