LEED
7 WTC Tenant to Build 5-Star Green Resort in Bermuda
Scout Real Estate Capital, whose New York City offices are located on the 34th floor of Larry Silverstein’s LEED Gold-certified 7 World Trade Center, announced earlier this week that construction on a 5-star resort hotel in Bermuda’s Southampton Parish should commence in September after local officials approve the firm’s preliminary design plans. Scout has already commenced demolition of the Wyndham Beach Resort (which currently occupies the site) and is recycling reclaimed copper and concrete from the property. The firm intends to seek an unspecified LEED rating for the $300 million project, which should open up sometime in 2011, feature 150 guest rooms, and draw power from an on-site solar array.
Popularity: 6% [?]
22Jul2008 | Stephen Del Percio | 0 comments | Continued
Richard Stockton College of New Jersey: Green Addition to the Pinelands
The Richard Stockton College expansion project is an excellent case study for how to build green in a small space while acknowledging development’s impact on its natural surroundings. Richard Stockton was originally constructed in 1973 on New Jersey’s Pinelands National Park Reserve before the land was protected. The Pinelands include over one million acres of farms, wetlands, and forest and are located in the center of the southern part of the state. Expanding Stockton’s existing site footprint would have translated into additional costs and time through the NJDEP/Pinelands permitting process. Instead, the school decided to simply build on top of an existing one-story laboratory building.
Popularity: 22% [?]
2Jul2008 | Stephen Del Percio | 0 comments | Continued
Head of Green Building Finance Consortium Offers Critique of Recent CoStar Study
Back in March, CoStar released a well-disseminated study purporting to evaluate the financial performance of EnergyStar- and LEED-certified commercial office buildings. The results of the study were highly touted with respect to LEED as CoStar found that such buildings sold at a 64 percent ($171 per square foot) premium and rented at a 36 percent ($11.33 per square foot) premium over non-certified buildings. Last week, Scott Muldavin, Executive Director of the Green Building Finance Consortium, released a report critiquing the CoStar study. Mr. Muldavin suggested a number of reasons why euphoria over the staggering green premiums ought to be tempered.
Popularity: 24% [?]
9Jun2008 | Stephen Del Percio | 0 comments | Continued
Students Protest Lack of LEED in Design for CT Campus Building
There’s a bit of a LEED-driven controversy that’s currently playing out at the Norwalk Community College in Connecticut. Students are alleging that the design by Upper West Side-based Mitchell-Giurgola Architects for a new $40 million, 3-story laboratory building “isn’t green enough.” Last year, architecture professor John Sneider’s Environmental Systems class critiqued the 55,000-square-foot project, with students suggesting a building smaller in scale and the installation of a geothermal system. They contacted university officials last year and say they’ve been given the runaround; the school has spent $3 million on the design to date and finalized drawings for bidding back in January. Still, students circulated a petition and met yesterday with the design team, who explained the project’s sustainable features notwithstanding its lack of LEED registration with USGBC.
Popularity: 35% [?]
30May2008 | Stephen Del Percio | 2 comments | Continued
Brookhaven National Laboratory Awarded Long Island’s First LEED Silver Rating
The Department of Energy’s Brookhaven National Laboratory has earned Long Island’s first LEED Silver rating. Brookhaven’s $12.6 million Research Support Building, designed by Farmingdale, New York-based Ehasz Giacolone Architects, earned 34 credits from USGBC, including the maximum possible for recycled-content and locally-sourced materials. General contractor E.W. Howell of Woodhaven, New York also diverted between 50 and 75 percent of the project’s construction debris from local landfills.
Popularity: 19% [?]
20May2008 | Stephen Del Percio | 2 comments | Continued
Gotham Eateries Go Green, Industry Strives for Sustainable Standards
This week’s issue of Crain’s profiles a number of New York City restaurants that have implemented sustainable initiatives across their facilities and operations. It’s significant that as mainstream a publication as Crain’s is noting local eateries joining the green movement, but the press comes with good reason. According to Crain’s, the Boston-based Green Restaurant Association has certified 55 Gotham eateries to date, up from a mere 1 back in 2001; over a quarter of all the GRA-certified restaurants in the country can now be found here in New York City. As the high price of food cuts into restaurants’ profits, owners are finding ways to trim expenses through reduced energy costs.
Popularity: 10% [?]
14May2008 | Stephen Del Percio | 0 comments | Continued
New York’s Green Museum Roster Includes Rochester Butterfly Garden
The April 2008 issue of eco-structure profiles the Dancing Wings Butterfly Garden at Rochester, New York’s Strong National Museum of Play, a hands-on interactive learning institution geared towards both children and adults. Dancing Wings was part of Strong’s recent $37 million expansion effort and includes a number of sustainable design features, including a 4000-square-foot, 50-foot diameter tensile-fabric membrane roof designed and installed by Amherst, New York-based specialty contractor Birdair, Inc. The PTFE-coated roof allows up to 40 percent of natural light to penetrate into the habitat below, where over 800 butterflies are free to roam. It also assists the museum in achieving cost savings from decreased interior lighting requirements, minimizes the museum’s heat island effect, and contributed minimally to the project’s overall construction waste
Popularity: 8% [?]
9May2008 | Stephen Del Percio | 0 comments | Continued
Green Building Initiative Joins Chase for High-Performance Building Standard
Almost a year ago, USGBC announced that it was developing a new building standard in cooperation with ASHRAE and IESNA. Standard 189P for the Design of High-Performance Green Buildings Except Low-Rise Residential Buildings remained open for public comment through the end of last July. Though modeled on it, 189P is not the same thing as LEED. It’s intended to contain a series of performance-related criteria- including targets for energy and water efficiency- that buildings must satisfy in order for municipalities to issue a certificate of occupancy for new buildings or major renovation projects. The Green Building Initiative has announced that, it too, is in the process of developing a similar standard based on its Green Globes tool.
Popularity: 8% [?]
7May2008 | Stephen Del Percio | 1 comment | Continued
Sustainable Home(less) on the Upper West Side
Green materials and energy-efficient appliances are par for the course when the client is paying over $1,000 per square foot. Fortunately, thanks to socially-concerned and eco-conscious designers and suppliers, sustainably-built habitats need not be exclusive. The basement of the Broadway Presbyterian Church in Morningside Heights serves as a homeless outreach hub shared by several organizations. One of them, Care of the Homeless (”CFH”), a non-profit providing free medical services to the homeless, received a small federal grant to renovate its 500-square-foot medical facility in the basement, where “medical staff was performing medical exams in a rather crowded closet.” The New York affiliate of Architecture for Humanities (AFHny), the non-profit network of designers behind dozens of rebuilding efforts from Sri Lanka to New Orleans, came on board, as did several eco-conscious suppliers that chipped in free or discounted materials.
Popularity: 9% [?]
10Apr2008 | Alex Padalka | 0 comments | Continued
A Greener Suburban Sprawl?
While green building and luxury living in Manhattan are now practically married, a truly unique candidate for LEED certification is now going up forty miles out of the city. “Green is becoming the new amenity of choice in luxury housing. Today’s socially conscious, upscale homebuyers are more concerned about the size of their carbon footprint than the size of their master bath,” Mark Hallett Robbins, president of NRDC Residential, the developer of Windermere on the Lake, announced in a press release. Windermere on the Lake is a planned residential community being developed in the Fairfield County community of North Stamford.
Popularity: 5% [?]
8Apr2008 | Alex Padalka | 0 comments | Continued
Monday LEEDoff: Nationals Open Gates at America’s First Green Ballpark
Last week, brand-new $611 million Nationals Park, home to the National League East’s Washington Nationals baseball club, officially received a LEED Silver rating from USGBC, becoming the first baseball stadium in the country to earn the designation. Just a scant few days before Major League Baseball’s 2008 Opening Day, the ballpark earned 33 LEED points for a design by HOK Sport that, among other things, respects the park’s location in Southeast adjacent to D.C.’s Anacostia River. So far, so good for the Nats at their new home; Ryan Zimmerman cracked a walk-off solo home run in the bottom of the ninth to give the club a 3-2 win over the Atlanta Braves in the first regular season game at the ballpark on Sunday night.
Popularity: 11% [?]
31Mar2008 | Stephen Del Percio | 2 comments | Continued
Big Box Stores Jump on the Green Bandwagon
Home improvement stores like Home Depot and Lowe’s have kicked up their marketing push for energy-efficient and eco-friendly products sold in their stores, the Times Herald-Record of Middletown, New York, reported earlier this week. Due to increased awareness of issues like sustainability and climate change, as well as rising fuel costs, customers have been requesting projects like energy-saving light bulbs, efficient insulation, and energy-saving appliances in record numbers. Natedra Banks, the senior manager of environmental innovation for Home Depot, told the paper that “builders, in general, want to know which products would give them more LEED credits, and you also have those people who want to know what they can do it themselves to make an impact on the environment.”
Popularity: 8% [?]
28Mar2008 | Meredith Taylor | 0 comments | Continued
CUNY’s 280 Buildings Get $110M Greener
The Baruch College newspaper The Ticker has a nice wrap-up this week of all the green initiatives going on at CUNY schools across the City. CUNY is New York’s largest university system, with 23 campuses and 280 buildings. Over the past ten years, CUNY has invested $110 million in upgrading its facilities to make them more eco-friendly. The science lab at Bronx Community College, for example, runs entirely off solar panels on its roof, and two more solar roofs are planned at LaGuardia Community College and Kingsborough Community College. CUNY’s first eco-friendly science building just opened at Lehman College and additional sustainable science buildings are planned for City College and Brooklyn College.
Popularity: 6% [?]
20Mar2008 | Meredith Taylor | 0 comments | Continued-
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