Interior Case Study:
New York Academy of Sciences

Advanced Science: A Manhattan Institution Moves Its Employees Into A Light-Filled Skyscraper.

By Russell Fortmeyer

One year ago, if your image of the home of the 190-year-old New York Academy of Sciences entailed a dark, cramped five-story mansion in a tony Manhattan neighborhood, you would have been right. What a contrast that makes to the Academy’s home since October 2006—the sleek, dramatic 7 World Trade Center, a LEED for Core and Shell Gold building that stands on the north edge of Ground Zero.

The Academy’s architects, New York City-based H3 Hardy Collaboration Architecture, took every advantage of the floor-to-ceiling glass curtain wall of the 52-story tower designed by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill’s local office to indicate that this bright headquarters represents a new era for the institution.

Entering the Academy’s public lobby, you immediately face a slanted, see-through vertical CNC-milled screen that doubles as a map of the city showing the non-profit’s previous locations, but beyond that a sloped ceiling leads up to the all-glass east wall with postcard views encompassing Lower Manhattan and Brooklyn. “The map draws you to the window wall, where you can really appreciate this unique site,” says Mercedes Armillas, the project manager for H3.

Open offices, a huge departure from the warren of individual offices in the Academy’s old home, occupy the bulk of the west side of the floor, while the public functions fill out the east side. Aside from the lobby, these spaces include a 296-person auditorium, a boardroom, conference space, and a structural concrete core for elevators, stairwells, restrooms, and building systems. The column-free, 40,000-square-foot office’s main north-south staff corridor allows views from Midtown to the Statue of Liberty, helping orient the Academy’s 85 employees, who may still be adapting to working on the 40th floor of a skyscraper.

All offices have access to abundant views and daylight, making the indirect-direct fluorescent linear lighting, controlled with motion and light sensors, hardly needed on a sunny day. Internal shading devices were installed on the south-side windows, and Armillas says the west side may eventually have shades for intense late-day sun.

Armillas says the roughly 10-month timeline from the start of design to the finish of construction prevented the project from pursuing a LEED for interiors rating. However, that did not keep H3 from pursuing many sustainable interior design strategies, including 100-percent recycled polyester workstation panels, carpet with 40-percent recycled material, and zoned heating and cooling systems that maximize efficiency. Although sky gardens and operable windows were out of the question, the architects instituted an art program that included blow-up wallpaper photographs of wildflowers, walls decorated with electron-microscopic pictures of pollen, and DNA helix-patterned carpet. In the end, the Academy may not have moved far in its history—the new location is just two blocks from where it was founded in 1817—but the details in this sensitively designed interior space have positioned it well for the future.