As I approach the corner of Park Avenue and 48th Street in Manhattan I tilt my head back sharply. Above me, a new tower rises to a height of 1,400 feet, dwarfing the Chrysler Building and other nearby landmarks. After squinting to observe the building’s peak, my eyes descend nearly a quarter mile to its first 8 floors. There, the tower tapers dramatically, reducing a structure larger than the Empire State Building to a ballerina on pointe.
After spending much of my life looking at, and writing about, innovative architecture, I can’t help but admire this tower, designed by Foster + Partners for JPMorgan Chase. Yet building it was a mistake. Turning hundreds of millions of pounds of steel, concrete, and glass into a swanky corporate headquarters is exactly the wrong move—and sends exactly the wrong message—at a time of climate crisis.
The building is meant to impress with its overscaled opulence—12 of its 60 high-ceilinged floors are reserved for employee amenities—and structural derring-do. Which is precisely why 270 Park Avenue may someday be seen as a monument to what the philosopher Amitav Ghosh has labeled, in light of the gap between what’s happening to the planet and what little we’re doing about it, The Great Derangement.
JPMorgan Chase and Foster + Partners claim that the new building is highly sustainable. Specifically, they state, in identical statements on their websites, that as “New York City’s largest all-electric tower” it will produce “net-zero operational emissions.”
The claim is that once the building opens, its operations will result in no carbon emissions. But what about emissions that occur before opening day, when energy is used for things like making steel and concrete? Those processes are highly energy intensive: Every pound of steel was responsible for the release of about 2 pounds, and every cubic yard of concrete some 400 pounds, of CO2. Chase and Foster don’t want us to count that energy, as if the raw materials arranged themselves into a vertical Versailles without the help of furnaces, bulldozers, and cranes.
But Chase and Foster + Partners are hardly the only ones ignoring the energy used to build their buildings, known as embodied energy. In early June the Department of Energy released a “National Definition of a Zero Emissions Building.” Disappointingly, the definition covers only operational emissions. (The Department said it may address emissions from construction at a later date.) The Biden administration can’t do everything at once, but energy is energy, and emissions are emissions. Ignoring a significant source is a variety of greenwashing, and no less so because it’s pervasive. I’ve read hundreds of press releases over the past five years calling new buildings “net-zero” or “carbon-neutral” or even “carbon-positive,” always without counting embodied energy. Hundreds of published articles dutifully echo the press releases. Only a few dispute them.
Ignoring embodied energy is a problem that extends to other industries. If you’re deciding whether to replace a gasoline-powered car with an electric one, you can estimate how much energy you’ll save over time, but it would help to know how much energy went into making the new car in the first place. Try getting that information from a manufacturer.
But the built environment generates 42 percent of annual global CO2 emissions, which makes buildings particularly important to consider. To clear space for its new HQ, Chase tore down the Union Carbide Building, a 52-story, midcentury modern tower that had stood for 60 years. Though the bank claims to have recycled nearly every component of that building, repurposing materials like glass and steel requires vast amounts of energy. No one is counting that energy, either.
It would be great if Foster’s building itself produced clean energy. Then one could say that it was designed to offset its own emissions and really deserves the label “green.”
But there are no signs of solar panels or wind turbines on 270 Park Avenue. That means that any clean energy used by the building is produced off-site. And that makes the phrase “net-zero operational emissions” almost meaningless. After all, if you can count clean energy produced at a remote location, you could build an obscenely wasteful building and still call it net-zero.
I asked JPMorgan Chase for its definition of net-zero. A spokesman for the bank replied: “Net-zero emissions from operating the building, in this case, is simply that the building is powered 100 percent by electricity sourced from hydroelectric plants.” Chase’s statement says nothing about the efficiency of the building itself. The bank can simply buy as much hydroelectric power as the new tower requires and pocket the accolades, not for creative architecture but for creative accounting.
What about the claim that 270 Park Avenue is emissions-free because it’s all-electric? Electricity has to come from somewhere. In 2022, 71 percent of New York’s energy was produced by burning fossil fuels. (And the state is behind in its goal of sourcing 70 percent of its energy from renewable sources by 2030.) In New York, making a building all-electric doesn’t eliminate emissions; it simply moves them from your property to someone else’s.
Chase said it has arranged to purchase its power from the “hydroelectric assets” of Brookfield Renewables, a publicly traded company that buys and sells the rights to clean energy. But Brookfield hasn’t created new hydroelectric facilities for Chase. According to the Chase spokesman, it is simply “directing power from existing hydroelectric plants” to the new building. Chase will be getting its electricity from the same grid as every other New Yorker; there is no way to separate “good” and “bad” electrons. So 270 Park Avenue will have no effect on greenhouse gas emissions from the production of electricity in New York State.
Slowing global warming requires significant changes in what we build and how we build it. Natural materials, like stone, hemp, and clay, have low embodied energy. These options can be used to create great buildings, as demonstrated in books like the opaquely named treasure Manual of Biogenic House Sections. True, you can’t build a skyscraper out of hemp. But maybe we’ll just have to accept that.
If a firm as reputable as Foster + Partners can claim this concrete and steel behemoth “exceeds the highest standards in sustainability,” then something is wrong with the standards. Chase’s new building is not remotely “emissions-free.” If we are lured into believing that is, we may pay a very-high price for our complacency.
Fred Bernstein is the winner of a 2023 award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters for exploring ideas in architecture and the 2009 Oculus award from the New York chapter of the AIA for excellence in architecture writing.
