Every Day is Earth Day: Doing Green Buildings Offers Hope

At this time when we are all searching for sources of pragmatic hope, I have been hugely encouraged by interactions with architects, engineers, and building owners in New York City who have over the last thirty years consistently and successfully pursued the goals of, first, energy conservation and more recently decarbonization in the built environment for both new and retrofitted buildings, including some of the city’s largest. And these leaders in their fields have collaborated consistently with the governments of both New York State and New York City, who have created a legal infrastructure within which those responsible for energy and emissions from buildings innovate to meet nationally leading standards.

In response to the oil crisis of 1973, New York State in 1975 created NYSERDA, the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority, a public benefit corporation which has provided professional guidance and financial support for large-scale building projects that seek to optimize energy resources and reduce carbon emissions. Headquartered in Albany, NYSERDA works with institutional and individual owners, power companies, engineers, architects, and federal agencies to provide information, technical analyses, and advice about tax incentives and other financial support for increasing energy efficiency. NYSERDA facilitated collaborations to rethink every means of lowering energy consumption and eventually eliminating dependence on fossil fuels for the operational energy of buildings, meaning their heating, ventilation, air conditioning, and lighting, among other systems. And the results have been dramatic, with Wesleyan alumni among those who are central contributors to this rapidly evolving field.

New York City is distinct in the disproportionate environmental role of its buildings. In 2007 the city released a study, the first of its kind, that showed that New York’s roughly 800,000 buildings are responsible for 79% of the city’s greenhouse gas emissions (mainly CO2). As of 2021, New York City’s buildings still accounted for 70% of its carbon emissions, but half of those emissions derived from the largest 5% of its structures. The clients and designers of the large buildings were each, in their own way, among the first working to mitigate this outcome. Each of the projects was experimental, but they collectively showed material, mechanical, and digital means of reduced energy consumption on a scale hitherto unimagined.

In New York City, a movement for energy conservation and, more broadly, urban sustainability accelerated following Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s election in 2001. In 2006, he published PlaNYC, to make New York a more sustainable city. As part of this effort, he established the Greener, Greater Buildings Plan in 2009, which required all buildings to have publicly available energy efficiency benchmarking. It also required evaluation and upgrading of the city’s largest public and private buildings to increase their energy efficiency. From 2009, the Empire State Building underwent a massive energy retrofit, reducing total energy use by nearly 40 percent.

Sustainability remained a priority for the next mayor, Bill de Blasio. One major issue concerns existing buildings whose owners are not inclined to make major new investments in sustainable retrofitting. This is a huge challenge, since annual turnover in commercial buildings in terms of new construction in the United States is under 2.5%. New buildings may be green, but existing ones tend not to be. New York State sought to accelerate progress with its 2019 Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act (known as the Climate Act), to reduce economy-wide greenhouse gas emissions by 40 percent by 2030 and by 85% by 2050 from 1990 levels.

Then, on April 22, 2019, on the annual celebration of Earth Day, in response to then President Trump’s decision to withdraw the United States from the Paris Climate Agreement (it later returned under President Biden), Mayor de Blasio signed the Climate Mobilization Act, an eight-bill package which aimed for an 80% reduction in the city’s greenhouse gas emissions. Among these bills was Local Law 97, which required new and existing buildings larger than 25,000 square feet (a total of 50,000 buildings) to meet strict greenhouse gas emissions limits starting in 2024. A key component of the plan was a new system instituted in fall 2020, whereby such larger buildings were required to publicly post a letter grade, based on the U.S. federal Environmental Protection Agency’s Energy Star score of 1 to 100, as determined by energy consumption. Consistent with the state’s 2019 Climate Act, these structures were to cut carbon emissions by at least 40 percent citywide by 2030, and 80 percent by 2050, or face steep fines, of $1,000,000 per year for the largest properties.

More recently, Local Law 154, passed by the City Council in December 2021, banned the use of fossil fuels, including natural gas, for space heating and service hot water in new construction or gut renovations of buildings under seven stories starting in 2024 and buildings seven stories or taller in 2027. They would be required to use electric heating and appliances to combat climate change. Local Law 154 made New York the largest city in the world to take this step, effectively mandating all-electric buildings. To support this and related efforts, New York State has legally committed to fully decarbonizing its electric power grid by 2040. Mandated by the 2019 Climate Act, the state aims for 70% renewable electricity by 2030 and 100% zero-emission electricity by 2040. In other words, all electric buildings will no longer be depending on fossil-fuel electricity.

There are hopeful trends in overall U.S. energy consumption. In 2009, in this country, 92% of all energy consumed came from non-renewable sources (coal, petroleum, natural gas, and nuclear).  Just a little over 4% of U.S. energy came from wind, solar, geothermal or biomass power. Yet by 2023, 23% of U.S. electricity came from renewable sources, up 10% from 2013.

One of the most important ways in which the design community and its clients pursue these goals is through continuing education and sharing of expertise. Toward this end, Richard Yancey, Wesleyan Class of 1985, makes an extraordinary contribution to public service in his field of architecture, arguably without a close parallel in the United States. Richard is the founding Executive Director of the Building Energy Exchange in New York City. This is a pioneering international center of excellence dedicated to building energy efficiency, addressing one of the biggest challenges of our time. At Wesleyan, Richard majored in Mathematics and Economics. He then went on to earn a Master of Architecture at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design in 1992, followed by an early career as an architect in both Seattle and New York. In these years Richard designed award-winning buildings for a range of residential and institutional clients. Then in 2009 he founded almost single-handedly the Building Energy Exchange, one of the most important, and effective, sustainability organizations in the country. Through its extensive program of many hundreds of meetings, events, exhibitions, reports and case studies, the Building Energy Exchange has been committed to education leading to reduced energy consumption and carbon emissions. The Exchange’s programs have brought together over 12,000 decision-makers, including architects, engineers, builders, landlords, building users, government officials, maintenance personnel, and industry leaders to learn about and address these issues. In 2018, BE-Ex officially became the founding United Nations International Centre of Excellence on High Performance Buildings, making it a model for similar centers in cities around the world. For his achievements as both an architect and leader of the Building Energy Exchange, Richard has won many awards. Among these in 2019, he was elected a Fellow of the American Institute of Architects, the mark of supreme professional esteem. In 2023 Richard received the Champion Medal of Architecture, from the New York Chapter of the A.I.A.

Another alumnus who has made extraordinary contributions is Mark Ginsberg, Wesleyan Class of 1979, who majored in theater design and government, and who went on to complete his Master of Architecture at the University of Pennsylvania and became a founding partner in the firm of Curtis and Ginsberg Architects. In 2025 Mark was named a Notable Leader in Sustainability by Crain’s New York Business. Mark’s passion for sustainability extends throughout his career. Since its founding, Curtis and Ginsberg has designed 25 Passive House buildings. A Passive House is a building that is very well insulated, virtually airtight, and primarily heated by the sun. It is designed to avoid excessive heat gain through shading and the placement of windows, so that little energy is needed by its occupants to either cool or heat the building. A Passive House can reduce heating consumption of its occupants by up to 90% and reduce total energy consumption by 50–70% in comparison with energy usage in a typical house. In New York State, in 2021, there were 169 Passive House projects finished or in progress. In 2021 there were 65 in New York City. By 2023 there were 123. As of mid-2025, there are approximately 640 certified or in-progress Passive House projects in the United States. 

Curtis and Ginsberg have also designed eleven LEED Certified buildings. In 2000 the United States Green Building Council unveiled the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (L.E.E.D.) Green Building Rating System for public use.  LEED was the first rating system in the United States to hold projects up to scrutiny for the full range of their effects on energy and water use, and on municipal infrastructure, transportation energy use, resource conservation, land use, and indoor environmental quality. Since LEED, there are other similar rating systems in other countries, but LEED is the standard in 135. LEED has grown from one rating system for new construction into a comprehensive program of multiple related rating systems covering all aspects of the development and construction process. As of early 2026, there are more than 195,000 LEED-certificate buildings in nearly 190 countries. At Wesleyan, Boger Hall (the former Squash Courts Building) was renovated in 2012. It earned the highest LEED rating, that of Platinum. When it opened, it was one of only 70 buildings in the world to have this status.

Curtis and Ginsberg have also designed over 65 buildings in the Enterprise Green Communities program in New York. This program is the only national green building framework designed specifically for sustainable, affordable housing in the U.S. It offers criteria for new construction and rehabs to ensure homes are energy-efficient, healthy, water-efficient, and resilient, while lowering utility costs for residents. For all this, Mark’s firm has been recognized locally and internationally for sustainable design, ranking in the Engineering News-Record’s (ENR) 2025 Top 100 Green Design Firms, and as the first architecture firm to receive the Ivory Prize for Housing Affordability in Construction and Design for bringing Passive House standards to scale, meaning upscaling Passive House methods to large multi-family apartment buildings.

LEED standards have been criticized in part because they focus mainly on operational energy. One recent frontier in rethinking the built environment is the issue of embodied energy, meaning the total non-renewable energy consumed from raw material extraction, transport, manufacturing, and construction, accounting for up to 50% of a building’s total climate impact in its first fifty years. It encompasses initial energy (construction) and recurring energy (repairs/replacement), emphasizing the importance of sustainable material selection. In this field a different type of contribution is that of Paul Lewis, Wesleyan Class of 1988, who went on to complete a Master of Architecture at Princeton University where he is now a senior professor. With colleagues at his New York City firm LTL [Lewis Tsurumaki Lewis] Architects, Paul in 2022 published the “Manual of Biogenic House Sections,” which explores using low-carbon, plant-based, and earth-based materials in house construction, focusing on how these materials can transform architecture. It presents 55 innovative houses with detailed drawings, arguing for a shift away from high-embodied-carbon materials to reduce environmental impact. This book was selected as one of the World Architecture Community’s Top 10 Architectural Books of 2022, and it received a 2025 Design Honor Award from the American Institute of Architects New York Chapter. These outstanding alumni are among my sources of hope for the better future that we all desire.

Joseph Siry is a Professor of Art History and Kenan Professor of the Humanities and can be reached at jsiry@wesleyan.edu.