John Krieble, New York's sustainable Tsar

Across the East River, within sight of the glittering towers of Manhattan yet a world away in style and affluence, sits a harsh warehouse district of Queens. Graffiti-daubed trains rattle overhead while deserted, rubbish-strewn roads wait for cars. Hawkers sell cheap goods on street corners and gangs of schoolchildren take on a menacing appearance.

This desolate neighbourhood is where you'll find John Krieble, director of the Office of Sustainable Design for New York (OSD). He is based, with the rest of the 1200-strong New York City Department of Design and Construction, in a grandiose but unkempt warehouse building leased from a cash-strapped developer which couldn’t tempt private firms away from Manhattan island.

Inside, work cubicles are stacked high with rolls of drawings and staff scurry about under yellow artificial light, too busy to care about the dingy surroundings. From the midst of this, the seven-strong OSD team is steering the 115 city agencies – including police and fire, jails, museums, health clinics and roads – and the private sector on a course which aims to turn New York into a world-leading environmentally conscious and sustainable city.

“It’s a huge challenge and one that has to be tackled from multiple perspectives,” Krieble says. “On one hand, we must police construction to ensure environmental aspects are being considered; on the other, we have to act as a role model and make all the projects that we develop exemplars of the highest sustainable standards.”

The OSD was set up in 1997 to identify and implement cost-effective ways to promote greater environmental responsibility in building design. In 1999 it published the 140-page High Performance Building Guidelines. This document has been significant in shaping the way that New York approaches the design and construction of its buildings. It includes advice on building energy use, water management, material selection, indoor air quality, commissioning and operations as well as maintenance, health and safety, the design process, and site design and planning.

“I was on the team at the time it was written and have since been charged with rolling it out. However, it is not binding and we are not a regulatory body. So, my job is all about promoting sustainability and ensuring that the city agencies adopt the guide’s ideals.”

The OSD hires the architects and manages the design and construction of all city government projects. Krieble is himself an architect of 30 years’ experience. After studying at Columbia University, he worked for two decades at the pioneering green practice Croxton Collaborative. “People thought we were bizarre for focusing on green urban projects,” he says. “They associated green design with rural schemes and self-sufficiency. We understood the importance of environmental design, whether it be in the city or countryside, and the practice designed award-winning buildings that would have as little impact on the environment as possible.”

When it was conceived, the OSD was “pushing against the tide” and to some extent it always will be. Only about 1% of New York’s building stock is new and the rest is not likely to be torn down and replaced. “We have to tackle this existing stock as well as new buildings,” Krieble says, “but our maintenance reserves are very limited. We can pay perhaps a quarter of what a private firm would for building management and maintenance.”

Add to this the staff complacency that is found in many public-sector buildings throughout the world: “Too many city-owned buildings are operated on entirely comfort-based criteria, not energy efficiency programmes. The trouble is that the people who occupy them don’t pay the energy bills and so they don’t have any incentive to become more energy efficient,” says Krieble. The OSD is trying to get to grips with with this problem. “Do we use LEED’s EB (existing buildings) system or traditional audits and refits? What is the best way to sort out every building’s BMS?” The department is also working with the mayor’s office to see what can be done to encourage staff to act more sustainably.

The political arena is a difficult beast to control. currently our mayor is working with us and we are working full steam ahead, but his term will be over in 2010.

This involvement with the office of the mayor, Michael Bloomberg, has been critical to Krieble’s campaign to create a sustainable city. While the OSD can manage public projects, the mayor can impose new laws. “Mayor Bloomberg has been very supportive and we’ve been able to work with him to set green standards and targets for both the city and private sector.”

Local Law 86, the NYC green building law, came into force in 2005. A direct descendant of the High Performance Building Guidelines, it requires new city-owned buildings to perform to a LEED silver rating, achieving 20% energy and water savings compared with the Building Codes. “We police these measures that are obligated by the mayor,” says Krieble, “checking that energy modelling is used, that LEED is worked to. We don’t make the policy but we are involved at the coal face in day-to-day decisions. We help to form it and we implement it.”

More recently, the OSD was instrumental in committees that last year produced PlaNYC 2030, a comprehensive sustainability plan. It includes 127 environmental initiatives, such as: a million trees to be planted over the next 10 years; creation of an energy task force, which will spend $80 million a year for a decade on auditing and upgrading energy use in city-owned buildings; a target of 2mW of solar power to be generated from photovoltaic installations on public buildings; and Intro 20, a greenhouse gas reduction law, currently going through ratification.

PlaNYC 2030 also aims to tackle the energy use of existing buildings. A draft energy plan, published in December, sets out how the city will reduce energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions from municipal buildings and operations by 30% by 2017; the target is for a city-wide 30% reduction by 2030. It has 132 projects across the five New York city boroughs to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by about 34,000 tons annually, such as: lighting replacement and sensor installation; air-conditioning and heating improvements; water and sewerage upgrades; and vehicle replacements.

Krieble had highlighted many of these things in his battles to maintain city properties. “These steps are good news but the political arena is a difficult beast to control,” he says. “Lord knows, the federal government has gone missing on the environmental debate. Currently, though, our mayor is working with us and we are moving ahead at full steam. His term will be up in 2010, however. We have to hope that the good work will be continued.”

In the meantime, Krieble has got his hands full. At any one time the OSD is involved in construction or maintenance projects for 15-20 city agencies. The new visitor and administration building at Queens Botanical Garden earned the city its first LEED platinum accreditation. Other projects under way include New Sunrise Yard, a maintenance facility for the Department of Transportation (predicted to be LEED gold) and the headquarters of the Office of Emergency Management (silver). “LEED will play a big part in my work for the foreseeable future. The next decade will see more and more projects going through LEED accreditation.”

The OSD gets 15 new LEED projects a year. Krieble estimates that each takes an average of seven years to get built, with two years’ further involvement after completion for commissioning and monitoring. That will make his office responsible for more than 100 projects soon. Then there’s the matter of updating guidelines and advising the mayor’s office on everything from transport issues to waste water recycling.

“We have been around for 10 years now. Our existence has introduced the city to green construction and shown the benefits that can be achieved. This has led to more initiatives being allowed to go ahead,” Krieble says with a smile. “We are a department of one city agency out of 115, based in a part of the city where you can’t even get a decent lunch, but because we are inside the government we’ve been able to make the bureaucrats understand the importance of sustainable design. We’ve put green building on the New York city map.”