Rick Fedrizzi

Last May, the city of Greensburg, Kansas was devastated by a tornado that killed ten people and injured over fifty of its 1,400 residents - as you can see from the image, the level of destruction was almost incomprehensible. Back on December 17, though, the city passed a resolution to rebuild its public buildings greater than 4,000 square feet to a LEED Platinum level. In a USGBC press release from yesterday that announced the resolution, Rick Fedrizzi noted that “[t]he city of Greensburg has taken the extraordinary step of committing to rebuild their community to a new vision, not settling for simply recreating what had gone before.” The resolution also requires that qualifying projects reduce their energy consumption by 42 percent over code through achieving all ten of the LEED optimize energy performance credits.

In October, Greensburg selected Kansas City-based BNIM Architects to create a new master plan for the city, grounded in sustainable principles implemented through zoning refinements and streetscape design, among other features. BNIM has worked on a similar effort before - it designed a 940-square-foot green home in the Lower Ninth Ward through its work with Brad Pitt’s New Orleans: Make it Right Foundation.

You can check out the text of the resolution here; note that the language does not explicitly require formal certification from USGBC, but rather that projects “conform to the Platinum rating of the USGBC LEED [system].”

The New York Public Library’s Bronx Library Center was awarded LEED Silver certification from USGBC last summer, but USGBC President Rick Fedrizzi officially presented the honor in person at a ceremony last Thursday, January 11th up in The Bronx. The Center is the first publicly-funded green building in New York City to receive LEED certification (noteworthy because the City’s Local Law 86, requiring LEED Silver for many public projects, took effect on January 1, 2007). At five stories, 78,000 square feet, and designed by Dattner Architects, the Center is the New York Public Library’s largest capital project in the past twenty years, at a cost of some $50 million. Green features include FSC-certified desk, door, and interior paneling, an insulated glass curtain wall, and separately controlled heating and cooling areas for office and bookshelf spaces.