New York City architect Jared Della Valle began his career buying and redesigning existing buildings. In 2002, he invited three other architects to cooperate on a project to transform five vacant lots in East Brooklyn into 10 attractive low-cost homes – demonstrating his profession’s power to lead social change. After two decades of designing both millionaires’ penthouses and socially conscious housing projects, Della Valle’s firm, Alloy Development, is turning heads again, with a gleaming tower in downtown Brooklyn called 505 State Street: New York’s first all-electric skyscraper.
The 44-storey building with 440 market-rate residences is a three-sided landmark (like the famous Flatiron Building in nearby Manhattan) amid a full city block that Alloy is redeveloping. The super-efficient, fossil-fuel-free tower has integrated improved insulation and triple-glazed windows, as well as residential heat pumps and electric water heaters. Years ahead of an incoming state ban on the use of natural gas for heating and cooking in new buildings (taller buildings will have until 2029 to go all-electric), the development supplies induction stoves rather than gas-powered appliances and heat-pump dryers that reuse their warm air so they dry clothes at lower temperatures. Building systems also incorporate energy-recovery ventilators that transfer heat between incoming and outgoing airstreams – effectively pre-cooling or pre-heating the air.
“It’s really not that complicated at the end of the day,” Della Valle told Fast Company. “The less you need air-conditioning and the less you need heating, the less energy you’ll use overall, and therefore we can reduce the size of our systems and get them to a place, from an engineering perspective, where we can create enough hot water and enough energy to satisfy those demands.”
Although he makes the process sound easy, it’s a big global deal. The buildings sector generates nearly 40% of the world’s carbon emissions, and 60% of that comes from burning fossil fuels to heat water. (In Toronto, natural gas for residential heating accounts for 30% of the city’s total emissions.) 505 State Street shows what modern low-carbon building techniques can do – when teamed with purposeful design.
Alloy’s secret weapon? In 2006, Della Valle designed a Manhattan penthouse for entrepreneur Katherine McConvey, the founder and CEO of Texas-based KMM, a cable and wireless supplier to big telecom firms. McConvey, who grew up in Cobourg, Ontario, loved his work and shared his social vision, so she proposed they accelerate that impact by starting their own company. McConvey’s deep pockets enable Alloy to move faster and take on bigger deals. As Della Valle told architecture news site Building Design + Construction, “It’s all part of Katherine’s personal mission to invest in the city.”
As 505 State Street began leasing in January, Della Valle called it “a transformative development that represents the future of sustainable living.” That’s not just hot air. Alloy is enrolling in community solar projects to secure 100% local renewable energy. The building uses natural materials where possible and encourages people-powered transportation, offering parking for 200 bicycles – and no cars. And 43% of the project’s construction value – about US$115 million – went to minority- and women-owned businesses.
Smaller projects, such as the 45-unit Orion condominium in Pemberton, B.C., have already proven that high-performance, net-zero multi-storey buildings aren’t just feasible in cold climates: they can cost up to 30% less to build than traditional designs. A 2023 report from the World Green Building Council found that 80% of countries now include buildings in their climate-action plans – but only 26% have mandatory codes for the entire buildings sector, and few of those reflect the scale and speed needed to halve global carbon emissions by 2030. Three cheers for the innovators showing the way – but governments must do more to ensure that builders adopt the technologies that are already available.
