Green Brooklyn

Designed by architects Cook + Fox (The Lucida and Bank of America Tower ), a planned 17-story, 350,000-square-foot office building could become Brooklyn's first LEED Gold-certified commercial office tower. The tower, part of the larger City Point development in downtown Brooklyn, is a joint venture between Acadia Realty Trust, MacFarlane Partners, P/A Associates, Washington Square Partners and Rose Associates, is a smaller version of a much larger tower that had been proposed for the same site. City Point will also include 525,000 square feet of retail space, as well as a 900,000-square-foot residential component that will also include affordable units. Earlier this week, the development team named Cushman & Wakefield as the office tower's exclusive leasing agent. The image to the right is outdated; new renderings and specific green features for the project are not currently available.

• Blue Sea Development "bucking" the trend of projects registering but not achieving LEED certification with affordable Morrisania Homes, Melrose Commons V, and Fox Leggett projects in the Bronx
• City selects Gowanus Green to develop LEED Gold & LEED-ND development along Gowanus Canal between 5th and Smith Streets
• Despite budget cuts, New York Theater Workshop's LEED-certified scenery, costume, and prop shop at 72 East 4th Street to proceed with May 14 ground-breaking
• New Mancini Duffy-designed AOL headquarters at 770 Broadway to seek LEED rating
• Port Authority
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Designed by Gregory Merryweather, the Greenbelt condos, which broke ground back in January of 2006, are on track to become Brooklyn’s first LEED-certified mixed-use development. Developer Derek Denckla is rehabbing a former plumbing warehouse at 361 Manhattan Avenue in East Williamsburg into eight floor-through apartments across five additional floors and 9,600 total square feet. The $4 million project (which according to the New York Sun is behind schedule because of delays in sourcing 100% recycled-content gypsum wall board and steel I-beams) also includes a 4,000-square-foot ground floor dance center. Green features in each of the eight units at Greenbelt include bamboo flooring and kitchen cabinets, as well as Energy Star appliances, Richlite countertops made from recycled paper, and energy-efficient washers and dryers. The John Jasperse Company and Chez Bushwick (a dance center that provides low-cost rehearsal space) will purchase the dance center and create the non-profit Center for Performance Research at Greenbelt. The Center will accommodate an audience of up to 80 people; the companies should move into the space by next month.

John Jasperse himself will be a guest tomorrow (Wednesday) evening, December 12, with Katherine Lanpher on WNYC 93.9 FM at 7PM (also live on the web here and available on-demand thereafter). Mr. Jasperse will participate in the station’s "Must Have Festival," where he and other special guests this week will share their favorite music with listeners.

We’ll stick with green affordable housing projects in Brooklyn today and note Glenmore Gardens, a $2.3 million, five-building, ten-unit development in East New York which was funded by the Department of Housing Preservation and Development’s (“HPD”) New Foundations Program on land owned by HPD. New Foundations encourages smaller developers to build affordable housing in neighborhoods where ownership is difficult for many residents; most of the purchasers at Glenmore Gardens earn more than eighty percent less of the neighborhood’s median income. The project was completed earlier this year and is profiled in the November 2007 issue of Dwell (though the article is not available online.)

In addition to co-developing the project with ET Partners, Brooklyn-based Della Valle Bernheimer Architects designed two of the buildings and directed Architecture Research Office (“ARO”), BriggsKnowles Architecture + Design, and Lewis.Tsurumaki.Lewis, as they designed one building each.