Buildings- One Bryant Park

The Bank of America Tower at One Bryant Park in New York City is a $1 billion skyscraper project currently undergoing construction, on the west side of Sixth Avenue, between 42nd and 43rd Street, opposite Bryant Park in Midtown Manhattan. It has been designed by Cook+Fox Architects to be one of the most highly efficient and ecologically friendly buildings in the world. Midtown Manhattan

The tower has an architectural spire that is 1200 ft (366 m) tall. The building will be 54 stories high and will have approximately 2.1 million square feet (195,000 m²) of office space. Upon the placement of its spire in December 2007, the tower has become the second tallest building in NYC, after the Empire State Building. The building will have three escalators and a total of 53 elevators – 52 to serve the offices and one leading to the transit mezzanine below ground.

Environmental Features

The design of the building will make it environmentally friendly, using technologies such as floor-to-ceiling insulating glass to contain heat and maximize natural light, and an automatic daylight dimming system. The tower also features a greywater system, which captures rainwater and reuses it. Bank of America also states that the building will be made largely of recycled and recyclable materials. Air entering the building will be filtered, as is common, but the air exhausted will be cleaned as well, making the tower a giant air filter for Midtown Manhattan. Bank of America Tower is the first skyscraper designed to attain a Platinum LEED Certification.
The Bank of America tower is constructed using a concrete manufactured with slag, a byproduct of blast furnaces. The mixture used in the tower concrete is 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 greenhouse gas produced through normal cement manufacturing. (One ton of cement produced emits about one ton of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.)

One Bryant Park will use translucent high-performance glass in floor-to-ceiling glazing to permit maximum sunlight in interior spaces, in addition to featuring "floating" floors to facilitate more even, healthful, and efficient heating and cooling. It will capture and reuse all rainwater and wastewater, saving millions of gallons of precious water each year. A very high percentage of the buildings materials will come from recycled and renewable source within 500 miles of New York city.

Control of the temperature of Bank of America's tower, and the production of some of its energy, will be done in an environmentally-friendly manner. Insulating glass will reduce thermal loss somewhat, which will lower energy consumption and increase transparency. Carbon dioxide sensors will signal increased fresh air ventilation, when elevated levels of carbon dioxide are detected in the building.
The cooling system will produce and store ice during off-peak hours, and then use ice phase transition to help cool the building during peak load, similar to the ice batteries in the 1995 Hotel New Otani in Tokyo Japan. Ice batteries have been used since absorption chillers first made ice commercially 150 years ago, before the electric light bulb was invented.
The tower has a 4.6-megawatt cogeneration plant, which will provide part of the base-load energy requirements. Onsite power generation reduces the significant electrical transmission losses that are typical of central power production plants.