The Cromley Lofts in Alexandria, Virginia have earned a Gold level certification making them the first condos in Virginia to become LEED certified. These 8 beautiful units are located in The Old Town area of Alexandria in a vintage warehouse building circa 1910 — a fitting example of the environmental benefits of adaptive reuse.
This could just be one of the most innovative sustainable designs you’ll see all year. Here’s the background: a team from Weber Thompson designed this building for the Cascadia Natural Talent Design Competition put on by the Emerging Green Builders of the USGBC. They won the Cascadia competition and moved on to compete against about 15 other regional winners from around the country. They won there, too, and "Eco-Laboratory" was announced as the winner of the 2008 Natural Talent Design Competition at Greenbuild. Eco-Laboratory is a theoretical design set in Seattle with affordable and market-rate residential housing, a job training center, homeless shelter, hygiene station, and public farmer’s market.
This is The Union by architect and developer Jonathan Segal Architect. The project gets its name from its prior life as the union hall for San Diego’s textile manufacturing business. When the textile union moved away, the building fell into disrepair, and rather than demolish it, Jonathan Segal decided to adaptively reuse the structure to create sustainable live/work units and his own architectural office. The Union now includes additional buildings that, in total, comprise 13 residential loft units, of which some are market-rate and some are affordable. Also, the rooftop solar panels provide ~50% of the units’ energy needs.
The Lucida, located in New York City’s Upper East Side, is the first LEED condominium building in the neighborhood. If the Upper East Side wasn’t rich enough for your taste, this building certainly adds to the allure. With 110 units, the smallest of which appears to be around 2,000 square feet, this building is certainly not for the average buyer, but it is beautiful.
If you live in LA, you’ve probably heard about Evo and the rest of the newly planted green buildings in the South Park neighborhood (official referred to as "South"). Evo is expected to receive LEED Silver certification, joining its neighbors Luma and Elleven — California’s first LEED Gold condos. At some point, we’ll take the opportunity to talk about both Elleven and Luma as well, but since Newsday published these pictures of the model unit in Evo, we thought it’d be fun to take a look inside.
Project Profiles
