LEED

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

According to University of Minnesota biosystems engineering professor James L. Bowyer, USGBC’s LEED system may be doing more harm than good when it comes to fostering sustainable design practices. In a recent article in Professional Builder, Bowyer specifically pointed to LEED’s current lack of life cycle assessment (”LCA”) for building materials. LCA in the context of sustainable building refers to an analysis of the environmental impact of construction materials and building systems during the course of their entire useful lives. Bowyer’s main point is that, in the absence of LCA, LEED encourages project teams to achieve as many credits as possible, which may actually end up increasing- rather than decreasing- the environmental impact of purportedly green construction.

Mercy Corps today officially unveiled its Action Center to End World Hunger, a $5.4 million, 4,000-square-foot interactive education facility in Battery Park City that should open up this fall. Designed by Edwin Schlossberg’s ESI Design, the Center will seek a LEED Platinum rating from USGBC. The Battery Park City Authority chose Mercy in the wake of September 11 to create a Downtown cultural space that would raise local awareness about global issues; Mercy is a provider of international relief and development funding that earned a 2007 Nobel Peace Prize nomination.

A few green addresses of note jump off the most recent CoStar Group list of the largest contiguous blocks of office space currently available in Manhattan (as of December 31, 2007). The list appears in the Real Estate Report in this week’s edition of Crain’s. Topping the list is SJP Properties’ LEED Silver hopeful 11 [...]

Chapter 1 of the 2007 Building Design + Construction Green Buildings White Paper, “AEC Industry Continues to Embrace Green Building, But Is It Still Only a Niche?,” includes three pages of quotes from industry stakeholders regarding, among other things, their attitudes towards the role of A/E/C professionals in green building, prevailing green market conditions, defining [...]

The City University of New York (”CUNY”) announced a budget request earlier this week for $77 million to build a new sustainable library on the campus of Bronx Community College (”BCC”). The North Instructional Building and Library, designed by Robert A.M. Stern, will be constructed for LEED Silver certification and is expected to be [...]