All Posts Tagged With: "LEED"

Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Pamela Green, executive director of the Weeksville Heritage Society, along with other Brooklyn and city leaders, broke ground in a ceremony last Wednesday on a new 19,000-square-foot educational and cultural center at 1698 Bergen Avenue in Bedford-Stuyvesant. The $19.5 million Weeksville Heritage Center, designed by architects Caples Jefferson, will seek a LEED Gold rating from USGBC. Weeksville- now known as Bedford-Stuyvesant- was an African-American community that began in Brooklyn in 1838 as a refuge for slaves fleeing the South.

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-CI Platinum rating from USGBC. Oddly enough, a local plaintiffs’ law firm that has likely made millions prosecuting claims arising out of exposure to decidedly non-green building materials such as asbestos and lead paint has purchased 770 Broadway for $70 million.

gbNYC selects green news items of note that were reported across the New York City area during the week of June 15, 2008, including ongoing litigation in connection with Neil Denari’s HL23 condominium project in Chelsea, the Port Authority listening to bids from the private sector for the Freedom Tower, and Brooklyn’s Toren shooting down rumors that the condo project will turn rental, pointing to its LEED Gold application as a major drawing card for potential purchasers.

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.

While the New York Yankees have been mum on the green design features (if any, though the project is not seeking a LEED rating) at their new $1 billion stadium in the Bronx which will open up next April, Major League Baseball announced today that next month’s All-Star Game (July 15) at the current Yankee Stadium across the street will be “the greenest event in MLB’s history.” MLB has partnered with the Natural Resources Defense Council to promote environmental awareness at this year’s Midsummer Classic.

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.

British Airways announced yesterday that it will spend $30 million over the next 18 months to refurbish its Terminal 7 out at JFK International Airport. The project is slated to break ground in June and BA plans to pursue first LEED rating to date for any facility at JFK. Specific details on green design features aren’t available yet, but the new terminal will maximize natural daylight and presumably incorporate other LEED-standard credits. The New York Observer suggests that “modernist furniture, clean lines and general sleekness seemed to be the prevailing theme” for Terminal 7 at yesterday’s unveiling.

Hospitals and clinics are among the most conspicuous energy consumers on the planet. The need for infection control introduces a fog of harsh chemicals that are rough on lungs as well as the wastewater stream. Air quality has to be monitored and changed frequently. And because hospitals never sleep, neither do expensive, sensitive respirators and scanning machines. Add to that an interminable flow of disposable needles, gloves and blood bags, and you can understand why so many hospitals have a Godzilla-sized carbon footprint. At the same time, as healing spaces, hospitals are striving to gain ground within the green movement. Healthcare administrators recognize that green buildings are healthy buildings, promoting speedier recovery rates and improving staff performance, while simultaneously saving energy and reducing operations costs.

gbNYC selects green news items of note that were reported across the New York City area during the week of May 11, 2008, including the likely end of plans for JPMorgan Chase’s new LEED Platinum headquarters at Ground Zero, a profile of Bronx-based recycled materials supplier ReBuilders Source, and new LEED projects for Donald Trump in Philadelphia and the New Canaan Country School in Connecticut.

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.