Corporate Home

It’s all happening at the zoo

by Beth Leibson

When you try to envision New York City’s first LEED-certified Gold-landmarked building, you probably picture Manhattan institutions such as the New York Public Library or the Metropolitan Museum of Art. But actually, in the greening of this city of skyscrapers and subways, of cultural icons and financial powerhouses, it is the lions who are leading the way. And you can see it for yourself, starting mid-June.

			The Lion House is a 20,000 sq.ft. French Beaux Arts-style structure opened in 1903 and festooned with decorative friezes, two-story windows, limestone sculptures, and wrought iron elements. It is the capstone of historic Astor Court in the 256-acre Bronx Zoo, one of five one of five Wildlife Conservation Society’s (WCS) New York-based zoos and aquarium. In 2000, it was designated as a Historic District by the New York Landmarks Commission. But it had been empty for decades because it had become outmoded as animal exhibits became more naturalistic and in keeping with the animals’ natural habitats.

Transforming this notable structure into a dynamic animal exhibit and multi-use meeting space – while meeting the goals of the highest designation available under the United States Green Building Council (USGBC) Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) rating system – was quite a challenge. A challenge that took six years and approximately $62 million to meet. But its worth it – the facility will be almost carbon neutral, according to WCS.

“We can’t be a leader in global conservation, if we don’t also live it at home,” said Steven E. Sanderson, President CEO of WCS.

This complex project involved a medley of Bronx Zoo curators, WCS Exhibition, Graphic Arts and Design staff, and the Bronx Zoo construction department plus participants from the New York Department of Design and Construction, the New York City Office of Sustainable Design, the New York Power Authority, and New York-based architects FXFowle.

Hissing cockroaches and executive meetings

Little could be changed in the building’s exterior of limestone, Roman ironspot brick, and terra cotta. “A lot of the exterior was sacred,” says Dr. Christine Sheppard, Curator of the Bronx Zoo Ornithology and Co-Chair of the Green Team. But inside and beneath the building was fair game.

The building was intended to meet two needs: increased animal exhibit areas and meeting/conference spaces. The Madagascar exhibit planned for the building will include two-story high limestone cliffs for lemurs and Coquerel’s sifaka; underground Tsingy caves to house the 131/2-foot male and 10-foot female crocodiles; a waterfall and 1,000-gallon elevated pool for colorful freshwater fish; an arid forest home to ring-tailed lemurs, radiated tourists, and red fodys; and a giant baobab tree with a glass-enclosed collection of Madagascan hissing cockroaches.

The Schiff Family Great Hall, a 4,600-sq.ft. multi-purpose room, is the zoo’s largest indoor meeting and event space, intended to seat 230 people. In addition, a glass-enclosed space within the Great Hall will provide an executive meeting room for smaller groups.

Creating an environment that can house lemurs, frogs, crocodiles, and executives demands enormous quantities of electricity, diesel fuel, and natural gas as well as a constant flow of fresh air. None of which was currently available in the Lion House.

Adding elbow room

The first challenge was creating additional space in a landmarked building to accommodate the necessary heating, plumbing, and electrical systems.

To do so, the design team excavated the crawl space under the Lion House, deepening and extending the basement beyond its existing footprint. The team also added an interior mezzanine to increase the flexible use of the event space. Together, these measures expanded the building’s usable area from 32,000 sq.ft. to 41,000 sq.ft. The basement will serve several purposes, including animal holding and care facilities and keeper workspace.

“When you’re taking apart a century-old building, you always encounter unexpected conditions, no matter how many core samples you’ve taken or how much probe work you’ve done,” says Susan Chin, WCS director of planning and design. “Basically, we gutted the building and then levitated it. No part of the foundation touches the same ground. There were moments when I held my breath and said a few prayers.”

Simultaneously, the Lion House interior was demolished, the floor structure replaced and stabilized, and the walls modified to support living exhibits. Throughout this process, the WCS used as much recycled and low-impact material as possible. The process salvaged and reused existing brick and stone to eliminate the need for new materials. The project also used recycled steel and concrete, and sustainably harvested woods.

Lowering the carbon pawprint

Once there was space, the Lion House needed to lower its carbon foot – or paw – print. “The carbon footprint,” says Brenda Burbach, Environmental Compliance Specialist and Co-Chair of the Green Team, “focuses on energy use and paper consumption.” Unfortunately, the Lion House’s existing utilities were as historic as its exterior, if less grand. A few radiators provided heat and a couple of fans were the closest the Lion House came to air conditioning. Building systems were minimal. Now, innovative systems reduce Lion House’s consumption of fossil fuels. A fuel cell powered by natural gas allows the building to generate half of its own electricity and about 40% of heating needs. In addition, the building is connected to the Zoo’s campus-wide cogeneration system as well as its waste heat loop. “Everything in the building, the fan, the lights, the computer monitors, are all using energy that is produced here,” explains Burbach. “And the waste heat is used for heating and cooling buildings.”

The cogeneration plant, already a sustainability-focused approach, is going greener. “We switched our cogen plant,” says Burbach. “It used to be a diesel- and natural gas-burning plant and we’re in the process of switching out all the engines so they’re natural gas only. That change will reduce our carbon footprint and reduce our overall emissions.”

And it is working. “Sometimes, especially during the highest-usage periods, we actually put electricity back into the grid when we’re not using it all,” says Sheppard. “The zoo is on occasion even able to feed power back into Con Ed’s energy grid.”

Graywater, graywater everywhere

Water, too, plays a role in cutting energy costs. When the project dug down to expand the usable space, it also created a geothermal system with five wells as deep as 1,500 feet below the Lion House. The water there runs at a constant 55 degrees Farenheit year-round and will help cool the building in summer and heat it in winter.

The Lion House uses two types of skylights, both traditional and state-of-the-art ones. Traditional skylights grace the corridors for visitors, public spaces, and the mezzanine level of the conference room. For the nearly 8,500 sq.ft. of skylight space over the animal exhibits, the building uses a thermoplastic foil layering system called Foiltec made of three layers of ethylene tetraflouroethylene (ETFE). This system provides twice as much insulation as standard skylights and transmits ultraviolet light, which is vital for animals and plant life. In addition, the layers adjust automatically to allow maximum light while preventing overheating in summer or heat loss in winter. An integrated building management system controls all aspects of the building’s environment. Ultimately, the Lion House has a 57% savings in energy cost compared to an equivalent building that meets energy code standards.

“Water isn’t a factor calculated into our carbon footprint, but it’s really important environmentally,” says Sheppard. “We’re lobbying to think beyond just the carbon footprint” to the overall environmental footprint. “That means water, chemicals. Really, it means every single facet of the operation – everything that comes into the facility and everything that goes out of it.”

As a result, the Lion House makes a real effort to reduce water consumption. It uses waterless urinals and low-flow plumbing fixtures in the restrooms. A gray water system reclaims sink water and uses it to flush the toilets, amounting to a savings of nearly 150,000 gallons a year.

Water conservation extends outside the building as well. A circulating water filtration system for the adjacent Sea Lion Pool eliminates routine water changes and saves about 160,000 gallons of water a week. All in all, the Lion House has a 59% savings in water consumption and a 30% savings in waste water.

The project also addresses indoor air quality for humans and animals alike. To provide plenty of fresh air, the building has operable windows and skylights and a low-pressure under-floor air distribution system. The building uses only low-volatile organic-emitting materials (VOCs).

Figuring the ROI

Return on investment is often the bogeyman of the sustainability movement. Especially in the nonprofit world, where major projects are often underwritten by grants. (The Lion House project was funded by the City of New York.)

“It’s a little hard for us to calculate,” says Sheppard. “The zoo is a private institution, but there’s a lot of city support. So we don’t have things like individual water and power meters on buildings.” That makes it hard to evaluate the impact of a particular improvement on a given building or exhibit. “We cannot tell you how much we’ve reduced our power consumption, for instance, by putting compact fluorescents in all the fixtures in these buildings,” she adds. “There is no way for us to do that.”

“We can absolutely quantify water use,” says Sheppard. “We can calculate, for instance, how much water we’re going to save by recirculating the sea lion pool.” WCS is working on this challenge. “We hope to develop some monitoring systems sort of further downstream from where stuff comes in,” says Sheppard.

It is important to note that the Lion’s House, while a huge project, is only one item on WCS’s tremendous list of greening opportunities. The zoo has arguably the world’s first Eco-Restrooms (using every imaginable water-saving technology and serving as much an exhibit as a lavatory), the Jose Serrano Center for Global Conservation (a 40,000 sq.ft. Gold LEED certified office building), and a tremendous recycling program (including paper, glass, metal, plastic, batteries, fluorescent lights, cell phones, inkjet and laser printer cartridges, walkie-talkies, computer components, and furniture). The zoo is replacing traditional light bulbs with compact fluorescents; traditional letterhead with recycled paper; and diesel fuel with natural gas. It’s a total make-over.

Calculating the carbon footprint

Last year, WCS created a Carbon Footprint Project Team to calculate its greenhouse gas emissions. Using input from the Greenhouse Gas Protocol Initiative, the World Business Council for Sustainable Development, and the World Resources Institute, WCS estimated the carbon footprint of its North American facilities, including the Bronx Zoo, the Central Park Zoo, the Prospect Park Zoo, the Queens Zoo, and the New York Aquarium.

WCS estimated that these operations emit approximately 34,000 metric tons of greenhouse gases, including direct emissions from heating and power generation at the five parks and WCS-owned vehicles; emissions for purchased electricity by parks; and emissions from organization activities—travel by air, car, and train, as well as paper consumption. To put this in perspective, the team compared the WCS estimates to those of other institutions, such as Middlebury College: 25,000 metric tons, BP: 60.4 million metric tons, and the think-tank World Resources Institute: 978 metric tons.

Hopefully, next year, the figure will drop. But more important, WCS hopes that its entire environmental footprint – including water use – will decrease. “We as an organization are committed to reducing our total footprint in any way that we possibly can,” says Sheppard. “We want to make our zoo as impact-free on the environment as possible.”