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A Day In The Light
To test the groundbreaking scheme for its new headquarters, the New York
Times has launched an elaborate building study: a 24-hour experiment in
lighting design.
By Martin C. Pedersen
Photography by David Joseph
May 2004
The most ambitious lighting experiment in American commercial real
estate is currently being conducted in the parking lot of the New York
Times’s printing plant in Queens. Sitting in the northwest corner
of the lot is a gray flat-roofed structure that hardly resembles
world-class architecture or cutting-edge research. But inside that
building is a glimpse into the not-so-distant future: a luminous
4,300-square-foot office mock-up—a prototype for the Times’s
new Manhattan headquarters, by Renzo Piano. The design for the 51-story
tower, featuring a shimmering 800-foot glass curtain wall, promises to
bathe notoriously cranky reporters and editors in natural light. Here in
Queens, interior architects and designers are testing workstations,
private offices, a glass facade sheathed in Piano’s sun-shielding
ceramic rods, and one of the architect’s other signature touches
for the building, a set of stairs in the southwest corner of the space
that will link the paper’s 28 floors and create a transparent stage
show for its Midtown neighbors.
The mock-up is the culmination of a meticulous, near maniacal two-year
effort by the newspaper and its consulting designers to thoroughly
trouble-shoot any and all building issues prior to construction.
“The Queens facility really serves four purposes,” says David
Thurm, vice president of real estate development for the Times.
“It’s a furniture mock-up, an extensive lighting experiment, a
constructability review, and a tool for talking to employees and getting
their input.”
This might be the most analyzed, tested, and studied building scheme in
the country. The Times has already commissioned previous mock-ups for
furniture (in the basement of its current 43rd Street headquarters), the
ceramic facade (including a two-story structure built in Italy and later
shipped to New York), floors, under-floor air, and lighting, among other
things. Countless studies have been completed, even an extensive one on
ice and snow formation on the ceramic rods. “They have a lot of
different systems going into this building, and for each one they have a
research team looking into cost, performance, and impact on the
tenants,” says Eleanor Lee, a scientist with the Lawrence Berkeley
National Laboratories (LBNL) who is overseeing the lighting experiment.
“It’s a whole array of technologies they’re looking into
to make sure that everything goes well.”
The idea of harvesting the abundant natural light intrinsic to the Piano
design was an early and obvious idea. “During the furniture mock-up
in fall 2002 we asked our lighting consultants [SBLD Studio] to analyze
lighting controls,” says Glenn Hughes, director of construction
real estate at the Times. Could dimming systems improve the quality of
the work space by allowing each department to set its own light levels?
Was this economically viable? Could they in turn realize substantial
energy savings by reducing the artificial light in areas where it
wasn’t needed—near the windows, for example? What they quickly
learned was that the more sophisticated dimming systems in the United
States seemed prohibitively expensive. “We were worried about the
cost,” he says. “We were not prepared to get into a
budget-busting situation.”
Later that fall Thurm happened to find a paper on daylighting written by
Steve Selkowitz, a leading expert in the field and head of building
technologies at LBNL. “We called him and had a fabulous
conversation,” Thurm says. This resulted in a January meeting at
the California lab between SBLD Studio; Gensler, the interior
architects; Flack and Kurtz, the engineers; and a corporate team led by
Michael Golden, vice chairman of the New York Times Company.
“About a month earlier we’d had some brief moments of
enlightenment,” Hughes recalls. “While trying to make up our
minds about which dimming system we wanted, I said I thought we had the
wrong question in front of us. We needed to talk about what kind of
shade system we were going to purchase and then we would be able to
understand the lighting system we needed. When we went out to Lawrence
Berkeley, that is exactly the message they gave us. We started out
telling them about the low-iron Star Fire glass, and they said,
‘Oh, that’s the highest transmittance of any type of curtain
wall. You’ve got to manage your facade.’”
Thurm told Selkowitz that they were looking to rent space in Manhattan
for a second furniture mock-up (the first one had narrowed the
manufacturers to Knoll, Vitra, and Unifor). There they would also test
lighting controls. “Steve said, ‘Gee, this mock-up you’re
about to build—it’s too bad you couldn’t build it outside
because that would be a perfect way to test what we’ve been talking
about,’” Thurm recalls. “It was one of those
‘aha’ moments. Later in the conversation Steve says,
‘It’s really too bad it’s already January because
there’s a NYSERDA [New York State Energy Research Development
Authority] grant we could apply for, but the deadline is April and
we’ll never make it.’ And we said, ‘Hold that
thought...’”
In very short order—less than a week—the Times had committed
to the freestanding mock-up. In mid-June LBNL was awarded a $250,000
daylighting grant. (All of the NYSERDA money went into research; the
Times paid an undisclosed seven-figure-plus amount for construction.)
The interior architects produced the design and construction documents
for the mock-up. “We also worked with Fox & Fowle [the local
architecture firm collaborating with the Renzo Piano Building Workshop]
to get the curtain-wall information and the level of detail required for
that,” says Edward Wood, the principal in charge at Gensler.
“This whole job has been about understanding the architecture,
understanding the interior, and exploring how they relate to one
another.”
The mock-up was also an opportunity to explore construction issues.
“We worked hard with Turner, our construction manager, to do full
debriefings, and we had the architects sit in on those
conversations,” Thurm says. “What about the stairs? What made
them expensive? We get a huge benefit by having already built them
because that one stair is going to be replicated many times
over.”
Armed with recommendations from Selkowitz, the Times team attended
Lightfair last year and met with a number of manufacturers eager to
participate in the lighting experiment; all donated product, time, and
expertise. “To their great credit, they’re treating this as a
laboratory for their own purposes,” Thurm says. Testing complex
products often leads to simplification—and market acceptance.
“Obviously it works better for us if these systems are truly
commercial products,” he adds. “If it looks like they have
legs in the marketplace, then they’ll be supported and that will be
reflected in the price.”
In order to measure all sun angles, the lighting experiment began on
December 21 (the shortest day of the year) and will end on June 21 (the
longest). “Solstice to solstice,” Thurm says. “Sounds
very pagan.” The ultimate goal is the seamless integration of the
dimming-control systems, which regulate the artificial lights, and the
mechanized shades. “You want to provide a homogeneous light level
throughout the space, regardless of the conditions outside,” says
Attila Uysal of SBLD Studio, who designed the two schemes for the
mock-up.
The mock-up recreates the southwest corner of the building, which will
experience the most sun exposure. It is divided roughly in half; each
side operates with different dimming-control systems and shades. The
southwest wall (by the stairs) and half of the western facade is the
MechoShade side; here Siemens dimming controls operate on the DALI
(Digital Addressable Lighting Interface) system, a state-of-the-art
computer protocol popular in Europe that allows light sources to be
individually controlled. Because lighting zones can be changed without
rewiring, this provides great flexibility. The shades on this half of the
mock-up don’t respond to the light in the space but react to the
position of the sun and prevailing sky conditions using a rooftop
measurement device called a radiometer. “The computer already knows
the position of the sun,” explains Jan Berman, president of
MechoShade. “That’s a predictable event programmed into the
software. The radiometer determines whether it’s a sunny, cloudy,
or bright condition, and then the shades move up or down
accordingly.”
On the other side of the mock-up the dimming controls and mechanized
shades are made by Lutron. Their integrated scheme uses a 0-to-10-volt
system where groups of lights are adjusted in predetermined zones. Less
flexible than DALI, it’s still more advanced than anything used in
the United States, where less than two percent of office space has
dimming capabilities (and that’s largely confined to conference
rooms and high-end executive suites). In contrast to MechoShade,
Lutron’s shades are controlled by ceiling-mounted sensors, which
react to the light inside the space.
LBNL and the manufacturers have placed 107 sensors in the mock-up to
measure light conditions on a minute-by-minute basis. This data is fed
via a special Times Web site to a computer at LBNL, where scientists in
turn send information back to the manufacturers on the performance of
their equipment. “Every minute we sample what’s going on in
the space, and we do it twenty-four hours a day,” Lee says.
“Then we have a second set of information. We go out to the site
and do human-factors surveys. If you get a majority of people saying
they don’t like something, that is probably even more important
than the measurements you’re taking.”
Although the directional orientation of the Queens facility is identical
to the future home of the Times, the mock-up represents just one-sixth
of the future building’s floorplate. LBNL is using daylighting
software called Radiance to adjust for the other sides of the building
and the surrounding environment. Developed by the lab about ten years
ago, the modeling program has since become popular with architecture
firms and game designers (and can be downloaded for free on the LBNL Web
site). “Using the mock-up data you construct a computer
simulation,” Lee explains. “Then you take the field data and
ask, ‘Are the field numbers and computer simulation aligned?’
You have to calibrate them because you can only model to a limited
degree of accuracy. Then you take that calibrated model to the Manhattan
site and model the exterior surroundings—no trivial task—and
go about predicting the light conditions for the different
floors.”
In March LBNL provided the Times with preliminary numbers showing some
significant energy savings, but the full range of questions they need
answered won’t be available until all the data is collected.
“By the end of the mock-up period we’d like to know which
systems are working best,” Hughes says. “It’s not about
picking manufacturers yet but understanding what the requirements are
and being able to write those down so they can be put into the
marketplace for bid. Ultimately we need to know which shade systems are
operating without glare, how much energy we’re saving by harvesting
daylight, how much direct penetration of daylight we want.”
Groundbreaking for the new building, which will be located on Eighth
Avenue between 40th and 41st Streets, is imminent. In the meantime the
Times is not only bringing employees out to Queens to test the space but
also conducting tours of the mock-up for real estate developers and
builders to promote the glories and long-term economic benefits of
natural light. “For the past year David Thurm and I have been out
there telling the world that daylighting needs to come at a reasonable
price, and that we’re prepared to help provide some of the
solutions to make that happen,” Selkowitz says. “In this
business the classic term is market transformation.”
“One of the principles of innovation is that you share your
information,” Thurm says. “Daylighting should be universal.
And if manufacturers can figure out a way to bring the price down, then
I think builders will say, ‘Of course we have to do
this!’” |
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In the parking lot of its printing plant in Queens, the New York Times
has built a one-story mock-up, where it is conducting extensive
daylighting tests for its new headquarters in Manhattan. The 51-story
tower will feature a floor-to-ceiling curtain wall framed in
sun-shielding ceramic rods. Inside the mock-up is a ceiling-mounted
radiant heat sensor that measures temperature gain from direct sunlight. |
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The mock-up, with the Times printing plant in the background. |
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Several types of sensors are placed throughout the mock-up including:
(1) photocells that measure light for the dimming control systems; (2)
occupancy sensors; (3) cameras; (4) and brightness sensors, which
determine glare. “Early indications suggest we’ll have to
deploy the mechanized shades on the southwest wall [by the stairs]
earlier than we thought,” says lighting designer Attila Uysal. Here
they’re not deployed even though sensors are detecting glare. |
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At 2:30 p.m. the sun has shifted to the west, causing the shades on that
side of the mock-up to close. There is still enough daylight, however,
for the overhead lights to be off. |
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Fifty minutes later, the sunlight becomes more direct and the shades
lower still further. Note: the two lit fixtures near the curtain wall
should be off, since there is enough natural light in the space. |
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At 3:45 p.m. the sun continues to set, creating glare conditions that
the shades react to. |
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At 5:18, the sun is setting on the horizon; the intensity of the direct
sunlight causes the shades to close completely, and artificial lights go
on to make up for the loss of natural light. |
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At 5:46, roughly dusk, the sun disappears beyond the horizon and the
shades go up. |
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At 6:30 the sun has set, the shades are up, and the artificial lights
are on. The Times hopes that the dimming-control systems tested here
will give greater flexibility. “We want to challenge the seemingly
universally held notion that everyone wants to work in the same amount
of light,” says David Thurm of the Times. “The dimming systems
will allow us to break this rigidity by allowing each department to set
its own light levels.” |
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A rendering of the south elevation of the building . The Times
will occupy the first 28 floors; the staircase linking the different
departments is located at the southwest corner of the building (marked
with red box).
Rendering courtesy Fox & Fowle Architects |
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The stairs in the mock-up were built to test materials, treads,
handrails, and steps. |
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The first furniture mock-up in 2002 helped narrow the competing
manufacturers from six to three. The finalists are shown in the
mock-up’s three private offices: Knoll (1), Unifor (2); and Vitra
(3). |
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“One of the main things we’ve tested in the furniture
mock-up is the height of partitions,” says Rocco Giannetti,
a senior associate at Gensler. “We settled on 48 inches, because it
allows for privacy but still maintains the open plan seating
arrangement.” |
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The Times has conducted several tests for the building’s facade.
“At one point,” Thurm says, “to demystify the curtain
wall for potential bidders we hired four different firms to engineer and
build prototypes.” In the latest iteration the ceramic rods
are held in place by an aluminum frame. |
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The mock-up recreates the southwest corner of the building—roughly
one-sixth of one floor.
Floorplan courtesy Gensler |
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LIGHTING ZONES
The space is divided into 15 zones (two along the curtain wall are for
decorative night-time lighting of the facade). The blue section operates
on Lutron shades and lighting controls. The red uses a MechoShade system
and Siemens dimming controls; this half of the mock up is larger to
accommodate more intense sunlight.
Floorplan courtesy Gensler |
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Offsite:
Some of the most cutting-edge research in
daylighting is being done at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. A
wealth of information is available at its Windows & Daylighting
group’s Web site,
windows.lbl.gov. For more information about New
York State Energy Research and Development Authority funding
opportunities log on to
www.nyserda.org. MechoShade product information is available at
www.mechoshade.com. The DALI protocol’s home on the
Web is
www.dali-ag.org. Download the Radiance Synthetic Imaging System
for free at
radsite.lbl.gov/radiance. |
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SHADES
On the Lutron side, the shades respond to ambient light in the space.
This is a “closed loop” system. The MechoShade system reacts
to the position of the sun and sky conditions outside. This is an
“open loop” system.
Floorplan courtesy Gensler |
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