The Bank of America – Megastructure at One Bryant Park

The Bank of America Tower is a 54 storeyed $1,000,000,000 megaproject currently under construction at One Bryant Park in New York City, USA. Designed by Ar. Richard Cook of Cook+Fox Architects, this green megastructure is New York’s 2nd tallest and the 3rd tallest building of USA and is designed to be the most efficint and ecologically friendly buildings of the world. As its name indicates, Bank OfAmerica will be its anchor tenant.

The 54th storey of the building ends at 289mts, and a central spire runs all along the ht of the buildiing till 366 mts. Made basically of glass and steel, this building has 3 escalators, 53 lifts and yet claims to use only half the electricity as compared to other contemporary skyscrapers.

The building has employed various green technologies such as floor-to-ceiling insulating glass to restrict
heat and maximize natural light, and an automatic daylight dimming
system. The glass panels used in the facade has a light dotted pattern printed on them, invisible to naked eye from a distance, which restricts the infra-red heat radiations of sun while allowing visible light to enter, thus cutting daytime lighting expenses. Further, the building is designed in such a manner that no dark corners are left in it. The biggest problems of new york which rose with the rising skyscrapers is the increasing surface area of the city. With the construction of tall skyscrapers. the surface area of the city reciving sunlight also increases and hence the city temperature increases. When the day temp is 29 degrees in NY, the empire state building has a temp of 37 degs. Hence the air conditioning costs inc dramatically. But here, the building is recieves lesser amount of heat. Further, the building has a giant Air Filteration Plant at the 53rd floor. Air will enter the building only from the top and be cleaned of its impurities, half of which will be circulated in the building in a spiral manner, and rest will be ejected out for the city use, making the tower a giant air filter
for Midtown Manhattan.

The building is made largely of recycled material. Care has been taken that almost all of the material is bought fom within a 80 km range to cut the material transportan costs. Further all the steel used here is recycled from scrap metal, which is molten and removed of its impurities and then casted into giant steel columns. Also the Bank of America tower is constructed using a concrete mix containing slag, a byproduct of steel blast furnaces. The mixture used in the tower concrete contains 55% cement and 45% slag. The
use of slag cement reduces damage to the environment by decreasing the
amount of cement needed for the building, which in turn lowers the
amount of carbon dioxide (green house gas) produced through normal cement manufacturing, as well as imparts more strength to the concrete columns. The Bank Of America Tower alone prevented 53 milion tonnes of CO2 form ejecting out in the atmosphere.

The CO2 sensors present in the building will sense elevated amounts of CO2 in the building and alert the officials for necessary actions. Further, there are many terrace gardens and green gardens within the building itself which will serve as a meeting place for people as cafetarias and sitouts as well as purify the inner air of the building. The tower also features a greywater system, which captures every drop of rainwater and reuses it. There are giant water tanks in 4 intermediate floors and and a giant rainwater harvesting tank for this purpose. There are 54 giant water tanks, called ice batteries, 27 mts below the earth surface under the building which will use the night time earth’s coolness to freeze its water. This ice in the daytime will be given to the AC systems and will result in effective nonelectric air conditioning. The tower also has a 4.6-megawatt cogeneration plant, which will provide a part of the base-load energy requirements. This onsite power generation reduces the significant electrical transmission
losses that are typical of central power production plants.

Take another look at this building…

location of site :

(this last img had nothing to do with the site but i posted it because i found it really cute)

chrysler tower one bryant park empire state building

These days, its considered wise to spend more money on constructing green and to invest initially on green technologies. Spending initially on expensive treated glass and air ventilation and cooling systems increases the construction costs dramatically but makes the structure energy efficient for an entire lifetime.

Thus the owner in turn saves in the end. Also the govt. gives grants for these green const. The architect designed the building with the basic idea of reducing its operational costs by 50% and is successfull in doing so by inc the project const cost by 25%. In the end, the owner saves money, and the architect earns more name and more money… Of course, money is of prime intrest to most of us, isn’t it…