Sign of the Times (Square): InterContinental New York Times Square Gunning for LEED, Greenest Hotel in NYC Honors
There are presumably people out there who don't enjoy a good hotel room, but I don't know any of them. Not to get too "Up In The Air" on you here, but there's something about those fluffy pillows and big goofy comforters and imposingly glossy dark wood desks they don't even really expect you to use. Something kind of cool and different, yes, but also something that causes even the most virtuous carbon-footprint-watchers among us to forget ourselves and all of a sudden become the sort of people who think, "well, I might as well leave the air conditioning on blast, so that it'll be nice and cool when I return to the room in seven hours." And that -- along with a host of really dumb industry practices like leaving lights on in vacant rooms (which gets called out in the Urban Green Council's massive recent report) -- is why hotels are some of the least-green big buildings in any city. All of which makes the news that the in-construction 36-story InterContinental Times Square hotel is pursuing LEED certification that much more welcome.
The fact that hotels generally guzzle energy at a crazy rate means that they tend to run up similarly over-the-top utilities, but the industry's surpassingly deep attachment to turbo-charged pampering has translated to a slower-than-usual response to what looks like a pretty clear mandate to step up the efficiency game. There are some pretty awesome green hotels in other cities -- here's one I stayed at in San Francisco -- but New York is uncommonly behind the curve on this front. While there are organizations out there recognizing hotels that make an effort at sustainability, this particular sector seems far behind both the residential and office-space communities in the greening process. The Green Hotel Association -- or, as their Angelfire-looking website would have it, "Green" Hotel Association -- for instance, looks a lot like a greenwasher; Green Hotel Association membership fees earn participating hotels a "very comprehensive" 154-page guide packed with energy saving tips and requires... well, nothing at all but a willingness to stay current on membership fees, as far as I can tell. Maybe those quotes aren't an accident then? By the more stringent (that is to say, extant) standards of Energy Star for Hospitality certification, there are exactly two Energy Star hotels in New York City: the Hotel Penn and New York Marriott East Side. While there are several LEED for Hospitality-certified hotels in NYC (Stephen reported on this back in 2009), the InterContinental New York Times Square promises to be the biggest green hotel in the city, and one of the greenest big hotels on the East Coast.
About that bigness: the InterContinental Times Square is the biggest new-build hotel currently in process in the city, at 36 stories and with a whopping 607 guest rooms. Sustainability at that size is a matter of degrees, but with the exception of some generally cosmetic solar paneling, the InterContinental's green aspects seem pretty impressive: a green roof with low solar heat gain, sustainable finishes, copious daylighting and, most intriguingly, an energy-generating elevator system. Green hosptitality as a movement has a ways to go, and it will take more than daylighting to counter the way that basic green instincts that abandon us when we leave our apartments and enter hotel rooms, but it's at least nice to see the InterContinental New York Times Square giving it a shot.
This entry was posted on Monday, February 8th, 2010 at 5:17 pm and is filed under Environment, Global Warming, efficiency, energy conservation, green, green building. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.