Will Allston be Florida or New York?

For the foreseeable future, Allston will be neither, but this month’s installment of New Yorker Currents raises important issues about green architecture and green commuting. Someday, if Harvard ever brings back its ideas to bring 10,000 additional people to North Allston every day, this question will deserve careful consideration.

During the review of Harvard's Allston Science complex, the topic of how people get to work got some hand-waving about bikes and shuttle buses, but with the exception of North Harvard Street bike lanes we've never seen much action or specific planning about improving the "roots of the city" on a magnitude needed to handle this massive increase in demand.

Currents: Richard Cook on Sustainable Architecture : The New Yorker

Paul Goldberger, The New Yorker’s architecture critic, spoke with Richard Cook, a partner in Cook+Fox Architects and the designer of the new Bank of America Tower, a Manhattan skyscraper, completed earlier this year, that is the largest building to receive a LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) Platinum certification, the highest standard set by the U.S. Green Building Council.

23 minutes into the interview they talk about how people get to work and how transportation in cities allows for huge energy savings:

• In an urban setting, the people who work in a building use 1/20th the energy and have 1/20th the carbon production because people use mass transit when compared to a suburban office setting.


• The Bank of America tower is a 2.2 million sq ft tower without a single parking space in the building.


• Hybrid cars are not the answer - mass transit is (a subway car in New York rush hour gets 540 passenger miles per gallon.