New Age Architecture
The crystalline Bank of America Tower at One Bryant Park in Midtown Manhattan represents a new paradigm in sustainability.
Words Sara Hart
History repeats itself? Perhaps not literally, but certain places do seem to have a curious resonance. Bryant Park in midtown Manhattan, located behind Carrère & Hastings’s celebrated New York Public Library is just such a one. Two hundred years ago the site was a Native American hunting ground. It then became a potter’s field and next an enclosed park, when the imposing Croton Reservoir occupied the library’s site. In 1853 the Crystal Palace Exhibition, New York’s first world’s fair, was held there. A cutting-edge iron-and-glass structure, the Crystal Palace was a marvel of lightweight engineering, destroyed by fire in 1858.
Gone but not forgotten, that daring building became the inspiration for Cook + Fox Architects when the New York-based firm was awarded the commission in 2003 to design the Bank of America Tower at One Bryant Park, a joint venture of the Durst Organization and the financial institution, the building’s major tenant. The selection of Cook + Fox was not surprising. Douglas Durst had already worked with one of the firm’s principals, Robert Fox Jr., when he was a principal at Fox & Fowle, on Four Times Square, the world’s first speculative green office tower.
Douglas Durst is something of an anomaly among New York real estate developers. Under his leadership the family-owned Durst Organization has been a determined promoter of sustainable development for decades. The company undertook the development of Four Times Square in 1995 with the goal of demonstrating that environmentally responsible architecture was economically viable for office high rises. The project included many state-of-the-art energy-saving and life-quality–enhancing technologies not previously applied to tower construction: building-integrated photovoltaic panels and fuel cells to supplement energy needs; curtain wall with superior shading and insulating performance; gas-fired absorption chiller-heaters; and an air-delivery system providing 50 percent more fresh air than required by code.
Yet while Four Times Square was ahead of its time and duly lauded, it didn’t immediately spark a movement for green tower construction in the city. For one thing, these fancy new technologies didn’t perform as well as had been hoped. As Donald Winston, Durst’s director of technical services, confesses, “There was no way to make a significant dent in a skyscraper’s energy consumption with PV panels, given the lack of horizontal surfaces on which to mount them.” As for the fuel cells, the building broke even “on an energy-cost basis, but there was no payback on the capital cost,” says Winston. “The problem wasn’t so much that they don’t work at skyscraper scale, more that they are so space- and maintenance-intensive that other options are a much better choice.”
According to Appel, the team began by considering how the elements—sun, earth, wind, water—might be drawn upon as “free sources of energy.”
Despite these disappointments, Four Times Square did set the stage for change, at the very least providing feedback on how these environmentally advanced technologies fared when applied to high-rise construction. More research and development led to more sophisticated solutions. “Today there are 15 green towers now under construction or recently completed in New York City,” says Rick Cook, the co-principal of Cook + Fox. “We’ve come a tremendous distance in the past two years. We’ve gone beyond the tipping point.”
As an architectural firm committed to environmental intelligence, Cook + Fox goes about conceiving what they term “high-performance buildings” using a thinking process very different from that of a conventional architecture firm. The team begins by considering how the elements—sun, earth, wind, water—might be drawn upon as “free sources of energy,” according to Serge Appel, an associate partner at Cook + Fox. The link between these sustainable energy sources and the project’s scale can be problematic. In the case of One Bryant Park, “first we looked at using photovoltaic panels to store sunlight and convert it to energy,” says Appel. “This strategy was rejected early, when it became apparent that in order to meet the demands of a 54-story, two-million square-foot structure, the entire building would have to be covered in PV panels.”
The next source with potential was the earth. Geothermal power can be used to supply heat, cooling, and electricity, but its viability depends on the geology of the region. A geothermal system at One Bryant Park would require drilling 1,500 feet into bedrock, which would have been prohibitively expensive. The firm also considered the wind. It too was problematic because in New York, the wind velocity varies considerably, and the current state of wind-energy technology requires consistent wind cycles. Should the technology become more sophisticated, however, the roof of the tower has been engineered to support the weight of a wind turbine.
Finally, the architects turned to water. There was no feasible way to use water to actually power the building, but rain could be utilized as gray water in various systems within the building, such as sanitation. In so doing, the building would be conserving a precious resource—potable water—while reducing stress on the city’s already overburdened sewer and storm-water systems. Presently when there are downpours, the city’s only method for preventing backup is to discharge raw sewage and polluted storm water directly into the city’s rivers, and so, the Atlantic Ocean. By having One Bryant Park collect and store this water in a cascading series of large tanks, it is predicted that it will reduce the amount of water typically sent into the sewer system from a building of its size by 95 percent. In this way the addition of another 2 million square feet of office space will actually have a regenerative effect on New York’s urban ecology.
Rising 945 feet on the Avenue of the Americas, one block east of Times Square, the Bank of America Tower’s translucent, faceted form was inspired by the iron-and-glass Crystal Palace that occupied Bryant Park (foreground) as the centerpiece for New York’s first world’s fair in 1853. Covering two acres, it’s the largest development site in Midtown.
Since the elements were not going to provide the energy necessary to power One Bryant Park, the architects turned to cogeneration. Cogeneration, or CHP (combined heat and power), is the use of a heat engine to produce both electricity and usable heat. One Bryant Park’s 5.1-megawatt-turbine cogeneration plant—working in concert with an ice-storage system—will supply 75 percent of the building’s annual energy and 35 percent of its peak power. Moreover, it’s calculated to provide a payback in just four years.
If cogeneration is the best method of energy and power production, why doesn’t every new building use it? “The effort is difficult and takes a significant commitment from the owner in time, money and resources in order to overcome the technical and regulatory challenges of interconnecting with the utility,” explains Winston. “The complexity of the utility network in midtown Manhattan, along with Con Edison’s aging infrastructure, were challenges. We hope that by pushing ahead and investing the time, money and brain power, and refusing to take no for an answer, that others can will follow our example and [cogeneration] will become easier to implement sooner rather than later.”
In addition to cogeneration, Cook + Fox installed under-floor air distribution (UFAD), the largest such application in New York City to date, instead of traditional forced air, located in the ceiling. This alone is a major milestone in sustainable practice. Widely used in Europe, the technology employs the space in an under-floor plenum to deliver conditioned air directly into the work space. In addition to improving thermal comfort and reducing energy consumption, UFAD allows the HVAC systems and all cabling to be housed in an accessible area. If the proof is in the utility bills, the efficiency of these two applications should remove any lingering doubt that they’re too expensive or complicated.
Another one of the tower’s innovations regarding air is its sophisticated filtration system. One of the ugly truths about global warming is that 48 percent of all CO2 emissions come from buildings. And the air quality in office towers has in the past been notoriously bad. One Bryant Park will draw air in from at least 100 feet above the street, then filter it, removing 95 percent of all particulate matter before filtering it again on each floor. Even more impressive, the air the tower will expel will be significantly cleaner than what is outside.
View related article, “Green from the Inside Out“
Through One Bryant Park’s use of these novel technologies, in addition to more common strategies—high-performance glass curtain wall, LED lighting, green roofs, and recycled and locally sourced materials—the Durst Organization, the Bank of America, and Cook + Fox will likely achieve their mission of building the first commercial high rise in the country to receive the U.S. Green Building Council’s LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) Platinum certification. But the ambition of this group goes beyond the tower being a role model for sustainability. They believe they’re creating a new business model for commercial construction. As Serge Appel observes, “Regardless of what you think about global warming or diminishing resources, waste costs money. Why would anyone do that?”
I listened to an awesome podcast about the building. It’s really instructive and interesting. Here’s the link: http://www.nyas.org/snc/podcastdetail.asp?id=1799
With the potential of such airy,life-juvenating buildings, it astounds me that most of todays housing is following the traditional Craftsman movement with its eye clutter and darker woods. Is it because the general public sees this type of building as beyond the reach of the average family?