Big Apple, big savings

Controls ensure that daylight and artificial light are combined imperceptibly at the New York Times' new Manhattan headquarters

The New York Times was first published in 1851 and is still one of the most highly regarded newspapers in the US. When its parent company, the New York Times Company, decided to have a new headquarters building constructed in Manhattan, it turned to world-renowned architect Renzo Piano and two US firms, FXFOWLE in New York and Gensler of San Francisco.

Lighting design for the project was the responsibility of SBLD Studio, also from New York.

The completed structure is 52 storeys tall and encompasses 140,000 gross square metres of office and retail space owned by the New York Times Company itself and Forest City Ratner Companies. The media company occupies 28 floors - about 60,000 square metres.

"What we have achieved with our building is spectacular"

Its most striking characteristics are the open spaces and ubiquitous floor-to-ceiling glass walls that reveal the neighbouring buildings - and even allow a glimpse into the building from outside.

David Thurm, vice-president and chief information officer of the New York Times Company, says: "The whole building structure is designed for maximum light."

Researching alternatives

Any building that is designed to take advantage of daylight will need extensive lighting controls to make the most of it. From the start, company executives studied the systems available to meet their objectives of daylight harvesting and flexibility to reconfigure office spaces easily. Thurm told the Harvard Business Review that every possibility was scrutinised to avoid "well-intentioned guesses by others as to what you want".

The research effort eventually transferred to the Building Technologies Department at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory at the University of California. Taking advice from the Berkeley Lab, the Times Company built a mock-up of the southwest corner of the new building at one of its printing works in Queens, New York.

For no less than six months - stretching from winter solstice to summer solstice - lighting controls from a number of manufacturers were put through their paces. One of those technologies was Lutron's Quantum light management system, which was subsequently chosen for control of lighting throughout the office space.

Quantum leap

Quantum encompasses hardware and software for daylight control, occupant control, target set point control, time clock control and emergency lighting control. Together, they should ensure comfort for staff and make it easier for the company to make changes to the workspace as business dictates.

"The whole building structure is designed for maximum light"

Daylight sensors make the most of daylight, continually changing the amount of artificial light, but not so much to be noticed by staff. Of course, daylight brings with it a problem: glare. Attila Uysal, principal and technical director of SBLD Studio says: "With all the daylight coming in, the avoidance of glare was a crucial issue to the client."

On each floor, the lighting scheme is divided into zones with lighting levels appropriate to the work being done there and the amount of daylight that penetrates the space. To achieve this kind of local control, about 18,000 digitally addressable EcoSystem ballasts were installed.

The system's software monitors, controls and reports on lighting use throughout the building. It's that reporting capability that has allowed the Times Company to precisely assess how much energy - and money - precise lighting control has saved.

Beating the codes

The building was designed to use 13.8 watts per square metre for lighting, within the local building codes at the time. Close control of the lighting has cut that by 70 per cent, to just over 4 watts per square metre.

Building codes have since been tightened to about 13 watts per square metre, but Glenn Hughes president of Glenn D Hughes Consulting Associates, who assessed the energy performance of the building, says: "Our energy performance is still way, way better."

Thurm agrees. "What we have achieved with our building is spectacular," he says. "But any office space eventually needs to move in different directions and this lighting system gives us the flexibility to change as we see fit."

And there is scope for further improvements. The parameters of the control system are still being tweaked. "As a company," says Thurm, "we intuitively understood that, if we were going to work in a building with so much outer glass, we had to keep a rein on our energy consumption. That helps our bottom line but also is the environmentally responsible thing to do."

Project details

Project: The New York Times Building, New York, US
Lighting design: Susan Brady, Attila Uysal, Zengwei Fu, Wen Yaun Lin, SBLD Studio, New York
Architect: Renzo Piano, Genoa; FXFOWLE Architects, New York
Electrical contractor: Fred Geller Electrical, New York
Principal supplier: Lutron Electronics
Photos: Nic Lehoux and Gensler