Developers and architects have been experimenting piecemeal with so-called high-performance, or "green," building elements for decades.
But as the green building movement enters the mainstream, building developers are undertaking holistic strategies to designing high-performance buildings. For that, the industry has developed a common measuring stick.
That is where the Washington, D.C.-based U.S. Green Building Council comes into play. Six years ago, the nonprofit organization launched its Leadership in Energy & Environmental Design (LEED) certification to move the top 25 percent of the construction marketplace in a more sustainable direction.
Under the voluntary LEED system, commercial and residential developers register their buildings and work from the outset to integrate into their projects technologies and building materials -- such as photovoltaic panels, low-water faucets, low-toxic paint, double-pane windows and rooftop gardens -- to help conserve energy, water and other resources.
For new or remodeled buildings, the council has four LEED levels -- Platinum, Gold, Silver and Certified -- which are based on a point system. For example, points are awarded for onsite recycling, indoor air quality and energy and water efficiency.
To date, more than 600 public and private buildings in virtually every region of the country have been certified under LEED. Another 4,500 projects have been registered for future certification under LEED, making it the nation's dominant green building system.
Fifty-five U.S. cities, 20 states and eight federal agencies have policies requiring or encouraging various levels of LEED certification for new buildings, according to the industry statistics.
The public-sector policies are helping drive green building into the private sector, industry watchers contend.
The estimated value of the U.S. green building products market is about $8 billion today, up from less than $800 million a mere six years ago, according to the council. By 2010, the market will be worth about $32 billion, projects the Pittsburgh-based Green Building Alliance.
The Sustainable Design special report looks at environmental, economic and social forces driving the burgeoning green building movement. From Wall Street to Main Street, sustainable design is reshaping how we make homes, high-rises and buildings in between.
Part 2 examines new residential practices to help lessen the environmental footprint.
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| Artist's rendering of the Manhattan skyline with the proposed World Trade Center Towers. Image courtesy of Silverstein Properties Inc. |
NEW YORK -- It is a city in constant motion. The sidewalks of Midtown are ringing with white noise at noon. Traffic cops brazenly wade into the streets and direct the crush of taxis, buses, bicycles and pedestrians. Vendors hawk Broadway posters, Central Park pictures and famously salty pretzels. Tourists tilt upward to snap pictures of Times Square, Rockefeller Center and Trump Tower.
Seventy blocks south, past the iconic Empire State and Chrysler buildings, the skyline crescendos again around the yawning gap where the World Trade Center towers once marked the top of the financial world. Lower Manhattan's tall buildings are a rhapsody on 20th-century American ambition and bravado, changing tastes and fortunes. Such buildings are at once permanent and fleeting, for men in hard hats stir at their foundations. Skeletal steel frames will soon tell a new century's story.
It has been said that this city never sleeps, and perhaps New York never stops building upward, either. Not long ago, though, writers, politicians and sidewalk architecture critics, alike, wondered whether it would.
As calendars flipped to the new millennium, respected architect Ken Yeang dismissed skyscrapers as energy-inefficient relics of the 20th century that disconnected tenants from nature. Influential business mogul Phil Knight favored suburban corporate campuses. Technology turk Bill Gates promised that the Internet would scatter future workdays like dandelion seeds into telecommuters' homes, coffee shops and wherever else cyberspace enabled. And in the matter of one morning, two airplanes exposed tall buildings as hulking, vulnerable targets.
"We are now convinced that the age of skyscrapers is at an end," author James Howard Kunstler and urban theorist Nikos Salingaros wrote in a widely noted essay that was published shortly after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
"It must now be considered an experimental building typology that has failed," they continued, arguing that it would be more safe -- and socially and environmentally sustainable -- to confine future urban buildings to 10 stories. "We predict that no new megatowers will be built, and existing ones are destined to be dismantled."
They were wrong.
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| The atrium of the Hearst Tower optimizes daylight yet minimizes steel through the use of large windows in a diagonal grid design. Photo courtesy of Hearst Corp. |
A mere five years after the Twin Towers collapsed, the world is amid a high-rise construction boom driven by rebounding economies, plentiful development capital and burgeoning corporations and countries eager to put their mark on the world. From Beijing to Chicago, cities are again flexing their financial muscle in glass and steel form.
Perhaps fittingly, New York -- the self-described finance and media capital of the world and home of the first skyscraper -- is undergoing one of the biggest transformations. And in Manhattan -- whose skyline is rising with a new generation of so-called high-performance, or "green" commercial skyscrapers -- economics are trumping fears and real estate vital signs are stabilizing.
Lower Manhattan's building vacancy rate through August was 10.3 percent -- down almost 25 percent since August 2002, according to Cushman & Wakefield, a New York-based real estate and brokerage firm. Office rental rates, meantime, are rising. In the last year, alone, asking rates for downtown office space soared almost $6 to an average $36.71 per square foot, just $4 shy of the asking rate before the attacks, according to the firm.
Downtown's newest high-performance skyscraper -- 7 World Trade Center -- boasts an opening rental rate of $52.20 per square foot. Call it the new green premium.
"These buildings may or may not remain targets," concedes Peter Slatin, publisher of The Slatin Report, a New York-based commercial real estate journal. "The reality is people still want to be in these buildings to show success and stature."
The skyscraper renaissance may have as much to do with vanity as it does with economic and environmental sustainability. An increasing number of corporate executives are choosing energy- and resource-efficient towers as a way to buffer their bottom line.
Green high-rises lower utility bills as well as increase employee productivity, health and recruitment, a growing body of evidence suggests. And such buildings -- which are also touted as effective agents against urban sprawl and global warming -- can also help publicly traded corporations show off their social stewardship to Wall Street.
"Corporations are eager to build high-quality, environmental towers because they recognize the halo-effect these projects have on their brand," contends Charles Lockwood, an environmental and real estate consultant in California and New York who has written several books on urban architecture. "It's better than advertising touting their green credentials."
In past decades, before green was on the pages of glossy magazines and CSR reports, eco-skyscrapers were dismissed by most developers as overpriced and experimental meditations on nature.
Most commercial office buildings still took their cues from the 1970s, which saw the construction of Chicago's mammoth Sears Tower. The air-tight high-rise -- complete with its own zip code -- featured water-guzzling faucets, energy-swallowing air conditioners, bronze-tinted windows and an aluminum facade indifferent to the path of the sun. To be sure, Sears Tower and other Darth Vader replicas of that era have undergone renovations to improve energy and water usage. But most building owners still took a piecemeal approach -- a solar panel here or a double-pane window there -- to building a greener skyscraper.
There were notable exceptions, such as Yeang's MBf Tower, completed in Penang, Malaysia, in 1993, and Norman Foster's Commerzbanc Tower, completed in Frankfurt, Germany, in 1997.
Yeang's "bioclimactic" building was designed at its inception to optimize natural, or "passive," cooling in a muggy equatorial climate. Resembling a tilted tower of Jenga blocks, the 31-story building features garden terraces and two-story "skycourts" that allow light and air to penetrate deep into the core.
Foster's 850-foot-tall Commerzbanc had a more broad-shouldered, corporate look, with a sheer glass and steel curtain wall. A triangular atrium rises through the center of the 56-story building and opens to the exterior at nine elevations, forming large gardens.
New York's first skyscraper to embrace a whole-building approach to green design -- 4 Times Square -- did not come about until 1999. The 48-story tower, which houses Conde Nast Publications Inc., features thin-film photovoltaic panels on the top 19 floors, rooftop natural gas absorption chillers and heaters, and a floor-by-floor air filtration system.
While praised by architecture critics initially, these buildings are only now being emulated on a wider and grander scale. The reason, industry watchers say, is a confluence of new opportunities and pressures facing building owners and occupants.
The building sector today ranks as the largest energy consumer and greenhouse gas emitter in the nation, when taking into account the electricity required to operate the structures and the energy embodied in carpet, concrete, steel, glass and other building materials, according to the Department of Energy. Fast forward 30 years, and 75 percent of the country's built environment will be either new or renovated.
Architecture heavyweights such as Robert Fox Jr., a founding partner of Cook + Fox Architects, have seized on such statistics to show the enormous role high-performance buildings could play in tempering the nation's future energy consumption.
Meantime, Ceres and other powerful investor coalitions are increasingly demanding corporate environmental stewardship as a way to improve returns on Wall Street. Companies, in turn, are looking for cost-effective ways to decrease their emissions footprint and natural resources consumption.
In a recent survey of almost 2,000 corporate chief executives, 64 percent of respondents said they were "very concerned" or "moderately concerned" about global warming, according to Vistage International, the survey's author and the world's largest CEO membership organization. And given the last few years' exponential run-up of fossil fuel prices, 7 percent of the survey's respondents cited energy costs as the most important issue facing their business.
The smart corporate chieftains are taking a hard look today at the buildings their companies will occupy tomorrow, says Dennis Creech, executive director of the Southface Energy Institute, an Atlanta-based green building consultant.
"The cost of dealing with climate change is enormous," adds Creech, whose company is currently helping IKEA green its buildings. "It will swamp the cost that we will ... invest in buildings' energy efficiency and renewable energy -- and, in fact, those investments are going to pay us back."
Global media giant Hearst Corp. will be among New York's first companies to measure just how much a high-performance hedge pays off.
Last month, Hearst executives moved into a new headquarters building at the corner of Eighth Avenue and 57th Street in Manhattan. The building features a six-story art deco base, topped by 40 stories of diagonal steel beams and floor-to-ceiling glass. The "diagrid" design required 20 percent less steel than a like-sized building using conventional framing methods, Hearst officials say.
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| Hearst Tower as it appears today. Inset: Hearst Tower base circa 1930. Photos courtesy of Hearst Corp. |
Through a combination of sensors that adjust ceiling lights to the amount of daylight penetrating the building's interior, a super-efficient heating and cooling system, and other gadgets, the building is expected to be 22 percent more energy-efficient than a conventionally designed building, Hearst officials say.
The green features helped the Hearst Tower earn a Gold rating under the U.S. Green Building Council's LEED (Leadership in Energy & Environmental Design) certification system.
"When we decided to build a new home here, we had to get it right," says Hearst's President and CEO Victor Ganzi. "We are proud of this designation as it validates our hard work and hopefully raises the bar for future office towers in New York City."
To be sure, Hearst Tower is still an exception to the norm.
According to a study by the McGraw-Hill Cos., green buildings constitute less than 5 percent of total construction today, but that figure is projected to double by 2010. Hearst Tower is one of just four large commercial buildings -- those with 300,000 square feet or more of office space -- in New York and about 50 in the nation that are certified under the 6-year-old LEED program, according to U.S. Green Building Council data analyzed by Greenwire.
Another 18 buildings in New York and 4,500 additional projects throughout the rest of the country are registered for future certification, however.
The queue of developers aiming for LEED certification means building a green skyscraper will one day be standard practice, contends Martin Moeller, curator of the National Building Museum in Washington, D.C.
The multibillion-dollar question: When?
"There's been a sea change over the last decade, but we still have a very long way to go," Moeller adds. "I would guess that the vast majority of projects today don't even take into consideration green design principles."
Real estate writer Slatin agrees, underscoring his belief that most skyscraper developers will integrate green design principles only when they cease to be an amenity and become a necessity.
"The distance between a corporate boardroom, a company's stock price and the decision about what kind of heater or chiller to use is still a long way," Slatin adds.
But other industry watchers contend that the green skyscraper movement has already reached the tipping point. They point out that influential companies and tenants are demanding green office space in New York, Chicago, San Francisco, Seattle and other large cities, which traditionally set the tone for the rest of the United States.
"Green buildings are here to stay," says Cushman & Wakefield managing director Louis Mantia, who points to Manhattan as proof.
JP Morgan Chase & Co. is also seeking LEED certification for the planned remodeling of its 52-story, 1.45 million-square-foot headquarters in Midtown. Fellow banking giant Bank of America Corp. is seeking LEED Platinum certification for a 51-story, 2.1 million-square-foot tower the company is building adjacent to 4 Times Square. The Goldman Sachs Group Inc. is taking an even bigger step. In addition to seeking LEED Gold certification for a 43-story headquarters building currently under construction in Lower Manhattan, Goldman says it will strive for LEED certification for all new construction projects.
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| An energy-efficient shell with multiple-pane windows gives 7 World Trade Center a LEED Gold rating from the U.S. Green Building Council. Left photo courtesy of David Sundberg, ESTO. Right photo courtesy of Marcus Robinson. | |
But plans for the former site of the Twin Towers might be Manhattan's biggest statement yet. In May, Silverstein Properties Inc., the land's leaseholder, opened the doors to 7 World Trade Center, the last building to fall and the first to rise anew from the attacks. The 52-story building, which is LEED Gold-certified, is about 52 percent full. Ameriprise Financial Inc., Moody's Investors Service, Mansueto Ventures LLC and the New York Academy of Sciences are among its initial tenants.
During the next five years, Silverstein plans to build three more skyscrapers -- including the 1,176-foot-tall Freedom Tower. Together, the World Trade Center towers would add 10 million square feet of LEED Gold-certified office space in the heart of one of the world's most influential cities.
"Post 9/11, people were saying the high-rise tower would be dead, and what has happened is almost the opposite," notes David Scott, chairman of the Chicago-based Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat. "There has been a massive boom in high-rise living and high-rise real estate prices, and most of that is economically driven."
For the green high-rise trend to endure, Scott says building owners must conduct post-occupancy studies to prove just how effective their energy- and water-saving gadgets really are. And that is just the first step. Quantifying employee productivity, health, retention and other intangibles could have far greater effect on changing skeptical CEOs' minds, others say.
Historically, one of the biggest obstacles to green buildings has been a perception that a high-performance skyscraper costs more to build -- and, indeed, that perception was reality, says Cushman & Wakefield's Mantia. A full top-to-bottom green design typically carried a premium cost of 10 to 15 percent, he notes.
New studies show that high-performance and conventionally designed buildings are beginning to stack up evenly in terms of capital cost, however.
Cost-consulting company Davis Langdon & Shea International conducted a recent analysis of 600 buildings ranging in size, location and use. The London-based firm found that a majority of the buildings studied were able to achieve LEED certification without additional funding. What's more, the analysis suggested that the cost per square foot for buildings seeking LEED certification was within the existing range of costs for buildings of a similar program type.
"Five years ago if you used the term 'green premium,' it meant the building would cost more. Now, it means you will earn more," real estate consultant Lockwood notes.
But Lockwood considers the financial returns achieved through energy efficiencies "insignificant" compared to savings from improved worker productivity, health and retention.
According to a 2002 study by the DOE's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, about 23 percent of U.S. office workers experience some form of "sick building syndrome" symptoms -- such as nausea or throat irritation -- each year. The same study found that improved air quality, achieved through better ventilation, recycled carpet and low-toxic interior finishes, lowered such symptoms by 20 to 50 percent, Lockwood noted in a recent issue of the Harvard Business Review.
Other findings by the lab indicate that optimizing natural daylight and ventilation, as well as using less-toxic interior building materials could produce up to $20 billion in annual savings from reduced sick building syndrome, as well as up to $125 billion from improved worker performance in the United States, notes the Environmental and Energy Study Institute, a Washington, D.C., public policy think tank.
Today's small but growing group of green building true believers are still learning how to effectively market such intangibles to prospective tenants, industry experts concede.
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| Artist's rendering of the Manhattan skyline with the proposed World Trade Center Towers. Image courtesy of Silverstein Properties Inc. |
"It's not a hard and fast decision yet, in terms of our tenants," says Kenneth Lewis, an associate partner with Skidmore, Owings & Merrill LLP, the chief architect of 7 World Trade Center. "But that's changing.
"Five years ago people were not doing the due diligence on buildings' sustainability," he explains, while leading a recent tour of the tower. "Now some ask the question immediately: 'Is it green, and what's the certification level.'"
Job applicants, in turn, are beginning to ask the same questions of their prospective employers. And that leads Lewis to believe 7 World Trade Center is the start of something much bigger.
"This building has set the standard for all of New York," Lewis promises.
Lewis sounds like a man who is certain of what he is saying -- especially given where he is standing: It is the top-floor of a state-of-the-art building with a dazzling view of the Hudson River. Yet Lower Manhattan's greenest new office tower is only half full five months after its opening.
Of course, from Lewis' vantage point 52 stories high, he also sees a busy construction pit that was once called Ground Zero. Like the many other places in New York, it is filled by men with hard hats and big plans.
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