Transcript: Reduce Costs, Save Energy, Building Green: LEEDing the Way

THE CNA CORPORATION

ENERGY:  A CONVERSATION
ABOUT OUR NATIONAL ADDICTION

SPEAKERS:

Teresa Pohlman,
Department of Homeland Security

Bob Fox,
Cook and Fox Architects


MONDAY, MARCH 19, 2007
6:00 P.M. TO 8:30 P.M.

Transcript by:
Federal News Service
Washington, D.C.

MITZI WERTHEIM:  I’d like to get started because we have two really good presentations tonight, and I want to welcome you to the first of our second-year series on “Energy: A Conversation about Our National Addiction.”  I’m Mitzi Wertheim.  I’m one of the many energizing bunnies who help make this event possible, and we have both male and female bunnies working on this. 

One of the objectives that we have is to build an interagency learning energy network, so I’m hoping that each one of you will meet somebody tonight who you didn’t know before.  Networks are really important.  It’s about connecting.  It’s about learning, and actually I was listening to somebody the other day who said communication is about power and it’s power to produce more things and when you network you can do it faster.  And in this globalized world, that really matters. 

We want you to listen, learn, connect, share and collaborate.  That’s the theme.  You can see my four by 12-foot sign that we have.  This conversation series is now co-sponsored by the Departments of Defense, Energy, State, Agriculture, EPA, and the director of National Intelligence on behalf of the entire intelligence community.  I was told I had to make sure that I put that note in.  Before we get started, will you please turn off your cell phones and pagers because we don’t want to be interrupted.  Thanks. 

We’re going to have Q&A after each speaker because our first speaker is going to have to leave and I know that there will be questions from that.  So when we do the Q&A session, as you see we now have mike scattered throughout the room, so please line up at one of the mikes and state your name and the organization you’re with. 

Finally, I want to thank Sarah Minczeski, who I’m sure you’ve met out there, or many of you have talked with, and we couldn’t survived without Sarah and Louise Boaz (sp), who’s helping us this evening.  And I’d like you to all make note that on April 9th is our next session.  We’ll be here at the Doubletree and we have Mark Shannon, and I learned about him actually from the White House Office of Science and Technology.  I was talking to someone over there and she said she’d seen this fabulous brief done by Mark.  It’s about water and he has had his students analyzing the water in every county in the United States, and the GAO has recently put out a big report on the relationship between water and energy.  So that’s our April session.

Now, our first speaker is going to be Teresa Pohlman.  Teresa is responsible for the strategic master planning for the entire Pentagon renovation as well as other Pentagon facilities and alternative operations – and alternate operations.  Her efforts to ensure that the renovation was on the cutting edge of sustainable design and constructability won her team the Presidential Award for Leadership in the Federal Energy Management.  In addition, she spearheaded the efforts for LEED – that’s L-E-E-D – Leading in Energy Environment Design, right?

TERESA POHLMAN:  Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design.  We’ll talk about that later. 

MS. WERTHEIM:  Okay, good.  And three of the Pentagon renovation projects became LEED Silver certified.  Teresa is currently the director of the Office of Safety and Environmental Programs at the headquarters of Homeland Security.  Her job is to provide policy guidance, leadership and management oversight to support the department’s programs and environmental compliance, cleanup, pollution prevention, sustainability, energy, environmental planning, historic preservation and cultural resources, and safety and occupational health.

Please help me welcome Teresa Pohlman.

(Applause.)

MS. POHLMAN:  Thank you.  You need to give me the – I need my tool here.  Thank you, Mitzi.  Good evening, and thank you for having me here.  It’s a real pleasure to be here with people who are voluntarily here on their own time.  Right?  You’re here because you’re very interested.  I’m extremely impressed because this is a large crowd to find – of people who would spare their time and come here to see that some of the topics that are of extreme importance on a national basis. 

I’d like to get an idea.  How many of you are from private industry?  Would you raise your hand, please?  And from government, would you raise your hand?  Okay.  I’m from the government, too, and I’m here to help you.  (Laughter.)  Okay?  And that’s because you pay my salary and so do I, right?  I pay taxes, so I pay my salary.  But what I’m here – what I’m about tonight is not to talk about the Department of Homeland Security.  What I’m going to talk about is the place where I came from.  Before I had my current job, which I’ve only been in for about three months, I was six years at the Pentagon Renovation Office, and our job at the Pentagon Renovation Office is to renovate the six and a half million square feet of the Pentagon, okay?  So I’m going to tell you a little bit about what the Pentagon is. 

Let me just set the context for you: what the need for renovation was, why we’re going to be doing it, organization and operation, what we have as far as federal government requirements and initiatives at the Pentagon.  And we do have three facilities that are LEED certified.  They’re not LEED Silver certified, they are LEED certified.  And I’ll tell you what some of the difficulties were, what some of the pitfalls were.  And I will warn you in advance that maybe when I’m talking I’ll make it sound easy, but it wasn’t.  It’s been about a six-year journey to get these facilities LEED certified and also to get the system built in to Pentagon Renovation Office.

This is your Pentagon.  Okay, how many of you have been at the Pentagon and seen the facility?  Have you seen the new part of it?  Okay.  You’ve seen the new part.  All right.  So when you walk from the old part to the new part, you’re probably pretty impressed with how much lighter and airy, you know, the better atmosphere for employees to work in.  This is what happened in the early years.  We had minimal electrical communications and HVAC requirements capacity. 

The Pentagon was built in about 18 months.  We have taken about 15 years to renovate it.  Okay?  The task of renovating the Pentagon has been analogized to making a black and white TV into a color TV without turning the set off.  (Laughter.)  You know?  And that’s a hard job.  You know why that is?  Because nobody wants to move out of the Pentagon, okay?  It’s an easy task to – or easier task to renovate a building if you have no people in it, right?  How much easier is that?  Well, what we have to do when we renovate the Pentagon, because people don’t want to leave the seat of power in the Department of Defense.  What have you got there?  You’ve got Command and Control Centers, too.  What do you do in there?  What’s the mission of the Pentagon?  To save energy?  No.  It’s to fight wars, right?  This is the mission of the Pentagon.  It’s to fight wars.  So we have to deal with that, too. 

It’s a small city.  It covers 24 acres, six and a half million square feet, about 17.5 miles of corridors, 25,000 – give or take – personnel, about a million calls each day.  It’s got its own police force, which used to be the Defense Protective Service; after 9/11, they went from about a 200-person operation to over 1,000-person operation and now they’re called the Pentagon Force Protection Agency or PFPA.   So they have their own police force.  They’ve got a metro station there; they’ve got a fire station there; healthcare facilities; post office; mini mall.  You name it, it’s there.  All right?   And for those of you who’ve been there, you know the need for renovation.

We are asking our soldiers, sailors, airmen and marines, the people that put their lives on the line with working conditions like this.  We had asbestos; we had lead-based paint; we had mercury; we had everything bad you can think of in the way of environmental contaminants.  The last time the Pentagon met a code was in the late 1940s and it was the Electrical Code.  (Laughter.)  All right?  So that’s one of the reasons why there was a big need for renovation, and what we’re trying to do with the renovation itself, in the contract, it must conform to all of the codes, mechanical, electrical, all of those codes, including ADA.  All right? 

One of the other things that we were asking the people to do that were trying to make a living, we were asking people with disabilities to get into elevators that were made for freight.  So how do they close?  Like a guillotine.  All right?  And these were freight elevators that we were asking them to travel in, and some people got hurt doing it.  So of course, there was a need for renovation, complete slab to slab renovation, okay?  I mean, we’re talking about completely getting the place and renovating it from top to bottom: enhancing security, vertical mobility, complying with ADA, like I said. 

Oh, yeah.  One of the other things is there’re five features that makes the Pentagon on the National Register of Historic Places, and so complicating everything, including, you know, the admission of the military, keeping that mission going and keeping people inside the Pentagon that needed to be in the Pentagon and moving a certain portion of them out, which may or may not return.  We had to preserve the historic features of the Pentagon, too. 

So that’s all in the mix.  Oh, yeah.  What else?  What happens every couple of years with the military?  What do you do?  You kind of rotate out, right?  What happens every four years or so?  You have an administration change, or if you don’t change administrations, you do change personnel within that administration most of the time, okay?  So what happens when you get a new boss?  The boss wants to reorganize, right?  Is that right?  This means – yes.  Okay?  Is everybody asleep?  All right.  (Laughter.)  All right.  So they want to reorganize.  They want to reconfigure.  So we’ve got all of that going on, too, on top of everything else that’s complicated.  The reason I’m building this picture for you is to tell you what the challenges and give you an idea of what’s going on. 

We divided the – we decided to divide the Pentagon into five wedges, and they were about a million square feet a piece and the basement and the mezzanine floors were included in a separate piece of the renovation.  So we decided to divide it into five wedges.  Right now, we’ve got about three-fifths of the Pentagon done on the renovation site.  Oh, yeah.  What happened?  What happened in 9/11?  Well, security was stepped up, but even before 9/11 there were considerations given to security, infrastructure protection, that kind of thing, because we had to protect the mission of the military. 

Yeah, and what else is happening in there?  What did I tell you about?  Asbestos, lead-based paint, mercury, PCBs, all of those things that are in there, they have to be abated.  So while you’re moving people out, while you’re renovating space, you’ve got to build up a barrier wall so that your abatement doesn’t go into the space that’s full of people and has people operating.  And – oh, yeah, maybe you’re below the secretary of defense or you’re impacting a command center that’s right above you or right below you in most cases, so making a lot of noise, moving people into renovated space. 

And just when things weren’t complicated enough, it’s not just the Pentagon renovation that the Pentagon Renovation Office is responsible for.  How many of you were around when we moved to 110, Route 110 from under the eight quarter bridge and away from the Pentagon?  Okay.  That was done after 9/11 for standoff distance purposes and because it was extremely unsafe going underneath one of the main quarter accesses to the Pentagon.  We did that.  I’m sorry we made your lives miserable for a while, but I think it was for a good purpose. 

Route 27.  We put up a barrier all along Route 27.  Why do we do that?  Again, force protection, okay?  That was because we had to construct a barrier wall and make it safe for impact and explosions – from impact and explosions from 27.  We couldn’t move Route 27 out because what’s next to 27?  Can anybody guess?  Anybody here?  What’s there that we can’t move? 

AUDIENCE:  Arlington.

MS. POHLMAN:  Yes, Arlington Cemetery.  Thank you.  You do know you’re geography.  That’s good.  All right.  Thank you.  And we’re also in charge of the Pentagon Memorial Project, too, which is all – which the construction is underway, and it will be finished next year. 

So with all of this stuff going on, how do you incorporate sustainability and energy efficiency and constructability?  You know, one of the things that my boss has told me to do was: “So Teresa, you’ve got this idea for sustainability.  All right, we’ll give you an integrated product team.  We’ll have you have a cross-functional piece and a group to concentrate on.  Oh, and by the way, none of these people work for you, okay?  They work in other organizations, and so you’ve got to kind of link everybody together with common principles and – oh, by the way, you get this much budget, not this much, and you have to find a way for people to incorporate sustainability and sustainable construction into what they’re doing without costing any money.”  Right? 

I was, like, oh my gosh, how am I going to do this?  No money, no additional resources.  “And oh, by the way, you have to find a way to get through to the construction guys and gals with the muddy boots and the hats,” because they’re not going to – they’re going to be the ones who tell you that it can’t be done and it’s going to cost more money and on and on.  How many of you have heard that?  Hey, cost too much money.  You know, the first thing that gets cut is what?  It’s called value engineering, but what’s the first thing that gets cut and a lot of times in the design if you’re on a limited budget, energy, environmental considerations, maybe some sustainability, LEED certification stuff, that kind of thing?  I mean, it does happen.  You know, the first thing they look at is things that they don’t look at as being essential to the design of the project.

So here we are, and here’s my little guide here.  I like him because he’s about the only thing I can do in PowerPoint myself.  (Laughter.)  So I use this guide to say, all right, everybody knows sustainability is a good thing to do.  There is no way you have to convince your boss or your designers that this is a good thing to do.  Architecturally, design-wise, it makes sense.  But you’ve got to face practicalities.  You know, you’ve got to show payback.  What’s the one thing that you look at when you’re a project manager, all right, and if your boss is a project manager or a program manager?  What do they look at?  The bottom line: How are you either contributing to the bottom line, what’s your payback, how will you add value to the project, and how are you contributing to the mission. 

This is what we – this is our challenge here with energy, with sustainability, with environmentally sound practices.  We have to prove mission relevance, okay?  How do we prove that we are relevant to the mission and how do we prove the sustainability is not only the right thing to do, it’s the smart thing to do and it’s the most cost-effective thing to do?  Well, what we did at the Pentagon Renovation Office was we got a group together because the organization was organized into integrated product teams, that’s why we organize that way. 

Now, there was a proposal to do something totally different outside the organization and I talked to my boss about it and he suggested that no, we try to fit within the organization and try to draw a group of people, a cross-functional group of people.  We drew from the designers for the Pentagon renovation.  We drew from the construction people, the guys and gals with the muddy boots and the construction hardhats, and we drew from the safety people, the quality assurance, the quality control folks, the architects and also the civil servants like me. 

Oh, and by the way, the Pentagon Renovation Office is an office composed of about 250 people, but there are only about 20 civil servants.  So it’s kind of the ultimate in outsourcing.  All right?  So that’s the competition of – the composition of the staff that you have.  So in addition to all of this in not getting any resources, and not given the extra money, boss said, “Oh, yeah.  By the way, you have to make it easy for people to do this.”  How do I do that?  Now, so we were kind of going back and forth with them until we got a couple of ideas.  One of the ideas was what we called the field guide for construction because it was apparent to me after the first year or so – remember I said this was about a six-year labor of love – after about the first year or so, it was apparent that the people in the field didn’t really understand why we were doing stuff.

And I don’t really – I really, really care about the design and the specifications that I’m telling you if you don’t get the guys out in the field to do it, it won’t get done.  If you don’t tell them about it and publicize it and educate them and tell them why they’re doing something – “Why are we putting stuff over into this pile instead of this pile?  It takes an extra five seconds.”  “Well, we’re sorting our materials and we’re recycling them.”  You know, those kind of things. 

This book was made – well, it was kind of inspired by – when I was with the Air Force, I did some guides like this and we made them of the size to fit a BDU pocket.  So that’s kind of why it’s like this.  But the other reason is that, you know, it’s sort of handy, you know, and it’s organized in chapters.  So if you’re a contracting person, you go to one chapter.  If you’re a QA person, you go to one chapter.  If you’re a concrete and steel supervisor, you go to another chapter.  So this is one tool that we made for the people on the ground.  So we had to reach the people in the construction.

The other thing we did was – now, I’m talking about the tools here – we made a poster called “Sustainable Construction,” and we posted it on the sites so that the workers could at least read about some of this goofy stuff they were doing on the site – you know, for renewable energy – excuse me, for recycling, for energy purposes, et cetera, because that kind of explain why they were putting extra molding on the outside of the windows and why we were doing some of the lining that we were on the outside of the windows. 

And guess what else?  Another communication tool, we did this not only in English, but we did it in Spanish, because the reality of the situation is that out of about 800 construction workers on the site, most of them had green cards.  So if we were going to get our point across to them, we would have to speak their language.  The other thing that we did was we standardized some language and statements of work.  How many of you work with these wonderful government contracts that you have to write statements of work for?  Okay.  These statements of work are available to you.  They are government property.  You can talk to Walt Nielsen at the Pentagon Renovation Program, PENREN, Renovation Office.  He’ll be glad to send you the wording.  We developed standardized language for the contracts that we used to put in sustainability language.

We also developed a program manager guide.  Remember I told you about the field guide was for the folks in the field?  We also developed a program manager’s guide for the program managers, from their perspective so that they could see it.  Another important thing was how the contracts were composed.  Acquisition strategy – getting in the very beginning sustainability, incorporating in the very beginning extremely important.  Not only do you have to get your engineers and your architects on board, but you’ve got to get that religion into the contracting people and the funding people, because if you don’t have a contract and if you don’t have money for the contract, you’ll never going to get to do your great design and build your building. 

So we had to educate not only the folks in design and construction, but also in contracting, in funding, the quality assurance, quality control folks.  They are the ones that make sure that what’s in the drawings and specs actually gets built.  So they’re extremely important to the process, too.  Government requirements.  How many of you think that the Department of Defense doesn’t have to obey any of these environmental requirements?  Good.  You passed the quiz, because all of these are applicable to the Department of Defense and all other federal agencies.

The sustainable design product and process.  The reason why I really talking about this particular subject, and especially the energy portion of it, is because I think that sustainability not only talks about green buildings, but it also talks about unification and it defines a unified process for you.  It stimulates innovation and excellence, and it balances – it helps you to balance cost quality schedule with sustainability, because the bottom line is this.  All right, you can have all of the great ideas in the world about sustainability, energy and environmental stuff, but if you don’t prove to your bosses and the people who control the purse strings that it’s going to be giving the value-added to the project and it’s going to actually giving them a return on the investment that they made, then you’re not going to be able to get your project done. 

So that’s where sustainability comes in, and all of these – the Green Procurement Strategy has taken a course.  We went along with DOD’s Green Procurement Strategy and we established our own procurement goals on energy efficiency, bio-based materials, low VOCs, et cetera.  You can read that up there, I’m not going to you and I’m almost running out of time.  But basically, what I’m telling you about is how we integrated all of these requirements into the process, and it did not happen over the course of a year or two years.  It took about three or four years before the whole process fell in place.  My point is that at every step of the way and each person in the process has to have an investment in the process and they have to be integrated into it.

An example for energy efficient windows.  These energy efficient windows that I’m talking about – those are the old and the new – and you can see just by illustration that the new ones are much more energy efficient, but they’re also the famous blast-proof windows that saved lives on 9/11, okay?  So not only are they blast-proof but they also are energy efficient.  And I do another whole presentation about complementarity between force protection and sustainability, but that’s another story.  But that’s one piece of it right there, okay?  Also, on the windows there’s a side note.  They’re part of the historic features, too, because we had to preserve the little handles that you see on the windows, especially on the new ones.  You can’t open them.  But we had to preserve that feature because that was one of the things that the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation asked us to do to preserve the historic nature of the Pentagon.  So we did that.

Tightening the building envelope, windows insulation for thermal performance.  That’s something you’re – you know, very interested in.  I talked about abating hazardous material, and for Wedge 3, we had 53 percent of the construction recycled – construction to pre-recycle, and the contract goal was diversion of 50 percent from the waste training.  So we exceeded that part of it.  And one of the projects, the Pentagon Athletics Center actually diverted – I think it was 95 percent.  So it was a huge percentage. 

LEED, of course, LEED certification is now ongoing for the Wedge 2, and Pentagon Library and Conference Center using the new construction rating system.  We have three LEED certified buildings on campus, on the Pentagon reservation as it’s called officially: the Metro Entrance Facility, Pentagon Athletics Center and the Remote Delivery Facility.  All three of those were certified within the last six years, and they were the first, second and third LEED certified facilities within the National Capital Region. 

  And I’ve already talked a little bit about this.  I also want to tell you a little bit about practicality.  All right?  This is another thing that I – another kind of debate, discussion I had with my friends at the U.S. Green Building Council.  I have long been an advocate of Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design.  Part of the problem that we had was that they could not compete, the materials that they were offering in the industry could not compete with regular construction materials.  I was getting quotes from the Forest Stewardship Council, you know, for the FSC certified wood, you know, of like $500 per door, and my boss was telling me: “Teresa, we can’t pay $500 per door when I can get an $80 over at Home Depot.”  What kind of an argument can I make with that?

So I had this running debate with U.S. Green Building Council and sure enough in the past few years, the industry has responded and is much more competitive, and it’s not just with FSC wood, it was with a lot of other things.  You know, it was with ceiling tiles, it was with carpeting, that kind of thing.  It almost seemed like the industry was not really zeroing in on – or was actually becoming too specific, but now, if you go to the U.S. Green Building Council conferences and the Green Building conferences, Green Design, all of those conferences, you will see that the products are becoming more and more competitive and they’re on parity.

Remote Delivery Facility.  That’s the facility that all the trucks drive to to get inspected and unload their cargo.  In past times at the Pentagon, trucks were able to pull up underneath the Pentagon, disgorge their cargo and pull out.  Now, it’s very – deemed very dangerous, so Congress allocated money for the Remote Delivery Facility even before 9/11.  Metro Entrance Facility, same story.  Buses used to be able to pull up within about 23 feet of the Pentagon and let out their passengers.  And how many of you were there when the Pentagon had the old metro stop, where you could actually just go up in there and there you were on the concourse?  I liked it because of the weather.  You know, you didn’t have be out in the rain or anything, but it was extremely dangerous when you think about force protection, chem-bio, you know, blast protection, et cetera.  So again, pre-9/11 project that was built to get – give standoff distance and force protection to the Pentagon.  It’s also LEED certified.

High albedo pavement, Energy Star roof reduce site disturbance, storm water management, et cetera.  There are lots of factoids on the Pentagon renovation site about these particular facilities.  I’m not going to try and go through everything all at once with you.  I just want to introduce you to it and let you know a few things that you might not have thought of or might not have known before. 

Pentagon Athletics Center.  This was the second LEED certified building in the NCR.  It’s a great facility.  If you haven’t been there, Pentagon Library and Conference Center is already built.  Memorial will be built, and in conclusion – I think this is my last slide – again, sustainability, environmentally-friendly sustainable projects defines a whole system of coherent values for the project, stimulates innovation and design in construction excellence.  It also, I believe, is facilitated by the design-build delivery and facilitates the design-build delivery.  This is the particular delivery system we had on the Pentagon renovation contract.  It all goes together.  It’s the acquisition process.  It’s a specification process.  It’s the design process.  It’s the construction process.  It’s the actual day to day working quality assurance, quality control, et cetera.  Balancing sustainable factors with building code, force protection, costs, personnel and quality, you name it, okay? 

So I believe that this helps us maintain military readiness because the mission of the Pentagon, again, is not to conserve energy or be sustainable, or be LEED certified.  The mission of the Pentagon is fight wars; the mission of the Pentagon is to promote the military, et cetera.  But within that framework, I believe that sustainability actually helps it and promotes it.  All right.  This is the website for the Pentagon Renovation Office, and it’s renovation.pentagon.mil – M-I-L.  And with that I’d be happy to answer any questions. 

MS. WERTHEIM:  I have the mike, so I’m going to ask the first one.  I think you’ve learned a lot about how to do this.  How is that knowledge being shared with the other services?

MS. POHLMAN:  Well, that’s a good question.  When I was at the Pentagon Renovation Office, I worked very closely with Dr. Moy, Get Moy, and also tried to distribute – if you were a federal person, we can get you a copy of this, okay, for free, because we are authorized by our lawyers – (laughter) – to give copies of this to feds for free.  You can contact Walt Nielsen at the Pentagon Renovation Office to get this, because this was – I didn’t get to talk very much about it – but this is a venture that we had. 

It was actually done on the inexpensive side – I won’t say on the cheap – on the inexpensive side with a graduate course, a course of graduate students.  Each one of the graduate students had a chapter to do.  This is Penn State University.  We had them working for us, and each one of them had a chapter to do for their Masters thesis.  And so we put the book together.  I thought it was a real innovative way to do it.  We had innovative minds working on it.  We had the opportunity to use a university.  We also have used other universities for similar efforts.  Publicizing with DOD, we worked cross-functionally with Dr. Get Moy.  We have spoken at various conferences.  I myself have spoken all over the United States about what we’re doing and to various audiences.  And I hope – I hope I’ve introduced a little bit of this to you all. 

Question?

Q:  (Off mike.)

MS. WERTHEIM:  Please use the microphone; we’re recording. 

Q:  Yes, I’m Scott Shuff (ph) from the Naval Research Laboratory.  One of the biggest sources of energy used is lighting, and have you been using your new technologies, the LEDs and this sort of thing?

MS. POHLMAN:  Yeah, wherever possible we have.  As a matter of fact, I did not go into it because of the short time, but part of what we’re doing is using photoluminescence signage in the hallways.  You might notice if you go into the Pentagon that these funky looking green arrows – (laughter) – and some kind of tape along the wall and exit signs that actually are below on the baseboards. 

Lessons learned from 9/11.  That’s another – whole other presentation, but one of the lessons learned from 9/11 was that when people were crawling around in the smoke, they couldn’t see those really nice little red exit signs that are above the door because the smoke grows, and so what we did was we put, we lined each baseboard with the photoluminescence signage, and believe me I was not impressed with PL signage because I knew it from, like, 20 years ago, 15, 20 years ago, but the technology has come so far, that it only needs a certain amount of footcandle’s illumination per day to make it light up when the room is dark.  So I mean, it’s very impressive to me.

Q:  Final question.  Have you explored solar – using solar energy in any way?  You have?

MS. POHLMAN:  Yes, we have.  And part of the problem that we have – and this is another lessons learned, one of the things we learned the hard way.  Remember I said I’d make it sound easy, but it really wasn’t?  One of the things that we learned the hard way was that solar energy at least for the Pentagon and maybe for some of the other military facility is not acceptable and part of the problem is appearance, part of the problem is efficiency, the technology just is not there right now.  And so that’s one the problems that we had.  So we have to balance out our choices. 

Yes, sir? 

Q:  Hi, my name is Mario Fiori.  What level of LEED certification do you have?  When you say LEED certification –

MS. WERTHEIM:  Sir, who are you with?

Q:  Myself.  (Laughter.)  What level of LEED certification did you get?  You know, we had SRiRiT in the Army and we had colors, and I presume it’s still colors in the LEED system.
         
MS. POHLMAN:  Right.

Q:  So at what level did you shoot for?

MS. POHLMAN:  Just certified.  It’s certified Silver, Gold and Platinum, and we were just at the – no Bronze.

Q:  Okay. 

MS. POHLMAN:  Bronze went away with the first system.

Q: Well, then to answer the gentleman’s question.  The Army (has put out ?) by the assistant secretary a Gold standard for all new military construction.  It has to be included for the Army at least.  I don’t know about the other two services. 

MS. POHLMAN:  Great.  Thank you, sir.  Great, wonderful news.  Yes, sir?

Q:  I’m (Len Gollobin ?), NDIA.  In a complicated project like this, how did you handle stuff coming up from the field in terms of engineering changes?  What kind of process did you have for handling all of this?

MS. POHLMAN:  Remember when I told you about the IPTs, the integrated product teams?  Not only did we have changes in the field, we had changes that the tenants wanted to make.  So part of my job was not only to deal with the changes in the field that our folks were making, but part of my job was to try to figure out how to accommodate the tenants and the changes they wanted to make in the tenant change request and the tenant fit-out process.  We have a whole process outlined for that, and a whole time schedule, timeline where you can insert your input into the process.  That’s the answer to that.

As far as changes out in the field, yeah, regular change process.  You know, engineering changes that kind of thing and changes in the drawings incorporating the drawings.

Anybody else?  I thought I saw a couple –

Q:  (Off mike.)  I’m fascinated with the – what was your – (unintelligible) – material that you had to buy?  Was it the carpeting, the stone, the concrete?  And how was it greened or how was it sustainable?

MS. POHLMAN:  Oh, all of the materials?

Q:  Yeah, just give me the top five.
 
MS. POHLMAN:  Well, let’s see.  Quantitywise, it was – you know, concrete.

Q:  Yeah, how did you get green concrete?  (Laughter.) 

MS. POHLMAN:  Very good question.  But one of the ways in greening concrete is to put fly ash in the concrete. 

Q:  Fly ash?

MS. POHLMAN:  Yeah, and that’s how they judge the greenness of the concrete.  Now, the problem with that is that we always have to make sure that the performance isn’t degraded so that – remember we’ve got certain impact resistance that we have to have, okay?  The other thing is rather than – we were using – for sheetrock, we were using synthetic gypsum.  So we saved natural resources by doing that.

Q:  Okay.

MS. POHLMAN:  So – and –

Q:  Now, you mentioned carpeting.  So what kind of carpeting did you buy?

MS. POHLMAN:  Yeah.  Carpeting, there was recycled – using recycled materials that was recyclable.  That’s extremely important.
  
Q:  You didn’t use, like, natural sheep or something like that?  You can grow it as sustainable sheep supply forever, you know, kind of?

MS. POHLMAN:  Oh, no. 

Q:  You didn’t get into that?

MS. POHLMAN:  No, no. 

Q:  Okay.

MS. POHLMAN:  No, but it’s important though that you buy the carpet that’s recyclable because if you have recycled, it can’t be recyclable, then all you do is throw it away and you’re just kind of pushing problems on the road.

Q:  I got you now.  One last question.  Now, are you ready for the future, say, biowarfare attack, or are you going to wash down – (unintelligible) – all over and maintain the historic preservation of the building?  What kind of coatings did you put on the stone, this kind of thing?

MS. POHLMAN:  The coating on the stone?

Q:  On the concrete.

MS. POHLMAN:  On the concrete.  That part – part of it is classified.  I can’t really talk about.  (Laughter.)  But I will tell you that it is environmentally sustainable, non-fume producing and it’s also preserving the character of the stone. 

Q:  Yeah.

MS. WERTHEIM:  We’ll just have one more question – (inaudible).
 
MS. POHLMAN:  Thank you. 

Q:  Hi, my name is Joe – (unintelligible).  I’m with – (unintelligible) – Associates here in Arlington, Virginia.  I had the pleasure of working under Dr. Pohlman, so I just wanted to first of all say that she gave us a lot of great leadership in the sustainable environmental aspect there at the Pentagon.  I wanted to say that – or at least ask you in your opinion since the Pentagon with all of those roadblocks and barriers can do the LEED certification, certainly other agencies can, wouldn’t you say?

MS. POHLMAN:  This is a challenge that I want to issue to you, all right?  If we can do that – and let me tell you something else – to get LEED certification at the Metro Entrance Facility, it cost an extra $150,000 and part of that was for CO2 sensors because by and large, if we – we started at about the middle of the design process.  By the time we were out there, it was a little bit too late to incorporate Silver, Gold, Platinum sorts of thing.  But it’s very – it was a very low extra cost. 

So I want to issue you a challenge.  Other federal agencies, if we can do it there at the Pentagon, we did it three times, right – even after 9/11, and what we were working with there.  Remember the Pentagon Renovation Office is not only renovated the Pentagon, but we also rebuilt the Pentagon after the Phoenix – for the Phoenix Project after 9/11, and that was all in the mix there, too.  So we were thinking about 9/11, we were doing sustainability.  We were doing force protection.  We were issuing $300 million worth of contracts in one week after 9/11.  And then we were trying to construct a sustainable Pentagon. 

So I mean, maybe, yeah.  We didn’t reach Silver or Gold certification, all right, in those buildings, but the effort that we did – and we didn’t give up, by the way.  The first time we put in an application for LEED at the U.S. Green Building Council, we had to – (unintelligible) – three times, and it took us about six months and we never gave up.  And so we got there.  The important thing is we got there.  We had people who were committed to do it and we have leadership that was committed to do it, too.  And I issue a challenge to all of the other federal agencies to do the same thing and to even do better.  I’d love to see you do even better.  I’ll cheer you on.

Thank you very much.  (Applause.) 

MS. WERTHEIM:  Thank you very much. 

BILL BROWNING:  Mitzi in her usual fashion said, “Bill, you’re Bob’s partner, why don’t you do this?”  Great, thanks, Mitzi. 

I’m Bill Browning.  I am a partner with Bob Fox in a firm that we started last year called Terrapin Bright Green.  We do strategic consulting and policy work on large scale projects for governments, corporations, and new communities.  We’re based here, in Washington D.C. and in New York, and we are doing some interesting fun stuff.  My connection with this group is that I have the honor and pleasure of being part of the Defense Science Board Energy Task Force, and a lot of my cohort is here in the room tonight, and I’m glad that they’re here with me.  And it’s my really – it’s amazing honor to have this guy as a partner. 

Bob Fox was one of the first major architects in the country in New York City to say let’s rethink the way that we’re doing our buildings, and doing that with clients like the Durst family, the Rudins and other families that own and build the large buildings in New York.  They did in the mid-‘90s – and this is how I originally got to know Bob – a skyscraper called Four Times Square, the Condé Nast Building, which was the first speculative green skyscraper in the world.  And that really was a laboratory. 

But true to Bob’s nature and the Dursts, they stepped back and said, “Well, that was interesting, but that wasn’t enough,” and so next to that was an even larger lot designated for an even larger building.  And at that time, Bob went out on his own, left his original firm, Fox and Fowl to become a sole practitioner.  The Dursts formed a partnership with Bank of America to build a 2.2 million square foot building, and the Dursts informed Bank of America that they were hiring a sole practitioner to design that building.  And that is a leap of faith that gives you a sense of how amazing this guy is, and I won’t say more than that. 

I want to introduce Bob Fox.  (Applause.)

BOB FOX:  Thanks, Bill.  Can everyone hear me?  Is this working?

Before I start, I need to thank – I’m truly privileged to be Bill Browning’s partner.  I have two other terrific partners: one is Rick Cook, who is partner in our architecture firm called Cook and Fox, and the other is my wife who was my spirit guide.  So without those three people, I’m nothing. 

I haven’t – this is – I’m trying this title out for the first time, 180 to one – and I bet nobody has a clue what I’m talking about.  I’m going to try and do three things.  One to talk about the problem – excuse me – as I see it or as we see it.  Second is to talk about one large project, the Bank of America Tower at 1 Bryant Park, and the third is to talk about a project that’s a 180 times smaller – that’s the 180 to one – which is our own offices.  Both of these projects are going to be LEED Platinum.  The office has already received the certification.  It’s the first one in New York State, and the 2.2 million square foot Bank of America Tower, in the middle of New York, will also be LEED Platinum. 

As Teresa said, this is not easy.  And as Bill said, it was the Durst family and our firm and our engineers at the beginning who said, let’s do the best possible building we can, not let’s get LEED Platinum.  Let’s do the best possible building we can in every way, and let’s see what happens.  So that’s how we started. 

But first let me – let me talk a little bit about the problem.  I think all of you have heard this phrase: “Think Globally, Act Locally;” Rene Dubos in 1972 said this.  As an advisor to the UN, I think we are at a point where all of us realize how important this is.  We, privileged Americans, we, fortunate Americans, are a fraction of the world’s population.  We consume 25 percent of the world’s resources.  Every year, 16 million people in China move from the country to the city; every year, 16 million people.  Every year, two New York Cities get built.  You’ve got to think about that.  Every year.  The people who are moving from the country to the city want exactly what we have: cars, TV.  They all have cell phones already, but they don’t have everything else that we have, and the numbers just won’t work. 

And this is what is going to happen in a much greater degree as these populations move into urban environments.  The top graph is CO2 concentrations on our planet over a scale of 400,000 years – peaks, valleys, up and down.  The bottom graph is the temperature change.  Four hundred thousand years going from left to right, and a direct correlation dips in CO2, dips in temperature.  And these light blue colors that perhaps you can’t see in the back, these are ice ages.  So notice, when the temperature goes down, we have some serious ice ages.  The top line on this chart is 300 parts per million.  You’ll notice that for 400,000 years we have not been above 300 parts per million.  I’m going to change the scale of the graph to the last 1,000 years, and you’ll see that for the first part of that time, it was fairly flat.  And around the industrial revolution, things started to change fairly dramatically in this graph.  This is the line at 300 parts per million.  We are well beyond that now and close to 400 parts per million. 

The climate scientists that study this are pretty convinced that within this century and maybe in the first half of the century, we would get the 500 parts per million.  Four hundred thousand years bellow 300 parts per million and in a few decades, we are now at going to be 500 parts per million.  The temperature increase is going to be predicted at 5 degrees centigrade.  A very smart man named Eugene Lindon wrote this article in Fortune Magazine and talked about the changes that we’ve experienced over the last decade in terms of natural disasters.  If you noticed the first part of the last century, we had some, but not that many natural disasters, and now what we’re looking at – these different colors represent earthquakes and typhoons and droughts – and I’d like to say a little blizzard in New York State last week.  (Laughter.)  That’s not real natural disaster.  It was for some of us who lived through it.  But notice the dramatic increase in the natural disasters.  Think of hurricanes; think things that happened close to home. 

And with this increase in temperature change, we will have an increase in sea level rise.  The temperatures that are being predicted to happen by the end of 2100, the last time they were felt on this planet, the sea level was 80 feet higher.  This – some of us – are any others in this room from New York?  I see.  We have a problem.  We have a serious problem.  What we’re seeing is, in many ways, nature correcting some of the things that we have done as we have progressed.  We think it’s progress in our society.  Nature spent millions of years putting carbon deep down into the ground, and we in our infinite wisdom are taking it out as fast as we possibly can, so nature is correcting for what we have done. 

But that’s – so that is – perhaps one would look at that as the bad news, but I do think that help is on the way.  Starting in 1962, Rachel Carson wrote “Silent Spring;” U.S. Green Building Council was formed 30 years later in the early ‘90s, with the first edition of LEED that Teresa was speaking about.  The building that Bill mentioned, the Four Times Square, was a major exhibit at the National Building Museum here on large green buildings, and Battery Park City, which is a part of Manhattan, the southern part of Manhattan started in 1999 requiring that all of the new buildings in Battery Park City be essentially LEED Gold buildings – when they’re done, in the next three years, there will be 5 million square feet of LEED Gold buildings in New York.  So things are changing. 

The other thing that’s changing is the membership in the U.S. Green Building Council.  It started – Bill Browning was one of the founders – it started – you could go to U.S. Green Building Council conference and three tables in this room would be all of the people who were there.  And now there are thousands of members.  And this chart in the right shows the accelerated growth which is fairly interesting that it is actually the same kind of curve as we’re seeing the CO2 – (laughter) – and the national disasters.  So serious help is on the way.  To be – how many of you are members of the U.S. Green Building Council?  I bet there’s a lot more, you just don’t know it.  If your corporation or your agency is a member of the U.S. Green Building Council that means you are, as well, you can enjoy all of those privileges.  So I suspect a lot more of you can call yourselves members. 

The reason that buildings are so important in this work that we all have ahead of us to be better citizens on the planet is that buildings are responsible for a larger portion of CO2 than anything else.  At 43 percent, we are indeed part of the problem. 

So what does this one building in Manhattan have to do – in the middle of Manhattan have to do with that?  I’m going to first talk a little bit about the design of this building.  Where is it? What does it look like?  This is part of New York City; this is 6th Avenue running north south or central north south.  This is 42nd Street, east-west Bryant Park, which is one of the more beautiful places in the city, the New York City Public Library.  Fifth Avenue is over here, and this is our site.  It is two acres, right in the middle of Manhattan.  This is Times Square, and for those of you who have been there on New Year’s Eve or have watched it on TV, this is were the ball drops, right there in the middle of Manhattan.  It is truly on one of the more amazing streets probably in the entire world. 

This is a view of the entire length of 42nd Street East River.  Over here, this is the United Nations, and along this stretch of one street in Manhattan is the Chrysler Building, the Daily News building, Grand Central Station, the Public Library, the McGraw-Hill Building.  They are some of the most beautiful and some of the most well-known buildings in the world.  More interesting – maybe some of you in the back cannot see this – this is a section through the Isle of Manhattan.  This is East River, Hudson River on the left, and this building is actually right smacked in the middle of Manhattan at that point.  Most think of the East-West line is 5th Avenue, at 42nd Street, the middle is 6th Avenue. 

You know, our work we always look at the history of a site.  This is an aerial view looking down on – this, our site is in the low right-hand corner.  This is 42nd Street, this is 6th Avenue.  This is where the Public Library and Bryant Park are right now.  This is – it was then called Reservoir Park – this is the Croton Reservoir, which was the water supply system for the entire city of Manhattan in the 1800s, and in 1853, a building was created on this side called the Crystal Palace.  It was an all-steel-and-glass building, the only building of its kind in the United States.  It was a place where people would come to see all kinds of new things that were happening, and in fact, Elisha Graves Otis first demonstrated the safety brake on the elevator in this building, standing on a platform and cutting the rope – those days, they were not cables but ropes – cutting the rope and the elevator did not fall to the ground.  This was, for many, the beginning of the high-rise age of construction.  But notice this Crystal in the form of all-steel-and-glass, this was kind of what inspired us for our new project. 

This is an animation of how this building comes together.  This is our site.  This is Four Times Square, the only two buildings on the block.  This is the Henry Miller’s Theater.  Two million square feet in one big blob, put on the site which we sculpted, but most of the mass of this building on 6th Avenue and provide a lower base which we aligned with the base of Four Times Square along 42nd Street.  There’s a building on the opposite corner called the HBO Building, and we made a little notch in our building, creating a gateway going north on 6th Avenue, and created a public open space, public garden space, opposite the little park across the street. 

The heart of these large buildings is the elevator core and the services core, which is right at on the axis of the block in our case, and we’ve taken that opportunity and shifted the mass slightly to create better proportion volumes, and then folded back the corners on all the sides of the building to allow better views out around the other buildings, and also to allow more light and air to come down to the north side of the building.  We have a corner entry, behind the trees in the park, and a south-facing double wall system on this shard which the glass is actually four feet apart, which allows a very different feeling of the building from that view. 

This is what it will look like from the air.  It is all-steel and glass.  And someone is going to ask, “How can you be energy efficient with an all-steel-and-glass building?”  And I will tell you.  Again, Four Times Square -- and you can see that it is this extremely tall; it is the same sized building as the Empire State Building, in terms of area.  The site is actually two and a half feet larger than the Empire State Building site, but our floors are much larger.  The height of the building at this point is 950 feet, which will make it the second tallest building in Manhattan.  As we described to one of the tenants last week, from the top of the building, there will be ocean views not generally seen in Manhattan. 

One of our interesting challenges was this building is owned by the same family that owns the new one, and between the buildings, which is about 200 feet – a fairly large amount of space – was all of our mechanical equipment at the low part of the building.  So we have designed a green roof to cover all of the fans and stuff that would otherwise be sticking up through this roof for all of the people who are on that side of the building looking out.  This is another view that would be from Bryant Park, diagonally across the street.  This is our entry canopy; it is bamboo, a rapidly renewable resource. 

This is our urban garden room open to the public where one can go and drink at Starbucks and read a newspaper, a glass-enclosed subway entrance that goes down to the subway station right below.  Because our building is very hard-edged on the skyline, we wanted it to be warm and welcoming when one got to the lobby.  So we have a very warm granite stone on the floor and a very fossil-rich stone on the core wall, and when you get close to the stone, you can literally see fossils.  The closer you get, the more animated and beautiful this stone becomes. 

Unfortunately, like all other new buildings, security is a fairly important aspect of what we are doing.  The elevator lobbies are actually lined with leather panels, again, a renewable resource, but one that’s warm to the touch and we are waiting for it develop – when it gets built, waiting for it to develop a patina, as the users come in and kind of touch it with their hands. 

This is the 43rd Street side of the building; it goes from 42nd to 43rd Street.  This is the landmark façade of the Henry Miller’s Theater which we have kept.  If you go by there now, you will see this façade as standing pretty much on its own, but well protected.  The theater was totally beyond its useful life in terms of its mechanical systems, in terms of its fire egress, in terms of all of the facilities that people would use.  We have doubled the size of the theater.  It now extends from way over here to here, and developed a brand new theater, as well as a through block connection that connects 43rd Street with 42nd Street, one of those nice urban shortcuts in New York where you can – when it’s raining or windy or snowing or something, you can make a shortcut from street to street. 

This is a cross section through the theater, 43rd Street on the left, and now one comes in at the balcony level, goes down to the balcony or walks down some really beautiful stairs to the orchestral level.  We have been able to develop for the first time a workable fly tower for this theater, as well as the right traps under the stage.  And the one real innovative thing we’ve done to this theater is double the number of toilets in the women’s rooms – (laughter) – the largest complaint of any theater in New York, perhaps in Washington – I don’t now.  On the right hand side of this, you’ll see two subway cars.  This is the shuttle train that exists between Grand Central and Times Square.  We have – we are going to create a tunnel below grade that connects the 6th Avenue line with the Times Square Station.  I’ll talk more about that in a minute.

This – I had not known that Teresa was going to give a perfect lead-in to – or perfect introduction to all of the LEED stuff, and I was going to talk about the transition – in fact, Bill mentioned it, too.  When we did Four Times Square, I have to tell you, we had no idea what we were doing.  We just said, “Let’s see if we can figure out.  We’ll read a lot.  We’ll have good engineers.  We’ll talk to people.”  Bill, at that time, was at the Rocky Mountain Institute.  We engaged them, to learn from them, and we did – this is in 1995 – we did the best we could.  When we started the Bank of America building, as I said before, the Durst family said, let’s just do the best we can.  Let’s figure it out.  We didn’t do anything to save water in 1 Bryant Park on Four Times Square.  So what are we going to do about water?  What are we going to do about lots of things?  Let’s really sit down and figure it out. 

We started with what’s free.  And if you start to think about it, there’s a lot of things that are free, and most of them we kind of take for granted.  Sun is free.  We can get – we can warm the building with the sun; we can make power from the sun.  We looked at putting photovoltaic panels on this building, and in terms of the design, it just wasn’t going to make any sense to have dark purply photovoltaic panels on a very transparent curtain-wall system.  It just wasn’t part of our design vocabulary.  We looked at rain and snow, and said, “What can we do with that?”  And I’ll talk more about that in a little while. 

We looked at biology and started to think about what is it that biology could – how could we use that in this building?  And one of the things we are studying is taking the corporate cafeteria food waste and putting it in an anaerobic digester and making power.  It also at the end process that makes terrific fertilizers that the New York City Parks Department would love to have.  And that all sounds pretty cool and everything, but the amount of power you could make probably wouldn’t light this room.  We’re still studying it because the main benefit of this is to reduce the amount of food waste that goes from New York City to landfill.  You couldn’t imagine how many large trucks, every day go from New York City to Pennsylvania with our food waste.  It is – they are diesel power trucks, they are – it’s a disaster. 

We also looked at the earth.  What – is there some thermal value in the earth that we could capitalize on?  We also looked at wind.  And if you look carefully at this early model of the building, this piece over here is a wind turbine because my partner and I were convinced that we’re so high up in the air and we’re going to have lots of wind, we’ll get a wind turbine that will be really cool, and we’ll show everybody how to use – really use wind energy.  We put an anemometer at the top of Four Times Square, right here for a year, measured the wind, and found when we – this was from early ‘03 till sometime in the middle of 2004, there was no – we were less than – slightly less than 10 miles an hour of wind and there was no technology then that we could use to make sense out of the wind energy. 

We also looked at how we could generate our own power onsite.  What could we do to just power this building right on our own two acres in the middle of Manhattan?  One of the questions we get frequently as well: What’s so green about doing a building in the middle of Manhattan?  And its 2.2 million square feet, it’s arguably 60 suburban campuses, three-storey buildings, and I knew that it was much better.  So I said to our mechanical engineer, Scott Frank from – (unintelligible) – I said, “Scott, do me some calculations, and I want to do a chart that says our building uses this much energy, and all those buildings in the ‘burbs are like this, and I’m going to show a great graph,” and he said, “Sure.” 

He comes back about a day later and he says, “You know, this is stupid.”  I said, “What do you mean?”  He said, “Well, to light a square foot of space, it’s the same whether it’s three stories or 300 stories.  The heated is the same whether it’s three or 302.  Air-conditioned is the same.  The amount of energy you’re going to use is a little bit less, but not enough to really make any difference.”  So I kept thinking and I said, “Well, there is a difference.  It’s how people get to work.”  And when we were talking with Teresa earlier, we talked about how many people are going to be in the Pentagon – there’s 25,000 people – and one of the big issues is how they get to work.  What do they do with their cars? 

In this building there’s no parking; 8,000 people are going to work in this building, there’s no parking.  It is beautifully located in Manhattan, so that it is totally accessible to public transportation.  I have the next slide, it will show that.  But we will create about 120th of the CO2 compared to the buildings in the ‘burbs.  No one is going to take their private car to get to this building, because there’s nothing to do with – there’s no place to hide it.  New York City gets 540 passenger miles for the gallon on the subway system.  And these are the subways that stop under the building, all of the Times Square subways, all of the 6th Avenue subways.  It is six minutes’ walk to Grand Central.  It’s eight-minute walk – eight minutes to Penn Station, Port Authority Bus Terminal is a block away.  There is no building in Manhattan that is better located in terms of public transportation. 

This is one of the LEED points.  If you buy a significant percentage of your materials, get a significant percentage of materials within 500 miles, you get a point; fairly easy point to come by.  Cities like New York and Washington are somewhat challenged because most of our 500 miles, or most of the goods percentage of our 500 miles is underwater.  Nonetheless, we are able to do this.  We also, because it is a New York State-sponsored project, we focus on buying products from New York State.  One of the ones I like to talk about is from a company called IceStone.  It’s made in Brooklyn, New York; it is made from recycled glass – they make countertops, recycled glass and cement.  Brooklyn, New York, that is five miles away.  And we gave the bankers, Bank of America, their choice between granite and IceStone and they said, “Hey, we like the IceStone.  It’s beautiful.”  So all of the bathrooms we made out of IceStone. 

I know you have the same issue in Washington, but in New York, it’s pretty serious.  When we have a storm event, the water goes into the storm system, and invariably, with not too much effort, storm system goes into the sewer system and that whole system – it’s called the CSO, Combined Sewage Overflow – goes into the coastal East River and the Hudson River.  In fact, places in New York – when they get as little as a 10th of an inch of water, we have this overflow problem.  It is really serious.  This closes beaches; it makes the water – I mean, it just – the water in the rivers is horrible. 

We are going to collect all of the storm water that falls on the site.  It is four feet of water a year – not four feet from where I’m standing, not four feet, not that high.  We’re going to collect it in a series of tanks throughout the building.  We will add to that water, the water from the sinks, the water from the steam condensate – when you take the energy out of steam, it turns to water – and add to that the condensate from the air-conditioning system.  In your air-conditioning, you take moisture out of the air.  We’re going to treat that slightly.  We’re going to use it to flush the toilets, and we’re going to use it for our cooling towers.  All office buildings cooled all the time and the cooling towers evaporate water to make cooling that consume a tremendous amount of potable water. 

We also, because we have the deepest cellar for many, many blocks, have three sump pumps in the building and we are – instead of pumping that water into the storm system, as normally happens in New York – we’re pumping that into our storage tank.  And one of the things that we thought we could do was to – because that water is about 58 degrees, we thought we could use that water for heating and cooling in the geothermal system.  So we studied it for a while and our engineers said, “Sure, that would work,” and we’re going to heat and cool the branch bank with that water. 

And one of the engineers who works for the Durst Organization said, “Well, do we have enough?”  So because the building is now about halfway up, we were able to put a meter on the water that’s being pumped out of the building, and found that there wasn’t enough water coming out.  It’s something like 5,000 gallons a day gets pumped out, or get pumped into our tank, but that’s not enough to go through the expense of putting in this heat pump system for the small amount of heating and cooling we’d get out of it.  So we’ve looked at some things that didn’t make sense, and our clients insisted that everything we do be something that another team could copy.  This was not one of them. 

We also, for the first time of any building in New York, are putting in waterless urinals.  I’m sure many of you have heard about this, this is not something brand new.  There is no water in the urinal.  There is a cartridge in the base of the urinal that has some chemically inert blue liquid that is lighter than urine.  The urine slides down the side of the urinal, goes down the trap, no water.  This will save us three million gallons of water each year.  That combined system, the DEP, Department of Environmental Protection, New York which regulates water, thought that this was so interesting.  We’re saving slightly more than 50 percent of the water, potable water, that a building like this would use – they have reduced the rate by 25 percent.  So our tenants are paying – if you do the math – 37 percent of a typical water bill.  The cost of water in New York has gone up every year for the past 10 years. 

This is – I promised you – you remember this image – and I apologize to the people in the back.  You’re looking at some white lines.  You have no idea what that is, I’m sure.  These are 1,300 fluorescent tubes that are stuck in the ground.  There is no wire to any of them and they are lit from the straight current coming from this overhead transmission line.  And I’m not familiar enough with the area around Washington.  I can tell you if you drive around New York State, you will see transmission lines like these with houses under them, cows under them all over the place.  New York – the typical utility in New York State loses 7 percent of its energy from where it is created to when it comes out of the outlet in the wall. 

We will be – we will have our own gas-fired turbine.  It would be five megawatt turbine in this building.  The typical energy supply that arrives in the building from our –the source is New York State is 27 percent efficient.  Most of the energy goes up the chimney as waste heat.  We will capture that waste heat, and by having no transmission loss, we will be 77 percent efficient.  It will provide about two-thirds of the building’s annual energy.  During the day, we will need some from the grid; at night, we will make more than we need.  One of the things we will do with that is to – by creating our own power instead of having a peak load in the middle of the day, like all office buildings, we will tend to flatten that load out by making some of our own and by creating an ice farm.  In the cellar of our building, we have 44 of these tanks that are about 10 feet diameter, 10 feet high.  We will create a half a million pounds of ice every night, and then during the day, we will melt that to supplement our air-conditioning system. 

Another LEED point is using material with recycled content.  And Mitzi – Teresa talked about green cement – I think she called it green cement.  If you mix blast furnace slag with cement, it makes a much better cement.  It sets up faster and it is about 10 percent stronger.  Blast furnace slag is a waste product.  We are going to substitute 45 percent of our cement with blast furnace slag.  When you make – when a ton of cement is created, no matter whether it’s in this country or anywhere else in the world, a ton of CO2 is also created.  It is the most polluting product that we make; it is responsible for 8 percent of the CO2 on our planet.  So in this project, we’re substituting 45 percent of our cement with blast furnace slag. 

Another product that can be used is fly ash.  We found – that’s a product of coal-fired power plants.  We found that we could not substitute as much if we use fly ash.  We’ve also found – and Teresa talked about this as well – recycling construction debris is a big issue.  When we first started working on this at Four Times Square, I think we got up to about 60 percent recycling construction debris, and when we looked at what it was it turned out to be mostly wood.  And the wood was taken offsite, sorted, crushed and reused as paper pulp or something. 

On this project – and most of the wood came as pallets.  So the pallets were being brought to the site with material on them – and you’ve all seen these pallets on many construction sites around Washington – then thrown in the dumpster and essentially taken away.  We are now requiring that if you bring the pallet to the site, you take it back, and the contractors originally said, “Come on, it’s going to cost money.”  And we said, “That’s okay, just do it.”  They found that it saved their money because they were being stacked in a certain spot on the site, the contractors could easily take them away, and they didn’t have to buy more pallets.  So we would be – we are right now at 83 percent of the construction waste.  We have documentation of what it is and where it goes and how it’s being used.

When we started the project – I’m not sure if I was very clear in the beginning that this is the New York headquarters of the Bank of America; their corporate headquarters will remain in Charlotte.  We had a meeting with Ken Lewis who is the chairman, and he asked for two things.  He said, “First, I want an icon.”  And someone else would judge whether the building is an icon or not.  We haven’t asked Ken Lewis what he thinks recently – (laughter) – but we’ll find out, I’m sure.  But the important thing that he said to us is: “I want a building that will attract and retain the best associates.”  Their employees are called associates.  “Attract and retain the best associates.” 

So we looked at how we could create an environment where people would really be happier at work.  They really want to – once they got there, they would want to stay there, and then compare it – the value of that to the bank in terms of cost of the employees versus the cost of energy.  About 80-plus percent of the bank’s costs are for people.  The rest is real estate and energy, and taxes, whatever.  So we will save them about $3 million a year in energy cost.  Three million dollars is a lot of money.  If we get 1 percent increase in productivity from the people working in the bank – and run through all the mathematics in that – that’s about $10 million a year.  We expect that they will be at least 10 percent more productive in this building.  Now, we’re talking, even for the Bank of America, we’re talking some real money.  How are we going to increase this productivity?  How are we going to create a healthier environment? 

The first thing and we found out to be the easiest thing is to put better air filters on our building.  Typical office building in New York – and I’m sure Washington is probably no different – has a 35 percent particulate filter.  That’s the standard.  We are putting in 95 percent particulate filters; we’re filtering out all the ozone and filtering out volatile organic compounds.  Volatile organic compounds are the new carpet smell, the new paint smell, the new matter smell, the new car smell.  Volatile organic compounds known carcinogens, all of that gets filtered out. 

Additionally, the air supply – and I’ll say – I think I can say this with – be fairly certain – the air supply in your office comes from the ceiling.  That is the norm.  It comes from a beautifully designed diffuser that is designed to deliver pretty cold air, generally 65 degrees, and deliver it and spread it throughout the room so that it mixes with all the other air in the room before it hits you.  And in that mixing picks up all the air, all the dust and the pollen, and the sneezes, and delivers it very democratically to all the people in the space.  That is the standard.  In addition, that leads to the number one complaint in every office building in the country.  (Laughter.)  That’s it. 

Why does that happen?  Why is this the number one complaint?  The thermostat is controlled by the person in the corner office, and the person in the corner office is going to decide the temperature, and that VAV box up in the ceiling that’s controlling all of this is controlling the air for 15, 16, 18 people.  Those people are going to live with the temperature of the person in the corner office.  In this building every occupant gets their own thermostat.  There are no wires.  That’s what it looks like.  It is a device in the floor.  You put your hand on it, turn it one way, you get more air, turn it the other way, you get less air.  You control the air.  If you don’t like where the air is coming from, you can move it -- not yourself, building maintenance people will move it -- so it can be right under your chair, right, left, in back.  You control your own air.  You control your own temperature.  It is well filtered. 

And it works on a very – this under-floor air system, which has been the standard in Europe for a long time, it works on a very simple principle, and it’s going back to what’s free: the law of thermodynamics -- hot air rises.  Where does the hot air come from?  It comes from you, it comes from your computer.  And that hot air – the little diagram down here in the corner, it’s a very, very low-pressure system.  It does not make noise.  This is not forcing air through a duct where you can hear the force of that noise all the time.  It’s a big, open plenum under the floor.  You – the heat that you generate and the heat your generates pull the air up around you.  It is not mixing with all the other air in the room, creating a much healthier environment.  We also – because of this under-floor passageway we have, we’re also running all the wiring under there – all the communications wiring, all the electrical wiring.  When the bank, as it will inevitably, make change, when the bank needs to make an office bigger or smaller, they take down a sheetrock partition, move it over one mullion, two mullions and that work can be done at night – in one night.  Typically, if the duct work is in the ceiling and the wiring has to get changed it can take up to two weeks.  A bank changes 15 percent of their space every year. 

One of the sciences that is becoming more understood, actually started with a wonderful book called “Biophilia” by E. O. Wilson, that we as people need access to nature and access to daylight in order to function well, in order to feel good.  And in this building we will have 9.6 foot clear glass from floor to ceiling.  The normal ceiling height in a New York City office building is about 8.6 foot, in Washington, because of the height limitation it’s about 5.6 foot – (laughter) – or so I’m told.  The bank has as their standards – the typical office in most buildings has a sheetrock partition in the door, so the people on the inside have no view outside.  The bank will put glass partitions in all of the perimeter offices so that every person working on the floor will be – and they have low partitions in this building, low work stations.  Everyone in this floor will be able to look out the window and see what’s happening outside – raining or snowing, nice day, not nice day.  Huge difference in terms of the feeling of well-being and productivity. 

This is a view taken out of one of the top floors of Four Times Square.  If you ask anyone in New York who knows anything about real estate, Four Times Square is a class A office building.  It’s one of the best buildings in the city.  It’s state of the art.  These are the windows.  This is the difference that you get from floor-to-ceiling glass that will – this is essentially the view of one of the – this is probably out of the 30th floor of our building; we’re going to go up to 51, so the view will be quite a bit more dramatic than that.

I think Teresa had this as one of her slides, but I’m going to emphasize this a little bit more.  This building will be fully commissioned.  Commissioning is looking at every fan, pump, motor, everything that operates in this building will be inspected by the base building engineering team and the energy engineering team from the Durst Organization who will run the building.  The Durst engineers have been at all of our meetings from the beginning of the project.  Tom Perry, who heads that team sits there, he’s a very quiet guy as a building – you’d expect a building engineer to be, and frequently comes to us after the meeting and says, could you tell me again what you think you want to do?  So we explain it and he says, you know, the last three buildings that I worked on had this system and it didn’t work well, and we learned this and that.  We have learned a tremendous amount from this team, so we’re not repeating the same mistakes. 

Additionally, we have a totally separate team that is reviewing all of the drawings, all the shop drawings and is going to do a second level of commissioning.  We had a second set of eyes on this project and it was terrific.  So we can be certain that when this building goes online, it will work. 

I’m sure none of you can read these names.  Basically on the right-hand side are all the – the entire professional team and the names are not that important.  On the left, in this grouping, these are the state and city agencies that we have worked with in a partnership from the beginning of this project.  One of them is the New York State Energy Research Development Authority, which is a funding source for energy research and they will have given us close to a $1.5 million to offset some of our costs.  We also qualified for New York State Green Building Tax Credit, which has actually higher standards than the U.S. Green Building Council, and that will equal $7.2 million.  That pays for a lot of green stuff. 

Another name on here – and I suspect it could be the same in Washington -- another name on here is the New York City building department.  You can’t build a project in New York without hearing somebody say the New York City Building Department is awful.  That’s the way it normally is in New York, and it works for the system of expediters.  You hire an expediter – an expediter does all that dog work down at the building department.  So in the beginning of this project we decided we wanted to do it better.  We went to the building department and said, why don’t we form a partnership on this project, make this a model for how to do it better.  And they said, okay.  So we worked out the following deal: we would conduct training courses in some of these green technologies – and it’s not just us, it’s our engineers who are much better qualified to talk about some of these things than I do – and at the same time, whenever there was a meeting at the building department, we would get a borough superintendent to meet with, and I would go rather than the expediter.  We’ve had no problems.  And we have had that same teaming with the Department of Environmental Protection.  Every one of these agencies has been absolutely terrific working with us as a team and has made a huge difference, saved lots of money and lots of time. 

And this is where we were a couple of weeks ago.  We will be topped out in September.  It means the last piece of steel will go up in September.  We will have the curtain wall on, all of the exterior cladding on probably after the beginning of the year, and the bank will start to move in in 2008.  That’s what it will look like from the top of Rock Center.  I don’t know if people in the back can see that.  I have a closer version of it.  It’s – next time – if you come to New York sometime late fall, you’ll notice it. 

And I want to go to the (180 to one ?).  We outgrew our old office.  We found a really nice spot in an old department store, and we challenged out team who was – we have an in-house design team and we’ve said we have to get LEED platinum.  And we’ve got this tired old building and we have – and that’s who we are.  I mean, that’s what we want to do.  And so we started with something that was actually pretty cool. 

This is a postcard that someone in our office found and the floor we’re on is the -- it’s the eighth floor – it’s top floor, it’s the eighth floor – it was the dining room for a department store, which were very prevalent in 6th Avenue in the ‘20s – in street numbers in the teens and 20s around the turn of the 1900s.  They’re probably eight or 10 of these really beautiful big old department stores.  This was Simpson-Crawford, and they had seven floors of merchandise, one floor dining room, no prices on anything – Simpson-Crawford.  If – you’ve all heard the phrase “if you have to ask” -- well, this is if you have to ask.  They did go out of business, by the way.  (Laughter.)  So that’s not necessarily a road to success. 

So we looked at this space.  It certainly didn’t look like that when we found it.  This is now what it looks like.  We have modified the existing mechanical system, put in variable frequency drives, put in much better filtering system, similar to the one we’re using on One Bryan Park, are not quite the same, really carefully studied materials.  The carpet you’re looking at on the floor is from Interface carpet.  It is all recycled content and Interface would be delighted to take it back, because that’s their raw material for the next batch of carpet.  We have used a lot of bamboo.  Sometimes bamboo works well, other times it doesn’t.  It doesn’t work too well under compression.  It works very well if you support it properly. 

The countertop right here at our reception desk is something called paper stone.  It is absolutely beautiful.  It is compressed paper, that’s 100 percept recycled paper, and one of the nicest things about it is that if you – it’s made for kitchen counters.  If you take the typical Formica countertop and run your hand on it it’s kind of glassy.  And if you contrast that to picking up a pebble at the ocean – at the beach and feel the pebble, how nice it feels – has that little bit of texture – that’s what this stuff has.  So you touch it with your hand; it just feels good. 

This is the Interface carpet on the left.  It’s doesn’t come like that.  That is our design overlay.  This is the bamboo that we’ve used in a lot of our bookcases.  It’s actually beautiful.  I don’t know if you remember this, the early image of the – where it was a dining hall, we have adapted our lighting system to kind of echo the lights that were on the columns originally.  We have a daylight dimming system, so the brighter the daylight, the dimmer the lights.  We have our own waterless urinals.  The Bank of America is doing theirs legally, we just put them in.  (Laughs.)

We’ve also experimented with our housekeeper and we said to her originally – she speaks Spanish, so we said to her – I tried to tell her that the reason we wanted her to use green cleaning products was for her health.  And she’s using stuff that would take tar off of anything.  So we finally convinced her that we wanted her to use these products so that she would be healthier.  And we gave her all kinds of stuff to try and she found things that she liked that worked, and she’s very happy that we want her to be healthier.  But these – there’s probably – there’re dozens of really good green cleaning products that are available that don’t have volatile organic compounds in them.  I urge you all to focus on that -- not in your offices, at home. 

The best story we have to tell – this is our view, which is not bad, by any stretch.  When we first took the space, we were looking out on a 3,500 square foot black tar roof.  And Rick Cook and I said we can’t have this, we have to have a green roof.  And there are lots of good reasons to do a green roof: it prolongs the life of the roof, the roof didn’t belong to us, and that wasn’t part of our equation; it’s great thermo value, because you’ve got all those planting stuff. 

That didn’t apply to us at all because it was – the floor below us was rented by somebody else, but we wanted it because we wanted it to look good.  And our – a young man named Mark Rusitzky came to me early in the process and he said, you know this green roof’s going to cost $85,000.  And I said, Mark, that’s not going to work.  Find something else.  So he came back a little while later and he said, well, we have this bag system that we can get and that’s going to be about $65,000.  And I said, Mark, we’re not on the same wavelength here.  We are going to have a green roof.  We’re not going to spend $65,000. 

So he convinced the bag company from somewhere in Missouri to send the bags empty, because moving the bags full was part of the expense – send the bags empty to an organic farm in the middle of New York, and the son of that organic farmer was an intern in our office for a couple of years so we were familiar with the farm.  The organic farmer filled the bags for us with an expanded shale and compost mixture, put them on a truck, drove it down to New York on a Saturday, and our team – our office folks unloaded the bags – 800 bags.  They were 62 pounds each.  So the guys in the office were unloading the bags, spread them out on a roof, and the women planted little seedlings of sedum.  It cost a fraction of the $65,000, but it’s their roof.  That’s the best part of the story.  It’s not our roof, it’s their roof. 

We have the guy at the institute, comes every week and does readings and measurements, and we’ve had ladybugs and butterflies and all kinds of birds, and it is terrific.  When you walk in the front door – let me go back a couple of slides – when you walk in the front door – this is our reception desk here.  That’s our green roof, up there, not noticeable from that image. 

So besides the fact that it is a LEED platinum office, this is absolutely the best story that we have to tell.  So thank you all for listening and I’d be happy to take any questions.  (Applause.)  Easy questions.  (Laughter.)

MS. WERTHEIM:  It’s hard to be anything but overwhelmingly impressed by what you’ve done, and I guess in a sense the two things that struck me was how you started with questions, not answers, challenges and say “we want to try to create it this way” as opposed to saying “I have this much money; what can I do with it?” but understanding there were financial limitations.  And the other was the story you just told, which is sort of like a bar raising, and it creates a sense of community, and a sense of ownership, and a sense of caring.  Interesting to see if we could ever get that done on the federal level for the organizations we work for.  How are you sharing this story with others so they can learn about the questions that you asked, and the way in which you sort of solve the problems you came up with?  By the way, I’m Mitzi Wertheim, for those of you who don’t know. 

MR. FOX:  Well, we are delighted that we are asked to speak at a number of conferences.  We are partners with U.S. Green Building Council because we like working with them.  They’re a terrific organization.  I’m sure you all know they’re based here in Washington.  And when we have the opportunity to speak about this project, we do.  There will be a – we are also as part of the through block connection that goes from 42nd to 43rd and the very prominent face of it that will be seen from 42nd and Broadway, right at the beginning of Times Square, we’re going to have a green clock.  And that green clock will measure a whole bunch of stuff in this building.  I mean, there’s lots of stuff that I didn’t talk about: CO2 monitors and stuff.  So we will be documenting how the building is performing on a real time basis.  This is about – we’re also good to share.  I mean, this is not about we thought of it so we’re not going to tell anybody.  So the green clock we’re going to have kind of a planet-wide view.  A portion of this green clock is really going to focus on how this building is making a difference: how much water we’ve saved and that kind of thing. 

Q:  A quick question for you, sir.  Dave Blair (sp) from Navy.  I remember reading not too long ago about a problem in New York City with one of the plumbers unions when one of the architects made a proposal to install waterless urinals that the union went through the roof and had a real issue with that.  Is that something you ran into, and if so, how did you overcome it?

MR. FOX:  Well, you have the right issue of the wrong city.  The city is Philadelphia and not New York.  In our building actually – the issue was there because what we’re saying is that what we’ve designed is no water supply for the urinals.  In our building, what we’ve also designed is a separate water supply for the water closets.  So the amount of plumbing work to be done is the same.  So the plumbers union in terms of our building is not unhappy.  I won’t say – I can’t stay here and tell you they’re thrilled – (laughter) – but I will also tell you that the Mayor of New York Michael Bloomberg has a very, very ambitious plan called the 2030 Plan.  And it’s almost sort of taken the Schwarzenegger challenge, like oh my god, California is way out here in setting this bar, and in fact, even Washington, D.C., has set a bar by adopting LEED silver for projects, and I think you know about it.  And to be fair, I think, and the Navy has been out in front of this stuff for a long time.  Right?  You’ve adopted LEED standards, and I think you’re silver and gold for all your projects.  Am I right?

Q:  To be honest, I’m not sure. 

MS. WERTHEIM:  Nobody would know. 

MR. FOX:  Navy, yes.  Classified.  Okay.  (Laughter.)  I forgot where I was for a minute.  (Laughter.)  But in order for the City of New York to achieve the mayor’s standards that will have to be complied with by 2030, not only are we going to have to retrofit buildings with waterless urinals, but we’re also looking at things like retrofitting buildings with different toilets.  There are toilets that one can buy that have a dual flush – one flush for liquid, one flush for solid.  The liquid flush is about half the water.  If you add up the number of toilets in either Washington, D.C., or in New York City, you’re talking about lots and lots of toilets.  And in fact – I’ve been practicing in New York for 40 years.  Within that time, and I can’t tell you the year, at some point somebody said, gee, these six gallon toilets are using too much water, and they changed all the toilets in New York.  They didn’t quite get it right, but they changed them.  And they’re going to change them all again.  But the plumbers, plumbers have plenty of work. 

Q:  Great, thank you.

MR. FOX:  Yes.

Q:  Adam Seal (ph), North – (unintelligible) – Corporation.  Very much appreciate the presentation, as I think everyone else did here.  One of the real challenges throughout always is the cost to buy versus the cost to own.  And in here is a case where you were building for an owner that planned – the person who’s building it’s planning to occupy for a long time is involved in the decision.  Part of the problem in a lot of our infrastructure in the country is it’s rapidly turned over, it’s built to be leased and then how much extra, if extra, going as far as you went would it be versus just a “I’m blindly – I’m just building a building to whatever the code is,” first.  So what it would be an extra cost?  And what is the convincing required so that somebody who is in the “I’m just building to turn over as much as possible and I really don’t care how much it costs to operate.”  How do we get past that to be able to do projects like this in a larger percentage of the infrastructure? 

MR. FOX:  Every time.  (Laughs.)  That’s the question every time, and that’s the right question.  To do a really good LEED certified building – certified silver, gold and platinum – a really good certified building should not cost any more.  If you started in 1995 doing a LEED certified building, a little tougher, because the industry wasn’t there.  And some of the points are gained by the owner, some of the points are gained by the contractor, some of the points are gained by architects engineering team.  All of those teams have now come around to doing this stuff because is more of a way of building a building.  To get silver, not that much more.  To get gold, you’re probably going to spend a few percent more on the cost of the building.  To get platinum, in some ways – on the energy side of things we’re getting all 10 energy points.  That’s tough to get.  How are we getting 10 energy points?  Putting in a cogen plant – we’re making our own power.  It’s terrific.  It cost $12 million.  The payback period is two years.  You don’t need a calculator.  Okay, let’s build a cogen plant.  But we get 10 points.  If we didn’t get those 10 points, clearly, we weren’t going to get LEED platinum. 

So some of the things that a team – some of the creative things that a team can do to get more points – that end up in more points, getting points is not the goal here, doing the best building.  Some of the things you do actually get you a lot of points without a lot of energy.  The hardest building type to do well with is residential.  Certainly in New York, because the buildings – the high-rise multi-family residential buildings are poorly, poorly built, and why people accept this, for where they live, where they sleep, is beyond me.  Most buildings have what’s called a through-the-wall unit.  And to be honest with you, I’m not smart enough about Washington to know how these buildings are, but essentially it’s taking a window unit out of the window and sticking it under the window.  And it takes air in from the outside, and either cools it or heats it and blows it into the room.  And the filters on those systems are so awful that you might just as well have nothing.  So the new buildings – all the buildings at Battery Park City and the residential buildings that we’re working on have a central air delivery system.  And this is not the norm in typical residential buildings.  But we can filter the air to a much higher level, same – not exactly the same as we’re putting in this office building but pretty darn close, and give people the opportunity to live without asthma, to live without other kinds of respiratory problems. 

But cost is an issue.  The more we work at it, the more people that are doing it, the more it becomes the norm, the less the cost it’s going to be.  Air conditioning equipment is much more efficient than it used to be, the same with heating equipment.  There’s a whole bunch of products out there that are better.  And some gentleman asked about lighting.  Lighting is a third of the energy cost in New York City.  A third.  I think that it’s staggering the number of megawatts of power just to light things up.  We need some serious research in terms of how we provide lighting.  I’ve been told for a decade that LED is the answer.  I know what the L and the E and the D stand for, but I don’t know how it works.  All I know is that there’s a whole bunch of people working on it, and when they come up with the answer, it will make a big difference. 

Q:  I’m Bob Hershey.  I’m a consultant.  What are you doing for acoustics for your building?

MR. FOX:  In terms of the mechanical equipment that is – I’m only working on the base building – our team is just for the base building.  We are certainly isolating all the mechanical equipment so that there will be no structure-borne or airborne noise.  Having the under-floor air delivery system immediately makes it easier on the acoustics.  There’s another team that is working on all of the interiors.  We will have a two by two land ceiling that will – well, between the carpet and the ceiling, and some of the furniture systems that will have fabric rather than hard surfaces, I think we will provide a pretty good level of acoustics, but we’re not – we don’t have good control over the interiors.  Yes, sir.

Q:  Yes.  Hi, Scott Pugh with the Rocky Mountain Institute.  I think you said your building has a five megawatt gas powered power plant.  My question would be if the grid goes down, as it did in 2003, but the gas is still available, can you keep your building energized, and if not, what would it have taken to make it work that way?  Thank you.

MR. FOX:  If there’s a sad answer on this building – I’m sorry, your first name was Scott?

Q:  Right.

MR. FOX:  Scott just asked the really sad answer.  When we started this process, we could not get permission to do our power plant from the local utility.  And we could not – in New York City you can’t just decide to do this and make your own power.  So after some – one of our partners on most of our projects is the NRDC, Natural Resource Defense Council.  We enlisted their help with a state agency.  The state agency has talked to Con Edison at the local utility and finally after a year of struggle, we finally got Con Edison to agree to allow us to have this system, which feeds – the system feeds its power into the grid and the building takes its power out of the grid.  So we are producing and we are taking. 

There is in a number of municipalities and systems there is a device that if there is a blackout, takes this system and actually turns it around and lets it feed into the building.  And it is widely accepted all over the place.  Con Edison said no, we don’t believe that.  (Laughs.)  And we then fought for another year.  We started our design work in this – four years ago, just about four years ago today.  So for one year we fought just to get the system, another year we fought to get this synchronous switch that Con Ed didn’t believe would work. 

And finally the engineering was going ahead and we were making all kinds of space allocations and everything else for the system, so we stopped fighting at that point.  So the really sad new is that when there is a blackout this turbine goes down.  And instead of being able to keep this building going, we will have diesel fired generators like everybody else does, which we only expect to use in a very severe blackout.  But this is – it’s ridiculous.  And we would like some – we’d love it if some higher power would say to Con Edison, stop, or go.  (Laughter.)  Yes, sir.

Q:  I was very impressed with your slides, your viewgraphs.  Are they going to be available, Mitzi?  Are they going to be available on the web? 

MR. FOX:  Our client does not want us, at this point, to release them. 

Q:  I see.  Well, it’s a shame.

MR. FOX:  Let me tell you a story about that.  And I know I’m going to embarrass my wife.  In the fall of 2003 I was invited to Cornell to give a lecture for the students and I picked this project.  So unfortunately, my wife accompanies me on things like this, so off we go to Cornell, and I give my talk to the students, and afterwards I say how did it go?  And she looks at me says, you were awful.  (Laughs.)  And I said awful?  Well, you know, you’re a typical architect: you’re showing plants and you’re showing sections, and talking about these concepts and the graphics were just – it wasn’t this, it wasn’t this at all.  The graphics were just awful, she said.  Why don’t you hire Stephen Doyle, terrific graphic designer in New York?  Why don’t you hire Steven Doyle?  I’ll work with Stephen and we’ll try and use the right graphics to talk about the concepts that you’re talking about.  So it’s not me, it’s –

Q:  You know, it’s interesting.  I’ve been involved in a rather controversial area and just making even videos available it’s a nice advertisement.  And I don’t know, you might think about that.  It’s been very helpful for fostering communication.  I meant to say also I’m Scott Chuck (sp) from the Naval Research Laboratory.  Thanks.

MR. FOX:  Yes, the PBS has done – what’s it called, Bill?  PBS did a piece on green buildings and started in New York.  It’s been published a lot, actually.  It’s in this week’s Fortune?  No it’s in Business Week – this week’s Business Week. 

Yes, sir?

Q:  I’m Reginald Amory, from Morgan State University.  I’m chair of the department of civil engineering.  I have two questions: one, we have a very active civil engineering department and an institute for architecture and planning.  We work very closely together.  In fact, we will be moving into a building – one day in the future, anyway, but it’s been authorized by the state to design a building that will include transportations, civil engineering and architecture in one building – kind of an interesting combination.

MR. FOX: Very.

Q:  We think it will be innovative if we – the right architects obviously are involved with it, and we’ll see what happens.  It’s taken us four years to get to this particular point and if the governor decides or powers that be to take the project from the left hand and put it in the right hand, maybe we’ll get started and go to the next step.  But the building is estimated to be about maybe $59 million.  Perhaps a four- to six- or seven- or eight-year period would represent quite a change as far as the cost for greening the building, so over that time there might be some positives that occur. 

It’s been estimated that it would require about $4 million more over the $59 million to green the building.  Of course, we are all set for greening the building and the legislature doesn’t want to spend the $4 million.  So essentially it’s possible we might end up with a conventional building, where the architects and the engineers are involved in living in the same building. 

And I guess the question I have is the $4 million probably represents maybe a 6.5 or almost seven percent difference – differential.  Do you think – and I’m not putting you on the spot, but you see how much time has gone by and the technological advances that take place over that many years – where maybe it’s possible for the building to be greened at $2 million more as opposed to $4 million more.  I don’t know.  We’ll have to investigate it, I suppose, but that’s the sate of where we are at the present time. 

MR. FOX:  Well, I think it would be a little silly of me to agree with either number.  I would think you can do a pretty good building without spending a penny more, if you charge your architectural team.  And I applaud the whole idea of combining architecture, engineering and transportation.  There are very few schools that even – even that have the opportunity.  Some schools have the opportunity to make that mix and don’t.  But if you charge your architects and engineers to really work together, to figure out the fact that if they make a better exterior envelope, meaning that part of the envelope and that part of the envelope, that they can decrease the amount of the feeding air conditioning plant, if they do really good day lighting, if they do really good natural ventilation than other systems can be dramatically changed.  So to do a – I’ll go out on a limb a little bit – LEED certified, LEED silver building, you get a good team together and you’re going to get there for your $59 million.  To get higher than that may indeed cost you some more money, but I like to think in the 2 to 3 percent, and if 2 percent of $60 million is $1-2 million, so I’ll tell you what: give me an extra two and we’ll take you there.  (Laughter.)

Q:  At this point – that’s well taken – at this point –

MR. FOX:  Now, I will – let me – this is not meant to be a commercial plug.  But what Bill and the people from Rocky Mountain Institute have – when Bill was there, they started something called the green charrette.  And what the green charrette does -- and if it was only benefiting our Terrapin company that would not be fair, but Rocky Mountain simply does this extremely well-- that they gather a team of the right people, whether they are lighting designers, whether they’re landscape architects, whether they’re architects, mechanical engineers – a team of people that would be suitable for a project, bring them together with your in-house team, with whoever’s running it for you, and your architect and your engineers, and run a one-day, two-day workshop called a charrette, and at the end of that process have identified a clear path as to how to get there. 

And if the team dynamics start to form at that time – and I’ve been on a bunch of these with Bill, both when he was with Rocky Mountain Institute and as his partner.  When the team dynamics start to form, it is terrific.  And the projects that result from this – we worked on a project at Hackensack Medical Center, a little marine biology laboratory in Maine, a new city for Korea.  Scott can probably talk about three or four others that RMI has done.  That’s a really good way to go, and it’s very cost effective. 

Q:  I will also admit that I’m not exactly sure who came up with the $4 million.  I’m not exactly sure who did, but that’s what’s been floating around and might not be as accurate as it seems, but at this stage of the game all kinds of numbers get thrown around. 

My second question was this, if I may.  As a structural engineer I’m very much aware of BIM being used, BIM being processed as far as a method to use for many constructed structures at this present time.  And in your mind, to what extent was BIM used – you know, building information modeling used in the Four Times Square project?

MR. FOX:  You say building information modeling. 

Q:  Well, it’s just – you know, from the structural engineering student standpoint, and there a lot of things that have to be integrated: there are codes, so many different kind of codes, there’s the structural steel selection, the guaranteeing of the building fitting together properly – all these kinds of things are used in the BIM process and it’s being used to a great extent in many of the larger structures that are being designed in different part of the United States.  In particular let’s say – I’ll use a stadium – Soldier Field in Chicago and other big structures of that nature.  So I was just – that’s another way of course of saving money, too.  That building came in $15 million below budget and three months ahead of schedule, or something of that nature.  So it integrates the engineering parts, particularly the structure part which does constitute a reasonable portion of the building in terms of its costs.  So I was just interested – I’m probably answering my own question.  It probably was used.  If you use these other innovative things, it probably was used to a certain extent.  I was just interested in –

MR. FOX:  It may have been used by our engineering team.  I’m not familiar with the term.  I’m sorry. 

Q:  Okay. 

MR. FOX:  It sounds like it should be. 

Q:  Well, it’s out there.  But anyway, it will come your way.  Thanks very much.  Of course, I enjoyed your presentation very much.

MR. FOX:  Thank you.  One of the things that I did miss in terms of – someone asked it earlier.  Is there some additional value to these buildings?  Our clients do this because they want to build a better building.  And I’ve lived through four cycles in New York of great demand for architects and then no work at all; a great demand for architects and no work, and it follows with the real estate cycle.  When you get a downturn, companies move out, there’s the loss of the workforce and what I think the owners of the green building is going to find is that they will retain their tenants.  They will be able to – they rent them up faster, they rent for higher rents.  The rent’s now at one Bryan Park – there’re two floors left and they’re probably $140-$150 a square foot. 

So you can retain tenants, you can get higher rent and you’ve just got a better building.  Even if someone is going to build it to flip it, and I think that was your question.  Sure, build it, flip it, but you don’t – but generally if you’re going to flip it you rent it up first.  Right?  So you can rent it up faster and rent it up for more money and I think in a not too distant future you’re going to se an awful lot of proof, an awful lot of things being written that are going to document that that these are better building on the income side. 

MS. WERTHEIM:  If you want to ask questions you have to stand by the mike. 

Q:  Yes, sir.  David Comis, United States Navy.  Any of the buildings or some of the buildings in Germany that have been retrofitted have had glass and closures out at the outside and then using the airspace between the outer glass and the inner glass in order to go offset the heating cost.  Also, many of the buildings they put indoor atriums – multi-floor atriums.  Do your buildings use either one of those effects? 

And I guess the second question was would a full glass and steel structure – I’m thinking window cleaning is going to be (a), a major expense and (b), not that easy.  Do any of your calculations account for grit, grime or whatever reducing the amount of light coming on through or building up in order to go change the heat conductivity between the two? 

MR. FOX:  Well, let me – I can answer no to the second one, real fast.  We haven’t talked about that.  But early in the design phase of this project we have very actively involved clients, and one of our clients was in – I think it was in Germany – sent an e-mail and said, I’m standing in a construction site where they’re building a double wall building.  Why aren’t we doing that?  (Laughs.)  So we said why aren’t we doing that?  Well, part of it was that we knew from the get-go there was a huge budget expense in terms of New York City buildings to actually build a double wall.  But we looked at it for about a month and a half, did some energy modeling, and the climate in New York is significantly – it’s different enough from the climate in Germany that that system doesn’t work. 

But the problem we did face – and I alluded to it earlier and I didn’t address it – is how do you make an energy efficient building if it’s all glass?  And there is now – what’s wonderful is that there’s all kinds of really good glass these days.  The glass we’re using – it’s a double pane of glass and if this is the outside, the number one surface – one, two, three, four – on the number two surface we have a baked-on ceramic frit.  And where we have a spandrel panel, which is between the ceiling of one floor and the floor of another, we have a lot more of those ceramic – the little dots; they’re fairly close together.  When it hits the floor, they grade to nothing at 30 inches.  So there’s fairly dense and then they’re going to become more – become less and less dense and then there’s nothing at 30 inches.  And there’s clear glass up to 7.5 feet, and at 7.5 feet up to the ceiling which is two feet, there is another series of these dots in a very light layer.  It’s like the windshield of your car that tinted but you don’t really notice it, but it’s there and it grades from fairly intense up by the roof of the car down to almost nothing.  And that has saved us a tremendous amount of energy, because it’s actually reflecting light.  We also have a low e-glass, low emissivity. 

Yes?

Q:  Brad Hollomon, Institute for Defense and Homeland Security.  You mentioned planning a city in Korea, which basically raises the obvious question about applying this kind of approach to cities or clusters of buildings like military bases or something of that kind.  Could you tell us a little it about what experience you may have had with that and what you think the prospects are? 

MR. FOX:  Well, when we – when anyone starts to think about the urbanization rate in China, India, Korea and – the opportunity is staggering and it’s not just on the energy side, but it’s also on the water side, both potable water and sewage.  And what we tried to look at is all the different systems that could – that are necessary in a city: how do people move around, how do they get drinking water, what do they do with it, how do they – on the energy side, we looked first at how to reduce the demand.  That’s the number one – that’s where you start.  Use less energy and you need to create less energy. 

And we just look all those different systems and look at things like combining the energy source for an office building and a residential building and a hotel that had different times of day when energy is being consumed and one can create a fairly, a very, very efficient power plant that runs flat out 24/7 because you’ve got all these different uses.  People at night are using hot water and electricity in their apartment and there’s nothing happening in the office building, so –

Q:  Hello.  Philippe Chabot, Department Of Agriculture.  I’m going to – I’d ask you to comment a little further on the glass curtain and how that existing glass curtain, in terms of energy efficiency, stacks up to other building choices that you might have made. 

MR. FOX:  Well, the choice of the all-glass wall was not made on the energy side; it was made on the ability to light the space – to get a lot of daylight on the inside – and also for the ability of the people on the inside to look out and connect with nature.  So that was our number one concern.  Going back to Ken Lewis, attract and retain the best associates.  Then we looked at how do we make this system as good as we can get it.  And that was the use of the ceramic frit, which takes it from essentially a glass transparent wall to one that’s much more opaque.  Certainly, there are other buildings that haven’t used the ceramic frit that are real energy hogs; and there are other buildings, like Four Times Square, that has windows like this that don’t have the access to the daylight –  either daylight coming in or the view out.  They’re better in terms of energy, but nowhere near as good in terms of productivity. 

    Q:  Thank you.

    MS. WERTHEIM:  Bob, this has been absolutely fabulous.  I think we’ve all learned an enormous amount.  And thank you again from all of us for coming.

(END)

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