LEED
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: 15% [?]
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: 11% [?]
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: 8% [?]
20Mar2008 | Meredith Taylor | 0 comments | Continued
Green Building in Crisis? Bear Stearns Meltdown May Drown Beer Belly Building
Late yesterday, Crain’s reported that JPMorgan Chase will move its investment banking operations into the former offices of Bear Stearns on Madison Avenue at 47th Street in Midtown, which JPMorgan purchased on Monday in the aftermath of Bear’s meltdown last week. The decision places the proposed LEED Platinum Beer Belly Building project at 5 World Trade Center in jeopardy- if not completely shelving it- though according to a spokesman the bank is still considering its options in connection with the site. Crain’s also reports that JPMorgan will continue negotiating with the Port Authority about building at 5 WTC, but the same spokesman “couldn’t say what might be built . . . or when a decision would be reached.”
Popularity: 13% [?]
18Mar2008 | Stephen Del Percio | 2 comments | Continued
New York’s First Green Industrial Park Breaks Ground on Long Island
On Monday, a trio of co-developers broke ground on a Long Island industrial park project that will be the first such development anywhere in New York State to seek LEED certification. Located in the Moriches hamlet of Brookhaven, just west of the Hamptons, the 10-acre park will be designed to an unspecified rating and feature seven buildings offering 78,000 square feet of industrial space. According to Vincent Trapani, head of Bayshore-based U.S.A. Industries, one of the developers, the $7 million project should open by the end of the summer and could feature a solar panel company as one of its tenants. Trapani called the development “a green supermarket” for green construction companies.
Popularity: 7% [?]
29Feb2008 | Stephen Del Percio | 1 comment | Continued
Chandler Airport Commerce Center: First Green Globes-Certified Building in Arizona
The Chandler Airport Commerce Center is an office and warehouse building that just became the first in the Copper State to earn any level of Green Globes certification from the Portland, Oregon-based non-profit Green Building Initiative. Located just outside of Tempe, the Center features a modest 27,000 square feet of warehouse space and 3,000 square feet of office suite space. According to Michael O’Connor, senior VP of Wisconsin-based developer Irgens, “[t]he building is relatively small, and going for LEED certification didn’t make sense financially.” Irgens has a number of LEED-certified projects throughout the Midwest, but the Chandler Center was its first to seek a rating under Green Globes.
Popularity: 9% [?]
27Feb2008 | Stephen Del Percio | 0 comments | Continued
Green Commercial Office Space in New York City Currently Ranks Third in U.S.
According to a report that was released last month by the Burnham-Moores Center for Real Estate at the University of San Diego, Los Angeles is first among U.S. cities when it comes to LEED- or Energy Star-certified commercial office space. The CoStar Group provided the data upon which the report was based and ranked cities by the total amount of their square footage that has earned either the LEED or Energy Star designation; no breakdown appears to be readily available that segregates the figures according to individual rating system. Los Angeles topped the list with 100 buildings and 26.2 million square feet while Houston checked in at #2 with 46 buildings and 21.1 million square feet; New York City was third with 11 buildings and 12.3 million square feet.
Popularity: 27% [?]
26Feb2008 | Stephen Del Percio | 0 comments | Continued
Monday LEEDoff: Enable, Inc. HQ is First Certified Building in Syracuse
Enable, Inc. is a non-profit organization that provides assessment, training, and therapy to over 2,000 disabled children and adults and their families each year. Last week, Enable officially received a LEED Certified rating for its new 30,000-square-foot headquarters building at 1603 Court Street in Syracuse, New York- the first project of any kind in the city to formally receive a LEED rating from USGBC. The $5 million facility was designed by Syracuse-based Schopfer Architects LLP, built by Northeast Construction Services, Inc., and opened up in February of 2006.
Popularity: 8% [?]
25Feb2008 | Stephen Del Percio | 0 comments | Continued
Excavation Complete, Silverstein Prepares to Break Ground at Gold Greenwich Towers
After completing excavation at 4 World Trade Center a month ago, the Port Authority on Wednesday finished excavation and foundation work at 3 World Trade Center. Respectively, the sites will be home to Fumihiko Maki’s 64-story, 975-foot minimalist 150 Greenwich Street and Richard Rogers’ 71-story, 1,147-foot 175 Greenwich Street. The Port Authority performed the work pursuant to the agreement that it entered into with Larry Silverstein back in 2006 (whereby Mr. Silverstein turned over the development of the Freedom Tower and Tower 5- the LEED Platinum Beer Belly Building- to the Port Authority in exchange for the right to build a trio of Greenwich Street towers). The Port Authority has now turned the sites back over to Mr. Silverstein after collectively excavating 400,000 tons of concrete, soil, and rock, as well as constructing an 80-foot deep foundation with 240 streel tiebacks.
Popularity: 14% [?]
22Feb2008 | Stephen Del Percio | 0 comments | Continued
Fordham’s Campbell Hall: Green Higher Education in the Bronx
Fordham University will begin construction in late April on two new seven-story residential buildings at its Rose Hill campus in the Bronx, both designed by Sasaki Associates to achieve an unspecified level of LEED certification. Together, the residence halls will offer 166,000 square feet of living space, divided into four- and six-person suites. Sasaki is still ironing out green design features, but it’s possible that the project could include rooftop rainwater collection systems, as well as LEED-standard efficient lighting and recycled construction materials.
Popularity: 13% [?]
22Feb2008 | Stephen Del Percio | 0 comments | Continued
Monday LEEDoff: 200 Delaware Avenue in Buffalo Harvests 7200 Tons of Demolition Debris
A project in downtown Buffalo, New York is taking LEED’s Materials & Resources credit category quite seriously and expects to collect close to 7,200 tons of demolition material during the $68 million rehabilitation of what was once the Thaddeus J. Dulski Federal Office Building into the mixed-use 200 Delaware Avenue. Designed by architects Pfohl, Roberts and Biggie, the project team is slowly razing the existing 15-story building that dates from the 1970s and sorting each component of the structure, from its pipes and wires to light fixtures. According to co-developers Uniland Development Co. and Acquest Development, the effort should conserve 6,434 tons of concrete exterior panels, 570 tons of interior concrete and brick, 200 tons of steel and metal, and 10 tons of aluminum.
Popularity: 12% [?]
18Feb2008 | Stephen Del Percio | 1 comment | Continued
Green Globes Legislation Grows in Garden State: Will Proposed Tax Credit Act Follow?
The New Jersey Green Building Tax Credit Act of 2008 may soon give developers in the Garden State up to $20 million in annual tax credits that they’ll be able to apply to their state corporate, income, sewer, and water taxes. Under S1077, the bill containing the proposed legislation, the amount of credits that would be awarded for a particular project increases as the developer builds to higher levels of LEED certification, up to an additional six percent for LEED Platinum. Over the course of the seven-year program, the total amount of available credits could increase to $50 million. The bill is being sponsored by Essex County Assemblyman John McKeon (D), who hopes that it will be signed into law by July 1.
Popularity: 11% [?]
15Feb2008 | Stephen Del Percio | 0 comments | Continued
NYC: America’s 20th Greenest City?
Popular Science ranks the country’s 50 Greenest Cities in its latest issue and New York comes in at a respectable #20, despite being beaten out by Boston and Chicago. The magazine used raw data from the U.S. Census Bureau and the National Geographic Society’s Green Guide, which collected government statics and survey data across 30 different sustainability categories. Pop Sci then distributed these statistics across four broad categories: electricity, transportation, green living, and recycling and green perspective. Cities earned points for items such as their number of LEED-certified buildings, how much energy they draw from renewable sources, how many commuters use public transportation or carpool, and how much land they devote to public green space.
Popularity: 6% [?]
12Feb2008 | Meredith Taylor | 0 comments | Continued-
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