THE GREEN APPLE (Video Transcript) PBS

BRAD PITT:
They use 40% of the world's energy, emit 50% of its greenhouse gases.

"They" are not the cars we drive. "They" are the buildings where we work, live, and grow.
Buildings designed with an unconscious disregard for nature.

Adopting sustainable alternatives is not only a matter of progress, it's a matter of survival.

Design: e2, the economies of being environmentally conscious.

TITLE: E2, THE ECONOMICS OF BEING ENVIRONMENTALLY CONSCIOUS

BEGIN EPISODE

BRAD PITT:
There.
What do you see? A failed experiment in overcrowding? Massive pollution? All that represents
an ecological disaster?

In reality, could you be looking at one of the most efficient ecosystems in the world? Could
the greyest city in America actually be one of greenest?

Could reality, in fact, be a matter of perception?

DAVID OWEN:
When people look at Manhattan, even when New Yorkers look at Manhattan, they see an
environmental nightmare. They see concrete and big buildings and loud noises and diesel
fumes and garbage. If you measure New York City by the square foot, no place in America
spews out more greenhouse gases or more automobile exhaust or more trash. But that's the
wrong way to look at it. If you look at the city per capita or by residence, New Yorkers pollute
far less than anybody else, they use far less energy.

CAROL WILLIS:
New York, if it were the 51st state would be the most energy efficient state but it would be
the 12th most populous state. The community of crowding provides a kind of separation from
the individualization of consumption that you find in the rest of the United States. Manhattan,
especially with its great density of population both live and work, where people can walk to
work, they can bicycle to work as I do. Or more importantly for the great mass of people, they
take public transportation.

DAVID OWEN:
One of the first things that happened to my wife and me when we moved to the country from
the city was we both gained weight. The reason was that in the city we walked all the time. In
New York City walking is a major form of transportation. It's maybe the most important form
of transportation. Once you get outside the city, you really can't walk anymore even if you
wanted to. I can walk to the post office about a ½ mile up the road. And I can walk to the
library but the reality is to live in an environment like this, you pretty much have to live in
your car.

PAUL GOLDBERGER:
The city is in many ways the greatest energy saving device man's ever created. There's no
better model for energy conservation than putting people close together.

DAVID OWEN:
It's a thriving community of communities, people are out walking around, bumping into
people, talking. They're not sealed up in their car.
PAUL GOLDBERGER:
Los Angeles, Atlanta, Houston, those are just places in which people drive to skyscrapers,
instead of driving to suburban office parks. And then park their cars in garages and then
drive home again. So there's not that much difference in energy consumption in places like
that. So it's not just the city that's the good model for energy conservation, it's the older,
denser city, the city that was created before the 20th Century. Once a city was made to
accommodate to the automobile, it looses its advantage from the standpoint of energy
conservation.

BRAD PITT:
The average American spends almost two hours a day in a car. A waste of energy, right? But
what about the buildings that we spend the rest of our time in?

MICHAEL MCDONOUGH:
Building and operating buildings in the United States, for example, is responsible for 40% or
more of all energy consumption.

PAUL GOLDBERGER:
As a total of all the buildings we have in this country, they use more energy than cars. Um,
it's not as obvious but if you think about the cost of heating and cooling buildings, and how
many of them we have, and then also think of the cost of manufacturing buildings and all the
materials that go into them. It's enormous.

DAVID OWEN:
This house back there is heated by an oil furnace. It's a 200 year old house. It's a recycled
house, or it's a house that has been carefully re-used for more than two centuries. But
because it is, it's not very efficient. The biggest problem that we face is that every day, we,
Americans consume more than 800 million gallons of oil, one way or another.

CAROL WILLIS:
Everything in the building industry depends on the larger economy. Uh, our present day
larger economy depends very much on energy resources. And I think that we're at a point
now where, um, the cost of energy is a real consideration, that keeps green principals
foremost in everyone's mind.

BRAD PITT:
Okay. So we have an energy problem. That we know. And yet we still need more energy. For
new buildings, new offices, new homes. So where are the new ideas?

SUSAN SZENASY:
I think 4 Times Square represents a really important breakthrough. It was the first building
that really said that they are going to make an attempt at bringing in green technologies into
a skyscraper form.

DOUGLAS DURST:
Well, we certainly were not intending to loose money on the building. At 4 Times Square, we
were motivated by our interest in demonstrating that there was a better way to build
buildings.

PAUL GOLDBERGER:
4 Times Square was an important beginning; it doesn't get all the way by any means. But it
did a few things that buildings before it had not done. It took advantage of the latest
materials, the latest technologies, it has a number of internal features such as, you know,
recycling waste, air, and uh allowing energy to be sort of pumped back through the building
in an efficient way.

It was built by a major developer, Douglas Durst. He drives a Toyota Prius, he really does
care about this stuff. And I think the mere fact of a major New York real estate developer
signing on to the green initiative, so to speak, saying "OK, you know, I'm not gonna dismiss
this as just a bunch of nonsense thrown at us by treehuggers that business men have a
responsibility to reject." Instead, he says "you know what? I think they're right and let me see
how far we can take a skyscraper."
DOUGLAS DURST:
In building 4 Times Square, we realized that this was not just an environmental approach but
it was an intelligent approach and a much better way to build buildings. And that's why
everything we've done since then has been.uh.we don't really call it environmental anymore,
we call it a uh smarter, more intelligent way to build.

BRAD PITT:
Whether you call it environmental or smarter, it's contagious. From 4 Times Square to the
new Bank of America building at 1 Bryant Park.

BOB FOX:
When the Dursts started talking to The Bank of America, to put their New York headquarters
on the adjacent site, they said our starting point is 4 Times Square. We're gonna take all of
the knowledge of 4 Times Square and make it better.

RICK COOK:
We're on the corner of 6th Avenue and 43rd Street and 42nd Street on the site of The Bank of
America tower at 1 Bryant Park. The site behind me is just over two acres in size, the largest
construction site in midtown Manhattan. And, uh, we're looking at this enormous excavation
site and foundation that will be the site of what we hope to be the greenest skyscraper in
America.

BOB FOX:
Looking among the neighboring buildings, we have indeed created a much taller building that
will have terrific views of both the East River and the Hudson River, Central Park and in fact it
will have a pretty good view of the Atlantic Ocean. 4 Times Square is very prominent in the
foreground at this point and you can now see this very glassy, crystalline form standing by
itself. Between the two buildings is about 200 feet, and the area in between is going to be
planted as a green roof so that the people in both buildings will be able to look out and see
this beautiful planted area.

PAUL GOLDBERGER:
It wasn't that long ago that glass was an energy-inefficient building material. And people
said, oh you know these modern glass skyscrapers, they just are terrible, they're the worst
things you can do we can't have so much glass. Well, the technology of glass has continued
to improve and improve and improve to the point where now glass is not significantly
different from masonry.

RICK COOK & BOB FOX:

COOK: We actually have the ability to silkscreen on glass, tiny ceramic dots called "frit" which
allow us to almost create a pigment on the glass that allow us to see out and the sun to be
reflected back out and dramatically increasing the solar heat gain coefficient while at the
same time allowing the clearest view out to the outdoor environment.

SUSAN SZENASY:
The secret is right now the technology and how that's helping to soup up those old solutions,
and really create the new poetry of building.

BRAD PITT:
What would Walt Whitman write? Would he say, perhaps, that a new poetry of buildings is
born of a deeper beauty, not merely of sleek design, but rather a part of its DNA? Ingrained in
the materials, its source, its inner workings, possessing an unseen soul? Would the poet in
him suggest that a building can do more than stand, that in its own way, it can live and
contribute?

RICK COOK:
Some of the things that are really exciting right now are ideas that seemed a little bit crazy
at the time - that people had proposed. One of these is uh blast furnace slag in the concrete.
For every 1 ton of cement that we use in concrete, 1 ton of CO2 is produced out in the
atmosphere. All these concrete walls and all the concrete in this entire building will be made
with 45% blast furnace slag. It means that we're substituting 45% of the cement with blast
furnace slag, producing no CO2. On a project of this scale it means that we will reduce the
CO2 production into the atmosphere by the making of this building, by 56,250 tons of CO2
production.

RICK COOK & BOB FOX:

FOX: We decided on this project that we would capture all of the storm water that is gonna
hit this site. We also, in the design phase of the foundation of the building, uh, asked our
geotechnical engineer what are we gonna do about ground water? Water that's found in the
rock fissures. And his answer was, we would need 3 sub pumps working pretty much around
the clock and they would be pumping hundreds of gallons of water per minute out of the
building and in his words, into the storm system. We said "no, no, we're not gonna do that.
We're gonna take the water and we're gonna pump it into our storage system and we're
gonna use it. We're gonna add to that water from the steam condensate and water from the
air conditioning system and we're gonna treat it slightly and we're gonna use it to flush
toilets and for our cooling tower makeup."

This is resulting in approximately a 50% decrease in the amount of potable water that this
building will use, and the city of New York, the city Department of Environmental Protection
which regulates water use, uh, liked this system so much that they're giving our clients a
25% reduction in the cost of water. So we're using ½ the water, and for that ½ the water
they're paying only 75% of what other people are paying.

DOUGLAS DURST:
The recycling shoots, we feel that we got a pay back within 5 years, which is what we look for
on a typical investment, is a 5-year payback.

BRAD PITT:
Building green seems to be another way of saying building smarter. So why aren't more
people doing it?

MICHAEL MCDONOUGH:
There's something very specific in the American economy, relative to the way buildings are
built, are marketed and sold. And that is, in the United States, if you build a building, let's say
you build a high-rise, the chances are, you're going to lease it to someone or you're going to
re-sell it. The thought process is not tied to a larger collective social mission, it's tied to tax
policy and limited operating costs and low initial cost of the building.

In Europe, they tend to look at building over a 50-year period. What is the building gonna
cost initially is part of the equation but what is it going to cost to operate, keep in repair,
keep online and if you need to take it down, to disassemble - over a 50-year period. It's
similar in Japan. In the United States.12 months.

SUSAN SZENASY:
What's going to be interesting about these buildings, these, from the Bank of America
building to the Foster building to all of the ones that are coming up right now, is how we can
test if they are truly sustainable. I think they're saying the right things and they have the
features designed into them and engineered into them. So I think it's going to be a test of
time in first of all how people use them.

DOUGLAS DURST:
A building is meant to be occupied and have people working in it so to make it as efficient as,
the building itself as efficient as possible means to make the people working in it as efficient
as possible.

CAROL WILLIS:
The very highest cost of every operative building is the people cost inside. And so if you look
at the bottom line of building, keeping people comfortable and happy, whose salaries can be
more than 200 times the cost of energy per unit in the operation of the building, when you
look at that picture holistically, not just of what the building costs but what um the lives cost
inside, to keep safe, to keep comfortable, to keep happy um with their work so that they have
a commitment to the place that they work, the company they work and the city where they
live. Those are the kinds of equations that I think argue for sustainability.
BRAD PITT:
Imagine - just imagine - buildings that make people feel better. Inside and out.

RICK COOK:
4 Times Square had 85% particulate filtration. So it takes air in, it filters 85% of the
particulate matter in the air and circulates it through the building and then ultimately
exhausts it. At 1 Bryant Park, we'll have 95% particulate filtration, we'll also have gas phase
filters. So between these 2 buildings, they'll act like 2 giant skyscraper air filters in the middle
of midtown. The air coming out of the buildings is cleaner than the air coming in.

SUSAN SZENASY:
Do you like to breathe clean air? Who's gonna say no? Do you like your water to be potable
and clean and healthy? Do you like your food to be nourishing and fresh and healthy? If the
answers are yes to those questions then I think we have defined sustainability, we have
defined human life in the 21st Century basically.

RICK COOK:
How do we make this happen? Is it the government? Is it private sector? The answer is yes,
both, everybody. We all have a responsibility. That think globally act locally that's over used
so much, it's real, we all must take action. Government impact down at Battery Park City -
The Green Guidelines. That's an administration who said if you want to build on this
government-owned land, you must build green. It took off like crazy, huge success.
Unbelievable.

CAROL WILLIS:
Just after 2001 and the fall of the Trade Center towers, as challenged as this immediate
neighborhood was just across the street from the ground zero site, um a new building, The
Solaire, broke ground and has grown up in the last 3 or 4 years to be the first residential
green apartment house not only in New York but in America.

RAFAEL PELLI:
Battery Park City decided to make all future development in Battery Park City which is gonna
amount to 4 ½ million square feet which is the size of a lot of small downtowns, all of those
buildings to be under very ambitious environmental guidelines.

SUSAN SZENASY:
Rafael Pelli is very important in all of this. First of all, he trained himself. He's an architect but
he was not taught sustainable design in architecture. This was not his upbringing, it is not his
father's upbringing so, he's in his father's office which gets a lot of commissions. He could
have built unsustainably forever. It didn't, he didn't have to do this.

RAFAEL PELLI:
We were the guinea pigs but there was no question whether to do these things. If you're
gonna spend weeks discussing whether to be trying to achieve these goals, you've lost a big
part of your most precious resource, which is time. I had been interested in these issues for
years, had been pursuing learning about them but in more academic environments of
conferences and symposiums and implementing some ideas in our building but this is full
immersion. And we went from trying to apply what we knew in an academic sense to really
trying to apply it in a building, which is a very different kind of experience.

One of the first things we had to do when we designed The Solaire was re-examine and to
some extent re-design the design process itself. Alongside with the engineers, starting at the
day 1, we were reacting as much to their studies about different ways to approach the
building as it was them responding to us. That was the biggest lesson for us in The Solaire
was the ability collectively to discuss and find solutions for very tricky issues across so many
different fields.

We're standing on the roof of The Solaire - this is the upper roof - we have, this is also a
what's called a green roof which has a soil mixture on top of which is a ground cover called
sedum which serves to warm and insulate the building in the winter and it's a way to eject
heat in the summertime because of the evapo-transpiration of the water that's built up in the
roof.
Directly behind us is The Verdisian, which is the second building we have designed for the
same developer, The Albanese Group, with much of the same design team. The building,
which is nearing completion, many of the same strategies, in that we've employed a micro-
turbine to do some co-generation. It's a slightly different systems approach than some of the
things we did here. And we have collaborated with a landscape designer who's designing the
park to the South of us, who proposed heliostats, which are these large mirrors which are on
computer tracking devices so that they can reflect the sunlight directly into a park which
would otherwise see very little sunlight because it's gonna be surrounded by a future
building.

One of the advantages of a green roof is that when it's raining, like it is right now, the soil on
the roof retains a lot of the water. In hot weather, it will then evaporate a lot of it back but
the main impact is you don't have to build a stormwater retention tank. In our case we were
able to downsize it dramatically. We're looking at other projects now where we may be able
to eliminate it all together because the soil in effect is retaining all the storm water.

BRAD PITT:
So it's simple, right? Build smarter. Build greener. Build with the future in mind. But, there's
always a but.Money. Building smarter costs more. Doesn't it?

RAFAEL PELLI:
One of the concerns in the development community at large when Battery Park City created
these requirements to do buildings with these environmental criteria was that they would be
more costly and that they wouldn't be able to realize those cost increases in increased rents,
or increased sales. My understanding is that The Solaire leased out in record time and that
they realized close to a 5% premium. They calculated they needed about a 3% premium in
rents to amortize the additional costs to build a green building and they feel like they've
gotten that and then some. So it has proven not only that you can build all these things in
New York, for which there was some question, but that you can realize a profit doing it. And
that it provides an economic model for other developers not only in Battery Park City but in
the private sector to realize that there's a market for this and that there's a willingness for
that market to pay more.

PAUL GOLDBERGER:
When something becomes a marketing trend, that's a key to the fact that it taps into some
deeper desire in society, I think. So, you know, nothing is only a marketing trend. Marketing
trends may appear superficial but they always happen because they connect to something
deeper.

BRAD PITT:
What is that deeper thing? For you, for me. Maybe it's the desire to be connected. To make a
difference, to make the world, in some way, any way, better. And the way to change our
reality, is to change our perceptions. And the perception that sustainability is out of our
reach, is something we can no longer afford.

SUSAN SZENSAY:
There's no big change that occurs without the economy being behind it, without actually all
of the United States government being behind it. I think nothing big has happened without
those two. And I think we really have to think about how that can happen.

PAUL GOLDBERGER:
I think people are realizing a couple of things. First they're realizing that the resources of the
earth are finite and that we're gonna run out of stuff at the rate population is growing and
even more important than the actual growth of population at the rate that a kind of energy
consumption is growing.

SUSAN SZENASY:
What's our culture saying about us and how do we deal with this? And we know we want to
live well, we know we want goods around us, we know we love shopping. How do we turn this
culture into something that is sustainable? And that's a huge job.

RICK COOK:
We are 4.6% of the world's population and we consume over 25% of the world's resources. If
we do the math that the developing nations want the same standards that we have set, it
doesn't work. We must change the way we do things, we simply must.

END OF EPISODE