Monday LEEDoff: The Beer Belly Building- JP Morgan’s Platinum HQ at Ground Zero

It’s unclear whether Steve Cuozzo’s nickname will stick, but after an announcement last week, it looks like One Bryant Park won’t stand alone as New York City’s lone LEED Platinum office tower for very long. JP Morgan Chase will relocate its corporate headquarters to Ground Zero, on the site of the former Deutsche Bank Building (which is currently in the process of being razed after suffering fatal structural damage on September 11), into a forty-two-story, 1.3 million square foot building that should be ready for occupancy sometime in 2012. Designed by Kohn Pedersen Fox to earn a LEED Platinum rating, the building's “beer belly” which begins on the twelfth floor is actually seven cantilevered trading floors of approximately 50,000 square feet each. The cantilevered space was necessary to accommodate the St. Nicholas Greek Orthodox Church, which will be rebuilt (the original was destroyed on September 11) underneath, as well as reduce shadows on the Ground Zero Memorial by moving the large trading floors up off the ground level. JP Morgan paid the Port Authority $300 million to lease the land and build the tower, $10 million of which will go to St. Nicholas and the World Trade Center Memorial Foundation. The project itself is expected to cost upwards of $1 billion and the $290 million ground lease will end in 2100; details about the building's green design features were not immediately available.

Notwithstanding the relatively uninspiring Freedom Tower, we’re seeing truly eclectic architecture from some of the world’s most celebrated architects proposed for the World Trade Center site, all of which will attempt to simultaneously excel in sustainable design. (The Freedom Tower and the three Greenwich Street towers by Norman Foster, Richard Rogers and Fumihiko Maki will all seek LEED Gold, while of course David Childs’ 7 World Trade Center already earned Gold, and the new Goldman Sachs building under construction on West Street is also aiming for a Gold rating. Image is looking east towards Greenwich Street from West Street.)

Like that architecture or not, it appears that Ground Zero is about to fully position itself at the vanguard of New York City’s commercial green building efforts, just six years after many pundits declared Lower Manhattan’s days as the country’s preeminent business district to be over.

• What a Zero! (NY Post)
• JP Morgan Releases WTC Tower Plans (AMNY)
• JP Morgan to Build at Ground Zero (Reuters)
• WTC