How Alloy Aims to Decarbonize Real Estate

While 505 State represents the future of real estate in the city—by 2029, all new buildings will be prohibited from using fossil fuels—“there’s nothing that technologically innovative here,” says AJ Pires, the president of Alloy. He notes that the main difference between the building and every other well-appointed residential high-rise is that the boiler providing heat and hot water to the units is electric, and the cooktops are all induction. The innovation was more conceptual: to build to ambitious energy standards and show other developers what’s possible by taking informed risks. 

An Architect-Developer with a Mission

Alloy is the rare architect-developer, a business model that has enabled the company to hold true to a “very narrow and provincial mission,” Pires says, “which is to make Brooklyn beautiful, sustainable, and equitable.” Since its founding in 2006, Alloy has had ambitions that grew from affordable infill residential duplexes in East New York to a mixed-use building in Brooklyn Bridge Park that won an AIA COTE Award for its energy efficiency to several high-end multifamily projects and now to an entire city block. The company hopes that its decarbonization efforts will have ripple effects citywide.  

Since Alloy can control every step of its projects—from obtaining financing and purchasing land to design, engineering, and construction—it is able to pursue ideas that the industry as a whole might consider to be risky. “We pick a couple of things that feel like the most durable and the most accurate to the time, and we invest in those,” Pires says. “It’s about finding the one or two things that are achievable.”

A Decarbonization Experiment with Real-World Impact

Alloy bought its block in 2015 and began designing 505 State in 2019 when conversations about climate change and real estate were heating up. The city council began laying the groundwork for what would become Local Law 97, a plan enacted in 2019 that calls for a 40 percent reduction in building emissions (which account for over two-thirds of the city’s greenhouse gas emissions) by 2030 and reaching net zero by 2050. Meanwhile, the gas utilities Con Ed and National Grid said (in what was widely viewed as a politically motivated threat) that they would no longer be able to install new gas connections in the area unless a new pipeline was approved. The confluence of these factors led Alloy to conduct a thought experiment: What would it take to decarbonize the building? It posed this question to its mechanical engineers, who concluded that a high-performing envelope, heat exchange system, energy recovery units, and an electric boiler would do the trick—all of which are widely used in buildings in Europe.

“When it was clear everybody was going to use fiber optic cable lines, you wouldn’t put copper telephone wires in your building,” Pires says. “That’s backwards. We got to a point where we believed we’re going to get to a renewable grid, we’re going to be all-electric, and the city’s going to incentivize us to get there.”

Public Approval Through Environmental Leadership

At the same time, the environmental credentials helped Alloy receive public approval for the project. The Passive House school—a seven-story brick-clad building designed by Architecture Research Office (ARO) and developed in partnership with the New York City School Construction Authority (NYCSCA), which had final approval and sign-off rights—was a key part of this. Because Alloy had publicly promised to build a Passive House school, it was able to help ARO push NYCSCA out of its comfort zone. 

“Alloy helped us decide when we needed to go back and say, ‘I know your standards are this, but we really think it’s worth questioning those in the case of the school,’” says Stephen Cassell, a principal at ARO, who notes that the irregularly shaped site required a creative footprint and layouts that deviated from how most schools are built. “It’s really exciting to contribute to an exemplar of where we should be heading.”

Now, with energy consumption addressed, Alloy is turning to the next decarbonization challenge: embodied carbon, an indicator of how much carbon is emitted for the construction of a building. While this is a growing area of concern for the building industry, there are a lot of unknowns, namely what the actual levels are. While European countries, like Denmark, have embodied carbon targets, the United States does not. Alloy plans to measure the embodied carbon of the second tower it builds on its block as precisely as possible. Perhaps this work will lead to the next green building policy in the city.

“Sustainability has always been a core ethos of ours,” Pires says. “We have always thought of our work as being the mouthpiece under which we could communicate our values and indicate where we think the industry could be.”

Would you like to comment on this article? Send your thoughts to: [email protected]

• Architecture
• Cities
• Sustainability

• Alloy
• Diana Budds
• Real Estate and Development
• Sustainability Commitments