Sometimes good practice and economic necessity overlap. Our office is in a Class B office building for several reasons, with rent rates and the fact that we only need a couple of thousand square feet at the top of the list. In general, Class B spaces in Manhattan are in older buildings. Our office is in a 1905 building that was a Class A building when built but has floors smaller than top-tier tenants are now looking for.
What a lot of Class B buildings, including ours, have is old-fashioned infrastructure. We have steam radiators for heat, and operable windows that we use for ventilation quite often, and heavy masonry walls that serve as thermal mass to reduce the heating and cooling requirements for the interior. Finally, instead of small HVAC units serving each office, we have a building-wide heating plant and floor-wide air-conditioning units that benefit from efficiencies of scale. In other words, even though these buildings weren’t originally designed to be energy efficient, they have some features that are inherently energy efficient.
We moved to this office because we like the building and the space we took fit our needs. The fact that it is relatively energy efficient because if is the kind of old building that is at the center of our practice is a happy coincidence, but one that helps us with our goals and therefore our alignment with the goals of the Best for NYC Challenge.
