A revitalization of Brooklyn’s Boerum Hill neighborhood paved the way for the Alloy Block, Downtown, a mixed-use redevelopment that includes Brooklyn’s first all-electric residential tower. We’re providing architect/developer Alloy with sustainability consulting services for the ambitious project.
Plans for the residential tower, called 505 State Street, were based on three goals: to foster a connection to place, improve energy efficiency and design for future decarbonization. “Through the development process, we redefined the future of responsible building in Brooklyn,” says Jeffrey Sullivan, vice president of architecture at Alloy. “This was achieved through extensive collaboration among Alloy, Thornton Tomasetti’s sustainability team, city agencies and the local community.”
“Because we were aiming for an innovative approach, the entire project team came together from the start,” says Thornton Tomasetti Vice President Jose Rodriguez. We knew going in that electric heating technology was not yet commercially viable. We also knew electricity service to the area relied heavily on generation from natural gas, which produces greenhouse gas emissions and other pollutants. But ConEd had committed to building a zero-carbon electric grid by 2040, which let us look several moves ahead.
We worked with Alloy, Con Edison, the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority, and façade and MEP partners to understand what was possible and what measures we could evaluate for future implementation.
Jose Rodriguez, Thornton Tomasetti
We focused first on reducing the building’s energy loads, then on electrifying its systems to eliminate on-site fossil fuel usage. We modeled the impacts of thousands of inputs – including simulated façade-performance values, infiltration rates and ventilation-recovery effectiveness – to find the combination of variables that yielded the lowest heating load. Our process turned conventional energy modeling on its head by choosing an output aligned with our performance goals and working backwards to identify inputs to hit the target.