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Rafael Pelli
Designed under the new environmental design guidelines for Battery Park
City, 20 River Terrace is under construction by Cesar Pelli & Associates
on the Lower Manhattan waterfront. After this large-scale project (350,000
square feet, 27 stories, 250 apartments) and others, including commercial
buildings, get built to green guidelines, there will be a roomful of experts
in the field.
Though the guidelines are a breakthrough for the New York City construction
industry, some local practices can subvert good-faith efforts to be green.
For instance, the architects wanted to use fly-ash, a post-industrial
product from coal-burning furnaces, to make concrete. As it turned out,
adding more than 10 percent fly-ash to concrete lengthens the time
it takes to cure, from the usual New York practice of two days to three
or four days. This adds up to a lot of time--and money.
Most of the building's waste-water (20,000 gallons each day) will be
used in the cooling towers; the rest will irrigate the roof garden
[designed by Rafael Pelli's mother, Diana Balmori of Balmori Associates]
as well as the new park in the rear.
Related Articles:
» Green Giant
Offsite:
Cesar Pelli & Associates,
www.cesar-pelli.com. |
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Jessica Fein
At last year's ICFF we came across a furniture manufacturer out of Canada
who was using natural materials like coconut shells, driftwood, and grasses
to make tabletops and chairs in Malaysia. We were very interested in using
their products for the model rooms at 20 River Terrace in Battery Park City
(BPC). But when we looked into their processes we found that everything
was held together with bonding agents such as urea resin formaldehyde, a
known carcinogen that continues to off-gas long after the curing process
is finished.
I took an interest in the furniture for aesthetic reasons and began asking
why it couldn't be made sustainably, setting out to find an alternative
bonding agent. Eventually I located a manufacturer in Soho who makes water-based
resin products and glues, and linked up the two companies. They made another
prototype, testing it in the workshops of Malaysia, and we now have what
I think is a better product; it even looks better than the original pieces
did. And the workers have since reported back to us that they're much happier
with the new product because it's odorless. It doesn't off-gas toxins, and
it's something we'll be able to use in compliance with the BPC green guidelines.
Also at the ICFF, we found a Wisconsin glass artist who uses 100 percent
recycled glass that, we thought, would be great for the bathrooms. But then
I introduced her to another artisan who makes 100 percent recycled aluminum
materials, and the two of them sat down with us to figure out how to
make her glass tabletops for his aluminum bases. We now seem to be in a
position that helps create a greater dialogue between artisans. Not everything
needs to be difficult on a green project; there are some happy endings. |
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Energy efficiencies inside and material procurement for the exterior
wall construction at 20 River Terrace.
Above 1: occupation sensors in corridors and stairwells. 2: variable
speed pumps, motors, fans. 3: double action gas chiller and heat
exchanger. 4: programmable digital thermostats; 5: master electrical
shut-off, efficient lighting, Energy Star appliances. 6: fuel cell
[future]. 7: energy-efficient lighting with daylight sensors.
Below North-eastern resources yielded the mortar, sand/lime mix, masonry
wall reinforcement, and anchoring systems (50 percent recycled), neoprene
joint filler, and gasket. The longest trips were to Turkey for Portland
cement and the Midwest for accent brick. |
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TO BUILD IS TO BE LOCAL
Jean Gardner sees a new context for sustainable design. A professor at Parsons
School of Design's department of architecture and environmental design,
and a longtime pied piper of sustainability, Gardner refuted the cliché
of the last century, "Think globally. Act locally." In 2002 we
have the ability to influence global actions by thinking locally, she
said.
"The Battery Park City residential building, 20 River Terrace, is not
just the first large green residential building in the city,"
she said, referring to a high-rise being built in Lower Manhattan to the
city's green guidelines. "It's right next to the site of the World
Trade Center. It will be finished before the new building at World
Trade Center 7 goes up. This area is no longer a 'local' site; it has global
implications."
Gardner herself organized the panel on local/global issues, bringing together
a practicing architect and two interior designers, both of whom were her
students (though a generation apart) at Parsons.
The architect of the Battery Park residential tower, Rafael Pelli of Cesar
Pelli Associates, praised the Battery Park City green guidelines as critical
to getting the framework in place. "Having the requirement at the outset
is so important," he said, adding that the building was designed to
get five percent of its energy directly from the sun, through photovoltaics.
He expects it to receive a LEED Gold certification.
The interior finishes and furnishings, too, had to be within the building's
green guidelines. But the interior designers chosen for the job, Tim Button
and Jessica Fein of Stedila Design, came up with some disturbing findings.
Though they were trying to comply with the mandate to procure materials
from around the region, in some cases this was impossible. For example,
they were happy to find a Vermont stone as an alternative to Italian
marble until they discovered that the company ships the stone to Italy for
cutting and then ships it back for distribution in America.
Today such "challenges" are encountered at every step of the design
process. But Pelli believes that the transformation to the more universal
practice of green design will bring a comprehensive reordering of professional
practices. "It's not that green design necessarily takes longer or
costs more," he said. "But schedules do need to look different,
with more collaborative work up front." He is inspired by the surge
of interest in green design that he sees in New York and beyond, and hopes
that awareness will push communities to require it. "I believe what
we're doing at Battery Park City should be standard for the city."
A QUESTION OF WORDS
Fifty-four percent of 560 designers, educators, and students who responded
to an online Metropolis survey on the subject of sustainable design indicated
that green will simply be part of "good design" in the next five
years. That may be wishful thinking, however. People who take the time to
respond to such surveys are already interested in the subject and, to some
extent, hopeful about the future of the movement.
The name game, calling a design "green" or "sustainable"
or "environmentally friendly," can be a double-edged sword, as
some people at the conference said. For years the avant-garde as well as
most architecture critics cast the practice of green design as the "other,"
something outside the realm of conventional practices. Some say that the
worst aspect of that "otherness" is adding "green" as
a line item to a project. This practice, Pelli said, marginalizes genuine
efforts to be more environmentally sustainable, an approach, he added, that
"is fundamental to architecture," not an add-on.
Michael Morris, educator at the Parsons architecture school, believes that
"the label is what holds us back. I do not intend to teach or not teach
sustainable design. I want my students to understand geological time and
biological time. I want them to be aware of how their project sits in the
earth."
Worrisome, too, for some observers is the increasing use of the USBC's LEED
framework, which in some cases is interpreted as too prescriptive and may
stifle creativity in architecture. "To a corporate audience LEED
is a great button to push," said Colin Cathcart, of Kiss + Cathcart
Architects and a professor at Fordham University. "But to approach
the education of architects through LEED could be a disaster. We need to
approach it through first principals: rain falls, sun shines, mud happens.
These are central to getting the sensual spaces that are architecture."
But "if we don't name it, we won't acknowledge the hole in our expertise,"
said Jeff Barber, an architect with Gensler's Washington, D.C., office.
"Yes, it's a part of architecture historically, but for now it needs
a name." He added that in the marketplace the label can have an impact.
"Selling 'environmental design' is hard," developer Durst said.
"But 'smart buildings' are something that everyone wants."
Will we want today's green buildings in ten, a hundred, or a thousand years?
Not unless they are aesthetically powerful, was the consensus. "Many
of us believe," said Hillary Brown, "that sustainability has yet
to come into its own architecturally. It has yet to realize in built form
its most expressive and persuasive potential." Until it does, the name
game is likely to persist, and the need to reform the education of designers
will be a struggle on many fronts.
"What we're calling sustainability now is what architecture is,"
Gardner said. "This is not another category. This comes out of your
core being. Architecture has always been about negotiating with the universe,
until the last 150 years. Since then we have not been negotiating in a way
that will keep us on this planet."
Kira L. Gould writes about sustainable design and related subjects from
her home in Boston's South End.
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