Nelligan White Architects will be presenting at Greenbuild 2017!

Nelligan White Architects will be presenting at Greenbuild 2017! Across the globe our society faces no bigger challenge than the project of adapting to the changing climate. Manmade sources of elevated atmospheric carbon dioxide levels are causing changes to global and regional climate patterns and raising sea levels. How as a society can we advance resilient goals change given the economic, regulatory, and political challenges to broad change?

While governments and citizens grapple with strategies to reduce man’s contribution to the problem in order to decelerate the trend, it’s incumbent on localities – nations, cities and governing agencies – to adapt to a changing reality. At the Baruch Houses in Manhattan a team of architects, engineers, policy and finance professionals is leading the way with a comprehensive resilience project which aims to address rising sea levels and other challenges facing the Atlantic coast.

The New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA) is one of the largest institutional owner of properties affected by the 2012 Hurricane Sandy in the country. Baruch Houses is their largest housing development in Manhattan; 29 acres with 18 buildings and over 5800 residents. They lost electricity and heat for two weeks after the storm, and other basic services for nearly a month. The funding made available by the federal government in response to the damage wrought by this historic storm has made possible large-scale long-term resilience planning. The scope of work at Baruch Houses is big enough to force the team to grapple with most of the design, cost benefit, and regulatory issues that affect this kind of work. At the same time it’s small enough to get out ahead of other efforts such as the Rebuild By Design projects.

Participants in this session will get an introduction to NYCHA, their Office of Recovery and Resilience, the Sandy Program Unit portfolio, and information on the funding environment from the Director of Recovery and Resilience at NYCHA. Participants will get a summary of the Baruch House project from a principal of Nelligan White Architects (lead consultant), followed by an in depth discussion of two aspects of the project: the choice to replace the existing heating plant with utility provided steam presented by a senior engineer at Arup, and the technical/regulatory challenges associated with the floodwall incorporated into this project, as presented by a principal at Langan.

We hope to see you there. Please see the link for event details: greenbuildexpo.com