Green Theater Planned for Brooklyn’s BAM Cultural District
Meredith Taylor
Last month, the New York Times announced that the lagging $85 million redevelopment of the Brooklyn Academy of Music (“BAM”) Cultural District near Ft. Greene looks like it’s finally moving forward. Something that wasn’t highlighted in Times, though, is that the Theater for a New Audience, one of the cultural institutions relocating into the District, will be seeking LEED Silver certification for its new Frank Gehry-designed headquarters.
The theater recently posted an update on its blog outlining some of the reasons it’s decided to make the up-front investment required to achieve a Silver rating. Among the sustainable features that will be incorporated into the new space are a stormwater filtration system, a white roof and landscaping, a mechanism to reduce water use by 30 percent, the use of recycled steel and recycling and salvage of waste during the building’s construction, and a green cleaning program. The Theater is also pondering what it means to be green in the first place. It’s aiming to build “a theater that will be a healthy workplace” and anticipate that energy-saving measures will reduce energy costs by 38 percent from those of similarly-sized performance spaces (299 seats).
The overall plan for the BAM Cultural District is being spearheaded by the Downtown Brooklyn Partnership and includes a 187-unit, mixed-income residential tower and 4,000 square feet of retail. The District is being developed by Carlton Brown’s Full Spectrum (several of whose projects gbNYC has profiled previously) and was designed by New York-based Studio MDA and Behnisch Architects of Stuttgart, Germany.
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