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 Photo Credit: NYCEDC | |
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Transforming the Paradigm of Environmentalism
Two decades ago, sustainability was a relatively unknown concept, and its precursor, "environmentalism," was not generally associated with cities or buildings. Environmentalism was about clean air and water, recycling, and saving endangered species or ecosystems; the environment was associated with agrarian values or pristine wilderness-anywhere but cities. If buildings were involved at all, they tended to be passive solar houses in rural settings.
In the late 1980s and early 1990s, two groundbreaking New York City projects, designed by the Croxton Collaborative, started to transform this paradigm. Both projects—the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) offices and the headquarters for the Audubon Society—were renovations of older buildings in Manhattan. They demonstrated that urban environments could be designed sustainably with green buildings, and that the concept of the "environment" needed to incorporate populated landscapes, including the places of densest occupation and most massive impact: cities.
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New York City's Leadership in Green Building
In the late 1990s, three entities launched parallel efforts that together made New York City a leader in the sustainable design of large, new buildings. In 1995, the Durst Organization, working with FXFOWLE Architects, LLP (formerly known as Fox & Fowle Architects) and the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority (NYSERDA), began designing the world's first green skyscraper at 4 Times Square, completed in January 2000. That same month, the Battery Park Authority released its Residential Environmental Guidelines, which were used in building the Solaire, the country's first green residential high-rise, completed in 2003. And in 1999, the New York City Department of Design and Construction (DDC) issued its High Performance Building Guidelines (in PDF), which provided best practices for sustainable building, influencing green buildings worldwide and launching New York City government's first experiments in green building.
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Emergence of Green Buildings and Energy Efficiency Policy
Following the development of its Building Guidelines, DDC explored green building strategies through a series of high-profile pilot projects, which ranged from libraries and day care centers to correctional facilities. An important example was the Queens Botanical Garden building, which achieved a Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED®) Platinum rating. Successes like these increased familiarity with green building strategies, proving their viability and setting the stage for broader adoption. In 2005, New York City passed its first green building ordinance, Local Law 86 (LL86), which required most new City government building projects and renovations to achieve LEED® certification.
The passage of LL86 and changing paradigms about the environmental benefits of dense cities set the stage for the development of PlaNYC, which took sustainability from the building scale to the city scale. PlaNYC addressed how New York City could absorb almost a million more residents by 2030 without overtaxing its infrastructure and resources, while maintaining quality of life. Doing more with less was a key strategy, and therefore greening the city's buildings and improving energy efficiency emerged as important initiatives.
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