All Posts Tagged With: "USGBC"

Designed by Perkins+Will and Lilker Associates Consulting Engineers, the New Space for Women’s Health will be New York City’s first stand-alone birthing center, offering women and their families prenatal and postpartum care, childbirth education, social work, and psychological services. The three-story project is pursuing a LEED Gold rating from USGBC; green features will include efficient HVAC, water, and lighting systems, among other LEED standards. Lilker’s healthcare division sought to design a “relaxed and warm setting” for patients that simultaneously conserves energy. The team is also considering installing wind turbines and solar hot water panels. The 8000-square-foot project involves the conversion of a former parking garage on West 30th Street in Midtown and should open sometime in 2010.

gbNYC selects green news items of note that were reported across the New York City area during the week of August 17, 2008, including Frank Gehry withdrawing (or perhaps not) from the Theater for a New Audience project at the BAM Cultural District in Fort Greene, the recent topping out of Macklowe Properties’ LEED Gold hopeful 510 Madison Avenue, a proposal for a wind farm on the Fresh Kills landfill in Staten Island, and the energy-efficient glass skin of SJP Properties’ 11 Times Square- also pursuing a LEED Gold rating- beginning to take shape above Eighth Avenue.

We’ve written extensively here at gbNYC about the potential for litigation arising out of green construction projects. To date the issue has been on the radar screens of numerous industry authors, but real-life application of green legal theory has been relatively difficult to come by outside of a handful of green-related claims reported by insurance carriers. However, a (relatively) recent lawsuit that was filed on the eastern shore of Maryland demonstrates that green building risk is real- particularly in light of rapidly increasing regulatory activity at the state and local levels. The suit suggests the critical importance of clear contract language for each stakeholder on a green construction project and posits that the alternative could be massive exposure to unanticipated liability for every project participant.

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.

Yesterday was not a good day to be a green building under construction in Midtown. First, Steve Cuozzo reported in the Post that Macklowe Properties’ 510 Madison Avenue, which is currently pursuing a LEED Gold rating from USGBC, has received a partial stop-work order from the Department of Buildings. Later in the morning, a 5 ‘ by 13′ panel of glass fell from the 51st floor of Cook + Fox’s LEED Platinum hopeful Bank of America Tower. The panel landed on sidewalk bridging across 42nd Street (where the former Verizon Building continues to undergo a number of green retrofits), shattering and sending one person to Bellevue. Tishman Construction is serving as the construction manager for both of the projects

SL Green’s 100 Park Avenue was the first of Park Avenue’s International Style high-rises. Located at the corner of East 40th Street, the modern glass and steel tower was completed in 1949 and replaced the Murray Hill Hotel, which dated from 1883 and whose residents put up a fierce battle against the new development. The building’s current owner, SL Green, is wrapping up an 18-month, $72 million capital improvement program that includes a LEED for Existing Buildings (”LEED-EB”) application aiming for a Silver rating from USGBC. The project includes upgraded building infrastructure, a new facade and windows, and a new lobby and elevators; BOMA named the tower its Best Renovated Building of the Year for 2007. Last week, accounting and consulting firm BDO Seidman signed a 121,441-square-foot lease across the tower’s 9th through 11th floors.

Despite its green design features, JetBlue’s new $743 million Terminal 5 at Kennedy Airport will not be seeking a LEED rating. The project’s planning and design management firm Arup has deemed certification “not possible because of the airport’s existing energy infrastructure.” Architect Gensler’s design for T5 includes extensive daylighting and windows, and given JetBlue’s commitment at the corporate level to sustainability, it’s a bit curious that the project will not pursue certification from USGBC, though precise details about how JFK’s electrical grid precludes a LEED application are not available . T5 will give travelers the option of walking through Eero Saarinen’s TWA Terminal, a modernist landmark that has been incorporated into the T5 design program.

Cambridge, Massachusetts-based design firm KlingStubbins, in cooperation with Croxton Collaborative Architects, has achieved a LEED Gold rating from USGBC for the Johnson Hall of Science at St. Lawrence University; the project is the sixth for which KlingStubbins has earned LEED certification during 2008. The 122,000-square-f0ot building will house the biology and chemistry departments and is St. Lawrence’s first phase of a project which will also call for the construction of an additional 120,000 square feet. The school’s four existing science buildings will be renovated over the next three phases to create additional academic space for physics, math, geology, and computer science. Johnson Hall scored 41 LEED points, is oriented on a north/south axis, and is separated into two interconnected wings in order to provide maximum daylight to interior program spaces.

Last June, HSBC announced a five-year, $100 million partnership to address global climate change, agreeing to work with The Climate Group, Earthwatch Institute, Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, and the World Wildlife Fund in order to quantify the impact of climate change on the world’s cities, forests, and rivers through extensive field research. Yesterday, sources told GlobeSt.com that the bank is close to continuing its sustainable efforts by leasing 300,000 square feet across seven of the final ten floors available at Larry Silverstein’s LEED Gold 7 World Trade Center. Should the deal close, HSBC would likely sell its 500,000-square-foot headquarters tower at 452 Fifth Avenue in Midtown. Asking rents for the final ten floors at 7 WTC are hovering between $75 and $85 per square foot, and HSBC’s deal is rumored to be “at term sheet at the moment.”

At a meeting held earlier today, the Port Authority unveiled renderings from three firms for 20 Times Square, the 1.3 million-square foot, 42-story LEED (for Core and Shell) Gold tower that Vornado Realty Trust and Ruben Cos. plan to co-develop above the north wing of the agency’s Bus Terminal on 8th Avenue. From left to right in the image, Pelli Clarke Pelli (The Visionaire), Rogers Stirk Harbour & Partners (Tower 3 at the World Trade Center along Greenwich Street), and KPF (Court Square Two, One Jackson Square, and the Beer Belly Building) present three very different visions for the tower, ranging from Pelli’s artistic curtain wall and KPF’s glass box that evokes the Lever House (and Boston Properties’ “redux” on West 55th Street) to Rogers’ series of stacked boxes that is easily the most ambitious of the three concepts.