aTypical Joe: a gay New Yorker living in the rural South
Friday, April 14, 2006
Green office towers
Some of the green features in the new NYC Hearst Tower (link will come when it’s out from behind the TimesSelect wall):
The Hearst Tower lobby largely relies on the radiant floor for both cooling and heating. Tubes embedded in the floor pump hot water through the system, yielding heat that provides a comfort zone to about six feet above the floor. In the warmer months, cold water is pumped through to absorb the heat generated by the sun on the stone floor. Brandon Haw, a senior partner at Foster & Partners, likened the effect to entering a church on a hot day.
“All the stone has embodied the coolness,” he said. “This is a huge space - we don’t want to just throw loads of air into it.”
The building’s roof has been designed to collect rainwater, which will reduce the amount dumped into the city’s sewer system by 25 percent. Harvested in a 14,000-gallon reclamation tank in the basement, it will replace water lost to evaporation in the office air-conditioning system. It will also be fed into a special pumping system to irrigate plants and trees outside the building - and to serve “Ice Falls,” the lobby water sculpture.
RELATED: I compare the building I work in - the most ambitious modern architecture within a 40-mile radius - to the Hearst Tower.
