A Crop of Projects With Green Bonafides

Varying shades of green: clockwise from top left, Herzog and de Meuron’s building for the Pérez Art Museum in Miami; the Sims Municipal Recycling Facility in Brooklyn, by Selldorf Architects; the Lakeside Center at Prospect Park in Brooklyn, by Tod Williams and Billie Tsien.

Building “green” is nothing new. For decades, many architects have tried to adapt their designs to forestall a new normal, choosing materials that will be less damaging to the environment and arranging rooms to be heated or cooled by the sun and wind, not the grid. As well they might: Buildings, and the industries that make and assemble the materials that become buildings, are among the biggest contributors to the greenhouse gas emissions that are warming the planet.

Today, most designers know to build green, when they can. And they know to try to make a public noise when they do. Green is chic; whether you’re designing a skyscraper or a children’s spoon, it sells.

Yet what we are seeing now is a more concerted effort by architects to take a broad view, countering climate change not only by altering the design of buildings, but also the design of the larger systems in which they function.

An emblem of this new seriousness might be the Sims Municipal Recycling Facility, a new state-of-the-art processing center set to open in October at the South Brooklyn Marine Terminal in Sunset Park. Run by Sims Metal Management, which processes all the plastic, metal, and glass collected by New York City’s Sanitation Department, the building will exploit its waterfront site to favor the use of barges, eliminating an estimated 70,000 truck trips annually from city streets.

Such buildings don’t usually have a design architect. But this one does: Annabelle Selldorf, an architect better known as a designer of museums and art galleries. She has struck a hard balance here — in the economical use of off-the-shelf steel components, in a logical but accommodating master plan for the 11-acre site — between making a place that will work and a place that people will want to talk about.

And visit: an elegant outbuilding housing an information center will be a destination for day trips and school outings. It is connected by a bridge to an enormous shed called the “tipping building,” where visitors can watch from a mezzanine, as sanitation workers sort through the mountains of plastic, glass and metal that have found their way into blue bags and bins throughout the city.

Two design programs rolling out this year and next, both inspired by the impact of Hurricane Sandy, are evidence of big thinking along the same lines: learning to solve with systems, not style.

This fall and into 2014, the Architectural League of New York will sponsor a series of public programs, workshops and eventually a design study under the rubric “The 5,000-Pound Life.” The title refers to a target for an ideal maximum personal contribution of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere, based on the work of the British economist and climate activist Nicholas Stern. Current estimates put the American contribution, per capita, at 44,000 pounds.

In an effort to dramatize that gap, and perhaps to begin to close it, the Architectural League plans to conduct wide-bore educational programs this fall, including a guided reading series about climate change and public lectures in Manhattan by leading scientists in the field. Then, next spring, it will assemble multidisciplinary teams in New York and elsewhere across the country to devise and design scenarios for what a “5,000-pound life” might look like.

“We all have our heads in the sand,” said the league’s president, Rosalie Genevro, referring to public awareness of the human impact on the global climate.

A similar effort is planned by Rebuild by Design, a consortium that includes the Rockefeller Foundation, New York University’s Institute for Public Knowledge and the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development. The project includes a competition for which 10 teams, including firms like Rem Koolhaas’s OMA and the Bjarke Ingels Group, were recently selected to design projects for communities hit hard by Sandy. Their work will continue through next spring with the selection of winning designs, followed by construction in the East Coast study area.

Other environmentally minded efforts are more humble. In December, a new ice-skating and water-play center designed by Tod Williams and Billie Tsien is to be completed in Prospect Park in Brooklyn. It will boast a gold LEED rating for environmentally sustainable architecture, and the project includes the restoration of 26 acres of parkland around its lakefront site. The same month, the design firm WORKac will unveil a 5,000-square-foot organic garden at P.S. 216 in Brooklyn, a contribution to the Edible Schoolyard Project, a national educational program founded by the chef Alice Waters.

Herzog and de Meuron’s building for the Pérez Art Museum Miami (formerly the Miami Art Museum), opening at the end of the year, harnesses green as a metaphor, at least. Its galleries and public spaces will be sheltered by a giant trellis dripping with tropical foliage. But building 200,000 square feet of new anything is unlikely to be judged as truly kind to the environment.

So it’s worth keeping an eye on a project in Buffalo: Henry Hobson Richardson’s formerBuffalo State Asylum for the Insane, the largest commission of that important 19th century American architect’s career. The New York architect Deborah Berke recently won a commission to adapt that hunkering sandstone complex of 11 buildings dating from 1870 into a hotel and conference center that can serve contemporary needs. A groundbreaking is scheduled early next year.

It will be an interesting project to watch, given that the greenest buildings of all are the ones that we never have to build.

Correction: September 10, 2013

An earlier version of this article misidentified where the design firm WORKac will unveil a 5,000-square-foot organic garden in December. It will be at P.S. 216 in Brooklyn, not P.S. 7 in East Harlem, and it won’t be on a rooftop.

by Philip Nobel

> via nytimes