By Matt Chaban 3/05/12 12:16pm

Green Thumbs

Stylish and sensible. (Dream Life NY)

Good House Keeping! Hearst Tower Achieves Highest Green Building Rating, LEED Platinum

One of the challenges of green buildings is making sure they work. You can buy the fanciest air conditioners, install the most efficient windows, even recycle the toilet water in the drinking fountains, but if building owners do not monitor their energy use, the big-time green investments can be as bad as in conventional buildings.

Hearst knows better. Just as it might tend a photo shoot or test a recipe, the media giant has been tweaking the systems at its Eighth Avenue headquarters since it opened in 2006. Thanks to Heast’s efforts, the 46-story tower—the first LEED Gold building in the city—has earned LEED Platinum status for building maintenance, essentially upgrading the building to the highest level of sustainability practices. Read More

By Matt Chaban 12/13/11 5:50pm

Green Is the New...

7 Photos

Building Walls

Saving the Environment, One Zoning Amendment at a Time

Politicians are good at coming up with plans, proposals and white papers. The Bloomberg administration has been surprisingly good at enacting them.

PlaNYC begat 127 ideas for making New York more sustainable and cutting its carbon footprint by 30 percent. This begat the Green Codes building proposals, released almost two year ago, with 138 specific proposals for improving the city’s environmental profile.

The challenge has been enacting those ideas, which the City Council has been doing in bill after bill for the past year. Now, the Department of City Planning is getting in on the act, and yesterday it released a handful of new zoning amendments that will make certain sustainable building practices easier to do without seeking special approvals. Read More

By Jotham Sederstrom 7/26/11 8:49am

power broker

Mr. Black was working for Reckson Associates when it was acquired by SL Green in 2007. (Credit: Jackie Snow)

SL Green’s Jason Black Is Commercial Real Estate’s Al Gore

It all began, modestly enough, with the relatively simple task of implementing an energy-savings plan across Reckson Associates’ portfolio of 32 buildings in Westchester and Fairfield counties.

A regional architect with Reckson named Jason Black orchestrated a portfolio-wide program that included the installation of L.E.D. exit signs and occupancy sensor devices in private offices. Read More

By Matt Chaban 9/27/10 6:31pm

Up Up and Away

Air China Lands at Empire State Building

Air China, the official airline of the Communist regime, is moving into some swanky new space on the 69th floor of the Empire State Building. Apparently the looming threat of 15 Penn Plaza was just that, as Fred Posniak, a W&H Properties executive suggested in a release announcing the deal today.

“International brand-name companies appreciate Read More

By Steve Cohen 5/11/09 8:10pm

Global Sustainability and the Class of 2009

Here on Columbia University’s Morningside Heights campus, at around Broadway and West 116th street, the surest signs of spring are all of the preparations for graduation now underway. Groundskeepers are planting new shrubs, and bleacher seats and tents are being assembled everywhere. Working in a place like this is both a joy and a privilege– Read More

By Eliot Brown 11/28/07 4:47pm

Are Green Buildings the New Central Air?

At a breakfast forum this morning hosted by the Alliance for Downtown New York and the Downtown Lower Manhattan Association this morning, panelists from city government and the real estate industry professed their undying love for environmentally friendly buildings, saying both landlords and tenants should jump on the sustainability train before it leaves the station. Read More