The National Audubon Society's new office space on the seventh floor of 225 Varick Street has earned the highest point total ever for a Platinum LEED for Commercial Interiors certification. USGBC formally conferred the award late last month, and the project also received honors as one of New York Construction magazine's Best of 2008 projects. We noted the project last February right after the Audubon Society moved into its new space; you may recall that during the 1990s it had renovated its former headquarters at 700 Broadway using similar sustainable design features, so green construction techniques were not foreign to the organization at all.
It's important to keep in mind that sustainable, energy-efficient buildings do exist outside of the LEED rubric. Accordingly, 700 Broadway calls itself New York City's "original" green building; the 10-story, 100,000-square-foot tower dates from 1891 and is the former home of the National Audubon Society, which purchased the building in 1989 while it was abandoned during a much seedier era in the Village. The organization sold the building in 2006 to the Lincoln Property Company for $53 million and (as we wrote about recently) moved earlier this year to the seventh floor of 225 Varick Street. The Audubon Society has outfitted that space with a number of green design features in pursuit of a LEED for Commercial Interiors Platinum rating from USGBC.
