A Garden Blooms in Queens

In 1999, when the Queens Botanical Garden began planning its new visitors’ center, the LEED program that is now the currency of the green-building movement was still a nascent tool. New York City, meanwhile, was in the process of creating its own guidelines for “high-performance” buildings. Especially in the realm of publicly financed projects, the era of green architecture was just dawning.

“ One of New York’s lesser-known botanical gardens emerges as a leader in sustainable design.
By Fred A. Bernstein

In 1999, when the Queens Botanical Garden began planning its new visitors’ center, the LEED program that is now the currency of the green-building movement was still a nascent tool. New York City, meanwhile, was in the process of creating its own guidelines for “high-performance” buildings. Especially in the realm of publicly financed projects, the era of green architecture was just dawning.

Now the newly opened $14 million visitors’ center and administration building, designed by BKSK Architects, is on deck to receive a Platinum LEED rating, making it one of the city’s first structures in that exalted category. Moreover, two years after the passage of local law 86, which requires many new city buildings to receive Silver, Gold, or Platinum ratings, the 16,000-square-foot Queens structure “is showing people that it can be done,” says John Krieble, who heads the Department of Design and Construction’s sustainable-design unit. “It’s one thing to talk about it; it’s another thing to see it here in three dimensions, working.”
Krieble, who inherited the city’s green-building program from Hilary Brown, its founder, says his group is currently advising on 40 buildings. But that’s just the beginning: Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s blueprint for future development, dubbed PlaNYC 2030, contains ambitious environmental goals, for which the Queens building is both trailblazer and laboratory. For city officials charged with making the mayor’s vision a reality, the Queens project “demystifies LEED and green building.”



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