All Posts Tagged With: "green construction"

Designed by USA Architects of Somerville, New Jersey, the 90,000-square-foot Center for Lifelong Learning will accomodate 175 autistic and disabled children aged 3 to 21 and is aiming for the first LEED Platinum rating of any school in the state of New Jersey. The $23 million project just recently broke ground in Sayreville and should be ready in September of 2009. The school will offer 24 classrooms, as well as physical therapy, gymnasium, and aquatics space, which will also be used by Sayreville’s Brain Injured Children’s Swim program.

Earlier this week, the New York State Department of Transporation (”NYSDOT”) unveiled its Green Leadership In Transportation and Environmental Sustainability (”Green LITES”) design program. While NYSDOT has utilized sustainable elements in its transportation designs previously, Green LITES is an attempt to standardize the entire process and place New York State at the head of the pack when it comes to sustainable transportation design; the program, which is based on LEED, is the first in the country of its kind. “This effort is only the latest example of New York setting the standard for environmental sensitivity in transportation planning,” said Federal Highway Administrator Thomas J. Madison. “They don’t just set the gold standard, they set the green standard.” NYSDOT will review all designs submitted after September 25 under the Green LITES program, prior to the project going out to bid.

Boston-based Anna Beha Architects (”ABA”) has designed a renovation and expansion of Princeton University’s Carl A. Fields Center for Equality and Cultural Understanding, whose building dates from 1901 and was formerly one of the school’s eating clubs. The project recently broke ground and contemplates a 5080-square-foot addition to the original, Italianate-style base building, which will house 18,8000 square feet of programming, office, and classroom space. The architect’s challenge was to reclaim the building’s original design, which it discovered through researching the university’s archives had been buried by a series of poorly executed previous renvovations. ABA was charged with creating useable outdoor space, as well as visible entry points into the structure.

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.

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.

Earlier this week, lawmakers in Albany reached an agreement with Governor Paterson on amendments to New York State’s Brownfield Cleanup Program Act (”BCPA”). Under current BCPA provisions, developers can receive tax credits for up to 22 percent of the cost of remediating a brownfield site. The new Act will increase that figure to 50 percent but include a cap of $35 million (or three times the cleanup cost, whichever is less) for non-manufacturing projects; the cap increases to $45 million (or six times the cleanup cost, again, whichever is less) for manufacturing projects.