New York’s One Bryant Park Bank of America tower is first new high-rise to achieve LEED Platinum

The new One Bryant Park Bank of America tower in midtown Manhattan is the first new commercial high-rise to achieve LEED Platinum certification.

The 55-story building, designed by Cook + Fox Architects, has a curtain wall made of low-e glass and heat-reflecting ceramic grit. A thermal ice-storage tank in the building’s cellar makes ice overnight, reducing demand on the city’s electricity grid during peak hours.

A 4.6 megawatt cogeneration plant further cuts the building’s need for grid-fired power by covering 70% percent of the building’s electricity use.

To read more, click here. +

New York City has two very large buildings dedicated to answering the 911 calls of its five boroughs. With more than 11 million emergency calls annually, it makes perfect sense. The second of these buildings, the Public Safety Answering Center II (PSAC II) is located on a nine-acre parcel of land in the Bronx. It’s an imposing 450,000 square-foot structure—a 240-foot-wide by 240-foot-tall cube. The gleaming aluminum cube risesthe equivalent of 24 stories from behind a grassy berm, projecting the unlikely impression that it might actually be floating. Like most visually striking structures, the building has drawn as much scorn as it has admiration.