Jared Gilbert and Alice Hartley of architecture firm Cook+Fox look out their Chelsea office window onto the building’s green roof, which harvests rainwater to feed plantings that generate higher quality air back into the office.
Firm taking the LEED on green architecture
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| Cook+Fox’s One Bryant Park building for Bank of America, which is striving to become the first office building to achieve LEED “Platinum” status for green design. |
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By Chris Lombardi
Architecture firm Cook+Fox has won numerous awards from the US Green Building Council for innovation and leadership in green design, especially for its flagship One Bryant Park building for Bank of America, which is slated to be the first office building to meet the “Platinum” standard for Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED).
Last week we sat down with Alice Hartley, who joined Cook+Fox after years with a local environmental nonprofit, and communications director Jared Gilbert, who studied architecture at Ball State University. From their Chelsea offices on Sixth Avenue between 19th and 20th Sts., which itself has won renown for environmental design, they spoke together about what LEED principles look like when applied to buildings old and new.
Walking to this office from the subway, I was struck by the age of the buildings on what is referred to as “Ladies Mile.” How does history fit into your approach to green development?
Our firm was founded when Richard Cook, who’s always been very focused on historic preservation, joined up with Richard Fox, whose former company FoxFowle builds skyscrapers. So from the beginning, we’ve believed those principles—historic preservation and green development—go together.
We try to use the natural assets of a space. This office, in the Ladies Mile Historic District, is a good example. When this building was built, daylight was what there is, that was how you could see—a historical fact that helped us renovate along green principles. Our office was the first in New York to earn certified LEED Platinum status.
So how do you get there? We hear a lot about buildings that rate Certified and Silver, and all the planners bidding for the Hudson Yards project swear that their projects will be either Gold or Platinum. Since your office and the Bank of America building are already rated Platinum, take us through how you come up with solutions for each of the LEED criteria, both for new projects like BofA and older spaces like this one.
First, we have “sustainable sites”—the idea that you choose sites that help people have lower impact and make good use of a site’s natural assets. About One Bryant Park, Rick Cook wrote last year that “based on studies of the site’s different solar patterns in winter versus summer, the building’s faces will be oriented to work optimally with the sun.”
What do you look for when choosing the site in the first place?
For One Bryant Park, you’re also talking about the park itself, and there were numerous ways to incorporate that into how the building is designed and built. In New York, most sites have good access to public transportation, which gives you some automatic points. It’s kind of a no-brainer, unless you’re building on a brownfield [former industrial site].
Of course, usually in New York, it’s not like we’re working on undisturbed sites. Those issues are always there—former chemicals, storm water, materials that weren’t the best for health. But there are always assets to work with as well—like in this office, where we found that roof out there, and turned it into a green roof. Instead of having gutters and wasting all that rainwater, those plants help add to the air quality in the office.
Is that an example of how to create “water efficiency” in older buildings, like reusing water to help flush toilets? At the B of A building, you’re planning to collect rainwater in five storage tanks—together with condensate from heating/cooling systems and “gray” water from lavatory sinks—providing almost 7 million gallons that don’t come from city reservoirs. But what are you doing in Chelsea?
First, there’s this green roof, which besides providing good air, traps rainwater. And we get additional points because it’s planted with sedum, which doesn’t require irrigation, all year round. Meanwhile, our restrooms—we have low-flush toilets and waterless urinals, same as in new construction. Between the two, we save many gallons of water per year.
For One Bryant Park we’re using a kind of second-generation waterless urinal. It was quite a task convincing DEP [the city Department of Environmental Conservation] to accept it and approve the plans.
Is energy efficiency the most crucial aspect of green building in some ways, especially with building codes that have been emphasizing safety and comfort rather than sustainability? Is that why Robert Fox is not just on the Mayor’s Task Force on Sustainability, but also the Department of Buildings’?
Yeah—on the energy side, if you get to certified, that means you’re doing well. Now, they’re already working on the next generation of the code, and we hope to mandate deeper improvements toward the energy standards in the new code.
In this building, we were somewhat limited, because we had an existing heating and filtration system. We added for lighting seven levels of controls, depending on the time of day and how many people are working. More control is better, both for comfort and efficiency. At One Bryant Park, each individual workstation is slated to have its own manually adjusted heating/cooling control, which could resolve the No. 1 complaint in every office building in our country.
With a new building like One Bryant Park, it seems you go straight to cogeneration. How exactly does that work?
Cogeneration is like a giant engine in the basement—like a huge turbine. It captures the heat that would otherwise go out the window, or the vents, and recycles it to become energy.
All of that helps with air quality. Any heat you make on-site, it has to be clean enough so that you can live with it.
How about indoor air quality? At One Bryant Park, your filtration system is designed to filter out 95 percent of particulates, ozone and volatile organic compounds (VOCs) from the outside air. But what about older buildings, like this office?
We weren’t going to rip out the whole filtration system, but we added filters to make it all cleaner. And when we chose the materials for the interior, we made sure they didn’t have VOCs. You know how most newer offices have a smell? That’s a sign that you’re breathing solvents. That’s pretty bad for you.
Are VOC-free products more expensive?
It depends. Some prices are starting to converge. With paint it’s almost exactly the same—you can get VOC-free paint pretty easily. With others it’s harder—like plywood. You have to pay a little more for plywood that’s healthier than what you get at Home Depot.
We also favor recycled materials. In new construction, like at One Bryant Park, more than 40 percent of the concrete is from blast furnace slag, a waste product from steel manufacturing. Here in this office, and in other interiors, we use a lot of IceStone, which is a countertop product made of recycled stone and glass.
Everyone loves glass, it seems. You and Mr. Cook wrote that the Bank of America tower “will have floor-to-ceiling exterior walls of high-performance, low-emissivity glass—filtering out infrared rays but admitting abundant daylight—letting occupants access the views and connect to the elements outside.” Such glass buildings seem to be everywhere. Can you do that and still meet your goals for energy efficiency?
Look, the greenest building you could have would be a solid box with no windows. Then you’d have an extremely efficient wall and could trap heat extremely efficiently. But no one wants to work in a building like that. And for an office building, glass is desirable because the glass traps light, so you spend less on lighting.
And we can make energy more efficiently, not just cogeneration. For One Bryant Park, we’re designing an anaerobic digester plant, still under review, that would convert food waste from the building’s cafeterias into compost and electricity.
Speaking of glass towers, you’re not involved with any of the development projects being proposed for Hudson Yards. But you see the project as potentially a big step forward for green buildings.
It’s an opportunity for the city to make a huge impact on how buildings are built in New York. Even in the past few years, I’ve seen the cost of green materials start to come together, but when the city acts, it can make such a huge difference. You can incentivize developers to do so much, but cities can do more—they can change the rules of the game by making LEED certification mandatory. Otherwise they won’t do it, because they want to be competitive.
Still, green buildings make long-term financial sense for other reasons.
We’re seeing that building owners more and more want the best possible thing, since it’s going to stay in the portfolio for a long time. Then they can get high-end renters—as the Durst Organization has at One Bryant Park.
And residential buyers want the best also. If you’re going to be spending a million dollars on a condo for your family, do you want one with dirty air or clean air for your children? Would you spend an extra hundred dollars on an apartment that costs a couple million?
