The Sunset Park waterfront, once one of the busiest shipping ports in the country, today serves as a major industrial, manufacturing, and employment hub in NYC. The area’s continued prominence as a manufacturing center is due in part to the large footprint of publicly owned industrial campuses dedicated to preserving and growing the area’s manufacturing legacy. The New York City Economic Development Corporation (NYCEDC) manages more than 200 acres of this area including the Brooklyn Army Terminal (BAT), Made in New York Campus at Bush Terminal, and the South Brooklyn Marine Terminal. The Brooklyn Army Terminal was built in 1918 by Cass Gilbert and was originally used as an American military supply and troop deployment facility. Today, BAT is New York City’s premier affordable hub for innovative industrial businesses and entrepreneurs, serving more than 100 businesses and 4,000 employees. BAT is being positioned as a future home for climate innovators and industrial businesses developing and fabricating technologies that support climate solutions. The Made in New York Campus at Bush Terminal is undergoing an investment of more than $265 million to reposition this historic shipping yard as a creative industrial hub with events facilities and public waterfront open space. Along with Industry City, a privately owned and operated creative industrial hub in Sunset Park, these campuses born out of the same historic shipping ports are being reimagined as modern industrial facilities supporting a vast workforce.

Over the lifetime of a building, embodied carbon from materials, transportation of materials, and building construction can account for half of a building's carbon emissions. Global building floor area is expected to double by 2060, which amounts to an incredible amount of upfront carbon emissions to address in the built environment. The process, and responsibility, to do so spans multiple stakeholders: materials supply chain, structural engineers, architects, construction, and developers. No longer can excuses be made or fingers be pointed for not achieving reductions; there is an urgent need to address embodied carbon. Plus, as global momentum builds for climate action, federal, state, and local governments are introducing building-sector requirements covering both operational and embodied carbon. This session will provide perspectives from a general contractor, a structural engineer, and a developer who have successfully reduced embodied carbon in new developments. Panelists will walk the audience through embodied carbon reductions from predesign through development, building occupancy, and deconstruction, all of which encompass a vital part of the industry's journey to net zero.

Building owners, investors and tenants grapple with the costs of reducing carbon footprints while cities set aggressive goals towards achieving net zero. Meanwhile, the capital markets must determine how to finance these "green" initiatives and quantify the value and risk associated with transitioning to net zero. Join us as we explore the real costs of going to net zero, who bears the burden and the financial drivers behind this push.

Join us for a special tour of one of New York City’s most dynamic neighborhoods, Hudson Square. The district, at the nexus of NYC’s premier retail and residential neighborhoods, is rich in history but is also leading the way in terms of sustainable design and thoughtful and contextual architecture that is appealing to some of the world’s largest and most innovative office tenants, including Google, Horizon Media, Publicis Groupe and Squarespace. Trinity Church Wall Street, steward of the neighborhood since the early 1700s, helped usher in a residential rezoning that has allowed the neighborhood to flourish, and, in partnership with Norges Bank and Hines, Trinity Church has repositioned their more than 6 million-square-foot portfolio of purpose-built printing house buildings to cater to modern office needs in a Class A manner.

The group will tour a cornerstone of the Hudson Square portfolio, 555 Greenwich + 345 Hudson. 555 Greenwich is a 270,000-square-foot ground-up development designed by COOKFOX Architects that is the completion of the adjacent property, 345 Hudson (built in 1931), to create a 1.2 million-square-foot interconnected campus. 555 Greenwich represents the next generation of high-performing buildings and will exceed NYC’s 2030 climate targets for office buildings by over 45 percent and align with New York State 2050 carbon-neutral targets. 345 Hudson is one of three commercial buildings selected to participate in the Empire Building Challenge’s low-carbon public/private design partnership.

We will follow with a tour of 550 Washington, the 1.3 million-square-foot home to Google's headquarters designed by COOKFOX, and end at historic Pier 57. Originally constructed in 1952, the newly restored mixed-use pier features Little Island, an award-winning public park and urban oasis, a waterfront food market, ample indoor/outdoor community spaces, and an interactive gallery and classroom focused on wildlife and waterways.

In 2011, Cornell Tech emerged as the winner of a global contest—Mayor Bloomberg’s Applied Sciences NYC Initiative—that was designed to dramatically expand the city’s capacity in the applied sciences sector to maintain the city’s global competitiveness and create jobs. The winning bid by Cornell Tech, a partnership between Cornell University and Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, proposed the development of a 2-million-square-foot innovative science campus on Roosevelt Island, which will serve more than 2,000 graduate students and hundreds of faculty and staff upon its completion. By 2017, the $1 billion, 850,000-square-foot first phase opened, boasting a net-zero academic building, a striking co-location office building, a 40,000-square-foot conference center, a 224-room hotel and a residential tower with 350 apartments in the largest Passive House tower in the world at the time of its opening. The campus embodies New York’s commitment to technology’s growing impact in New York City. Discover Cornell Tech: NYC’s thriving innovation hub!

In recent decades, no building material has inspired awe, passion, and innovation like mass timber. Nature's building solution is transforming the construction industry because it sequesters carbon, greatly improves speed and precision, significantly reduces the size of the framing crew, and, most important, creates a superior product that occupants love. The United States has been behind Europe and Canada in the production and use of mass timber and many municipal codes haven't even contemplated tall timber as a solution. But in recent years that has changed, as companies such as Google, Adidas, Atlassian, and Walmart have embraced mass timber and cities have updated codes to allow for taller mass timber structures to be built. This session serves as a "state of the union" for mass timber: how far it has come, its massive future potential, and the biggest challenges (and solutions) for its progress.