55 Battery Place, PS/IS 276

Cost: $72 million

It was only a matter of time before Lower Manhattan's Battery Park City, known for launching the greening of the city's construction landscape with flagship ultra-green residential towers, was going to need a place for its youngest residents. Battery Park City's foray into the education of the area's children, started last August, is a step or three beyond the typical New York public school.

Constructed, like most Battery Park City buildings, on piles on fill from the construction of the World Trade Center, the 125,000-sq-ft PS/IS 276 at 55 Battery Place will seat 900 kids in grades Pre-K through 8, as well as 75 special-needs students when it is completed in time for the 2010 school year. This is not the squat and clumsy box design typical of many of the decades-old New York City school facilities: instead, it rises eight stories, clad in three types of brick, as well as stone at the three-story base (as required by the Battery Park City Authority), and vertical fins for passive sun shading on floors five and six. While the height was driven by "tough" site and zoning requirements, says Daniel Heuberger, design principal at Dattner Architects, the project's lead architects, the result was a slender building that "speaks to daylight on all sides, a very efficient plan, and daylighting on the ends of corridors."

Oversized, "overspeed" elevators will take middle-school students to the top, where they will access the top two floors' classrooms, while the lower grades will occupy the bottom four floors. In addition to 40 classrooms, the building will also house a shared 4,500-sq-ft, 330-seat auditorium and basketball court on the lower levels, as well as a cafeteria, kitchen, library, and art classrooms on the fifth and sixth floors. The third floor will have a 10,000-sq-ft outdoor “playroof,” and an outdoor "multi-purpose space" will sit on the eighth.

"[The New York City School Construction Authority] has very strict requirements as far as efficiency goes, which means you have to have a double-loaded corridor on the floor. It was a challenge because of slenderness to fit in and conceal and integrate with classroom layouts the bracing for seismic loads," says Heuberger. "Because it's such a high tower (most mechanical equipment is on the roof), it has to go quite a distance. It was a challenge to fit everything into the building, but we did it without sacrificing any of the design standards of the rooms themselves."

The school, as is typical of Battery Park projects, is a marvel in green design: in addition to natural lighting reducing the need for overhead lamps inside corridors and classrooms, the building will have increased insulation on the exterior walls, high-efficiency plumbing that will reduce potable water use by 40 percent, and 80 percent of construction waste will be recycled. The most impressive feature, however, are the roof-mounted photovoltaic cells capable of generating 60kW of energy, or roughly one-third of what will be needed to light the school. The PV array, according to Heuberger, plays triple duty: generating power, screening the mechanicals, and providing a visible public sign of the school's sustainable features. Furthermore, Dattner incorporated digital readouts of the cells' performance inside the school's science classroom so the students can do historical comparative studies of the system's performance and integration into the school's power needs.

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The green elements are a combination of two sets of requirements. The first is by the Battery Park City Authority, which are geared toward residential projects and include a 30-percent energy performance improvement over the New York State requirements, and to that end the Authority is paying for both the construction and maintenance of the photovoltaics.

The project also falls under the requirements of the Green Schools Program, a set of standards designed in 2007 for the SCA – incidentally, by Dattner Architects – with origins in the Local Law 86 public construction projects requirements. As it’s a standard created to achieve design and environmental equity for schools city-wide, the PVs, for example, are not one of the requirements and the energy efficiency is supposed to be 20 percent better than the state's minimum. Due to this blend with the Battery Park City Authority, however, the school will be 27 percent more efficient than required by state.

Team List

Owner: School Construction Authority
Architect: Dattner Architects, New York
Contractor: Leon D. DeMatteis Construction, Elmont, NY