A plan to upgrade a cluster of nine unremarkable apartment
buildings in Brooklyn typically would not merit a second look. But this isn’t a
quick fix; the project, called Casa Pasiva, aims to be a new model for the
sustainable transformation of the city’s housing stock.
اضافة اعلان
Sleek new skyscrapers that incorporate the latest
energy-efficient building materials like mass timber may look impressive, but
when it comes to solving the climate crisis in New York, the real challenge
lies in the city’s decades-old structures.
More than 90 percent of the buildings in New York today will
still be standing in 2050, and nearly 70 percent of the city’s total carbon
emissions come from buildings. Taken together, these facts suggest that the
fate of those nine nondescript Brooklyn buildings, and others like them, is
essential to cutting emissions.
Instead of demolishing older buildings, owners and developers
are devising ways to retrofit them with the latest green technology.
Casa Pasiva, a $20 million retrofit project in the Bushwick
neighborhood, aims to be a pioneer. The developer behind the project is pushing
an aging collection of buildings to the cutting edge by essentially turning
them inside out, all without tenants needing to relocate. Interior pipes,
radiators and heating ducts will be removed or sealed, and a new facade on each
building will cover a new all-electric heating and cooling system.
The project is being overseen by the nonprofit RiseBoro
Community Partnership, which owns the structures. When Casa Pasiva is finished
next summer, the buildings will meet a strict passive house standard, a modern
building convention that substantially reduces heating and cooling costs,
thanks to their airtight exteriors. The fading brick and concrete walls of the
Casa Pasiva buildings will be buried under a white, sculptural surface that
will help slash energy costs by 80 percent, according to RiseBoro.
“Our mission is long-term affordability, and low energy use is a
stabilizing force,” said Ryan Cassidy, director of sustainability and
construction at RiseBoro. He estimates the retrofit project, which is the first
of its kind in New York, will cut energy costs by $180,000 a year. “It’s good
for the environment, but it’s also good for our budgets.”
Casa Pasiva received $1.8 million in financing from RetrofitNY,
a program funded by the New York State Energy Research & Development
Authority. The agency is investing about $30 million in RetrofitNY projects.
The effort to help kick-start the development of low-cost, scalable retrofit
technology and build a market for energy efficiency upgrades comes as strict
city and state laws trying to reduce the carbon emissions in buildings go into
effect.
A measure passed last year as part of the city’s Climate
Mobilization Act requires owners of structures 25,000 square feet or larger to
make often sizable cuts in carbon emissions starting in 2024 or pay substantial
fines. The legislation affects 50,000 of the city’s roughly 1 million
buildings, including a substantial number of residential buildings.
“There is a laser focus now on reducing carbon emissions from
the built environment in New York unlike ever before,” said John Mandyck, the
chief executive of Urban Green Council, a nonprofit advocacy group.
The council estimates that the cost of bringing all buildings in
New York into compliance with the law will reach $20 billion, creating a huge
market opportunity for contractors and trade unions and potentially 141,000
jobs, and fostering the development of new technologies and business models for
building upgrades.
Affordable-housing providers are exempt from the emissions
requirements until 2035, but a low-cost way to raise energy efficiency and cut
costs would be welcomed by owners looking for more financial stability, said
Jolie A. Milstein, president and chief executive of the New York State
Association for Affordable Housing, a trade group.
“Everyone is looking for new ways to upgrade the affordable
housing stock,” she said. “Our goal is to make everything carbon neutral.”
Casa Pasiva was the brainchild of architect Chris Benedict, a
longtime partner on passive house projects with RiseBoro. She drew inspiration
from Energiesprong, a Dutch process that uses standardized, premade building
panels with built-in heating and cooling systems to upgrade older buildings. In
the United States, and New York in particular, the wide variety of housing
types, as well as differing climates, makes the standardized Dutch approach
unfeasible.
Benedict had to design the Casa Pasiva system from the ground
up. Each of the 146 apartments will have a wall-mounted electric heater and air
conditioner connected to a system of ducts and refrigerant lines that snake up
the walls and eventually connect to an energy recovery ventilator, a rooftop
machine that purifies and circulates air.
The new facade, layered up to eight inches thick atop the
existing exterior, will consist of a barrier to prevent airflow; rigid
insulation panels; stucco; and a self-cleaning finish, Lotusan, designed to
whisk away water by mimicking lotus leaves. Benedict successfully lobbied for a
change to the city’s building code to allow additional exterior cladding.
“When I first looked at how to design the wall, it was like a
big puzzle,” she said.
Tenant benefits go beyond energy savings. The facade is thicker,
airtight and watertight, which means improved air quality — it’s constantly
recirculated because of the tight external envelope — less noise from the
outside and fewer pest and mold issues. Electric induction stovetops will cut
interior air pollution, and the apartments will gain extra space from the
removal of radiators.
The incoming administration of President-elect Joe Biden has
made clean-energy retrofit projects a centerpiece of its $2 trillion climate
plan, with a goal of retrofitting 4 million buildings in four years. But even
that aggressive pace wouldn’t curb emissions enough to meet the goal of the
Paris climate agreement to hold temperature increases under 1.5 degrees
Celsius, said Martha Campbell, buildings principal at the Rocky Mountain
Institute, an organization in Colorado focused on sustainability across the
globe.
The nation would need to retrofit 3 million homes a year to
reach the carbon mitigation goals of the Paris agreement, she said. To give a
sense of the labor and scale of such a feat, about 900,000 new homes a year are
built in the United States.
The Casa Pasiva approach is one of many that builders and
engineers are examining through larger efforts like the Advance Building
Construction Collaborative, which Campbell called “an opportunity to address
deferred maintenance issues without digging deep into those buildings.”
“We need to get 100 more
projects underway and 100 more Chris Benedicts working on them,” Campbell said.
.jpg)
.jpg)
