Contact: Allan Chen, [email protected]

As their new headquarters, the New York Times Company will soon build a 52-story glass tower near Times Square.

Soon the venerable New York Times will have a new home in the heart of Manhattan, its first new headquarters office building since the current one was completed in 1913. The transparent glass tower, 52 stories high, will overlook the Times Square Redevelopment area on Eighth Avenue between Fortieth and Forty-first Streets.

Early in 2003, a group of visitors from the New York Times Company and its design and engineering contractors paid a visit to Berkeley Lab’s Environmental Energy Technologies Division (EETD) to talk about making buildings energy-efficient, comfortable, and productive places to work. They spent a day learning about the Lab’s research in commercial-buildings energy efficiency, glazing, daylighting, lighting, and thermal comfort from EETD’s Stephen Selkowitz, Mary Ann Piette, Francis Rubinstein, Eleanor Lee, and others. As a result of that visit, the New York Times Company and Berkeley Lab’s EETD are beginning a cooperative research project to test new technologies to increase the energy-efficiency of the new building and to improve the indoor environment for the comfort of its occupants.

As a major building owner, the Times found it difficult to specify with confidence a cost-effective, fully integrated glazing (window) and lighting control system. Berkeley Lab’s Building Technologies staff has been researching these topics for several years with Department of Energy and California Energy Commission support. The new Times building is an opportunity to extend and apply Berkeley Lab’s prior research, making available more efficient and cost-effective systems not only to the Times Company but to other owners and design teams.

The research focuses on integrated technologies to reduce electric lighting energy use through daylighting, while controlling glare and cooling loads in this highly glazed building. Researchers are testing alternative hardware and control solutions in a newly constructed, 4,500 square foot mockup of a portion of the building.

The research program will not only quantify performance alternatives, but will provide the New York Times Company with critical performance information so that it can publish a procurement specification for the technology solutions for the entire building. The project is being funded by the New York Times Company and the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority, with costs shared by the U.S. Department of Energy and the California Energy Commission.

Pushing the daylighting envelope

“We’ve known since the 1970s that daylighting can reduce lighting energy use,” says Building Technologies Department Head Stephen Selkowitz. “But the mere use of large glass areas is not in itself a guarantee that energy savings or comfort will be achieved, because there are so many trade-offs involved.”

Selkowitz notes that “it’s been difficult to make as much progress in the use of daylighting as we have in other areas of lighting and glazing technology for a variety of reasons. For one, daylighting requires a high level of system integration. Designers have to design the building from the start to incorporate daylight into office spaces, there has to be a flexible and responsive control strategy to lower or turn off electric lights when daylight is available, and visual and thermal comfort must be maintained at all times.”

Researchers in Berkeley Lab’s Environmental Energy Technologies Division have long studied daylighting as a means to more efficient interior lighting.

Adds Selkowitz, “The cost of components for successful daylighting can be high, like dimmable electronic ballasts” — which control fluorescent lights — “and the systems with their sensors and controls require careful calibration after they are installed, something that is not done very often in buildings today.”

Berkeley Lab research suggests that proper daylighting can reduce perimeter-zone lighting energy by as much as 60 to 70 percent of the annual electric lighting energy with additional reductions in electric demand. Overall building energy use can be reduced by 10 to 30 percent compared to a similar nondaylit building, depending on such factors as the fraction of total building area that can be effectively daylit. Additional savings come from reducing building air conditioning and heating loads through the selection of efficient glazings and automatic shading.

“The project will contribute to Berkeley Lab’s longer term energy efficiency research goals in several ways,” says Selkowitz. “Simulation and field testing will provide a measured database of performance quantifying the benefits of an optimized solution for this building’s design. The project will include a calibration and commissioning task, which will help lower costs and improve the operation of the installed systems.”

Selkowitz also points to the involvement of numerous manufacturers in the field test program, which will “directly involve the manufacturers with the design integration and calibration strategies. And finally, the very large procurement of an integrated daylighting system based on open, performance-based specifications should help move the market towards greater availability and lower costs for these energy-saving building systems.”

The building as a contribution to civic life

When the New York Times Company decided to erect a new building, creating a comfortable working environment for its employees was one of its highest priorities, along with energy-efficiency. The building was designed to have transparency, both to bring in the daylight, and to serve as a reminder of the mission of the newspaper: providing information “transparency” about the civic life of the nation and the city. To help create a connection to the community, the building will have an auditorium at the ground floor for civic and cultural events. The newsroom will occupy floors two through seven.

Low-emissivity glass screened by ceramic tubes will reduce the building’s cooling loads.

An unusual feature of the building, one more common in Europe than in U.S., will be its fully glazed curtain wall. Thin horizontal ceramic tubes placed on a steel framework one and a half feet in front of the glass will screen the double glazed, spectrally selective, low-emissivity, full-height glass wall around the building, thus reducing the building’s cooling loads. (Low-emissivity glass is an energy-efficient material that helps reduce heating and cooling use.) The ceramic tubes provide an aesthetic bonus, taking on the changing color of the sky during the course of the day as light diffuses through them from different angles. Above the top of the building, the screen of tubes becomes less dense, and its lace-like appearance will permit a view of roof garden foliage.

The building will unite most of the 2,500 Manhattan-based employees of the Times Company, which currently has offices at seven locations in New York City. “This building is designed from the ground up to reinforce the values of the New York Times Company,” said Michael Golden, vice chairman of the Times Company, when the plan was announced late in 2002. “The open plan and ease of communication, both vertically and horizontally, will enhance collaboration. Our new physical environment will improve the way we work, which is the highest calling of architecture.”

The building was designed by architect Renzo Piano, a winner of the prestigious Pritzker Prize in 1998, in collaboration with Fox & Fowle Architects. Construction will start later in 2004, and its expected completion date is mid-2006.

Piano is well-known for his design of the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, Osaka’s Kansai International Airport, and Berlin’s Potsdamer Platz, among many others. Fox & Fowle received a National Honor Award for Design from the American Institute of Architects in 2000 for their design of the Condé Nast Building at 4 Times Square, which emphasizes state-of-the-art energy efficiency and other environmentally responsible features.

A testbed for advanced daylighting

The transparent design of the New York Times building not only brings in daylight; it symbolizes the newspaper’s mission to shed light on the life of the city and the nation.

The New York Times Company’s engineering staff was seeking a set of integrated technologies that could effectively dim electric lighting and automatically deploy shading when appropriate, to take advantage of daylight benefits while providing comfort. They were unable to find a system on the market that they believed would meet their requirements.

David Thurm, Real Estate Vice President for the New York Times Company, says, “We were excited to find that LBNL’s prior work was relevant to our project. As an owner/operator, our primary interest is ensuring that the working environment in our building meets the comfort needs of our employees. The solutions we are developing in the mockup will verify that the control systems and operating strategies will function effectively and provide the productive work environment needed by our employees under a wide range of climate conditions.”

Selkowitz notes that “the New York Times, as a motivated and concerned owner, has provided us with a great opportunity to advance the use of daylighting as an energy efficiency strategy. In partnership with our team, lead by Eleanor Lee, they designed and have just completed a 4,500 square-foot south and west quadrant of one floor of the building on the grounds of their printing plant in College Point, New York. This full size mockup will allow us to demonstrate and test the key hardware, calibration and operational controls issues, allowing the team to specify a technological solution that meets both comfort and energy-saving goals.”

Although it was originally intended to be a conventional furniture mockup in a dark warehouse, says Selkowitz, with its glass curtain wall and exterior shading “the test structure has become a working daylighting laboratory, complete with lighting controls and interior automated shading, as well as furniture and interior finishes, to solve a design challenge that has eluded building owners throughout the country.”

One floor of the New York Times Company’s printing plant in College Point, New York has been modified as a fully equipped, 4,500-square-foot mockup of the planned new building’s interior.

After the Times had offered to cover the cost of constructing the outdoor mockup, the Berkeley Lab/Times team successfully competed in a solicitation from the New York State Energy Research and Development Administration for the additional funding required to carry out its extensive instrumentation and monitoring and the associated analysis. The Department of Energy and the California Energy Commission also provided a share of the costs, as did the hardware vendors, making this a national partnership.

Berkeley Lab will direct the 12-month, state-of-the-art performance evaluation in the testbed, and working with the Times Company will use project results to develop performance specifications, which should stimulate the building industry to provide lower cost technologies and systems that meet the needs of the building. Using this approach, the industry’s experience with the Times building will help proliferate daylighting to other buildings.

“We think that demonstrating these technologies in a landmark building will gain them far more attention among manufacturers and specifiers than through more conventional lab-based research,” says Selkowitz.

The New York Times Company, its architecture and engineering firms, and a Berkeley Lab team led by Eleanor Lee—consisting of Selkowitz, Francis Rubinstein, Dennis Dibartolomeo, Christian Kohler, Robert Clear, Greg Debra Ward, Judy Lai, David Watson, Howdy Goudey, Robin Mitchell, and Danny Fuller—have been working together to develop the R&D project plan and launch the project. They have held a series of design “charrettes” on the East and West Coasts and meetings with the building-supply industry. (Charrette, French for cart, is a term that originated among architecture students at the École des Beaux Arts, slang for piling on the work to meet project deadlines.)

Instruments in the mockup facility gauge the effectiveness of lighting controls, automated shading, furniture designs, and even interior finishes for the working environment of the New York Times building to come.

The mockup facility and final calibration of the instrumentation are now complete. Testing began on schedule on December 21, the winter solstice. While most of Berkeley Lab celebrated the holidays at home, Lee and her team were anxiously monitoring the data flow from the mockup. Watch the pages of Science Beat for the test results as they become available.

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