Well-Preserved: How a Historic Retrofit Models Modernity Through Well Standards

Human wellness is paramount to developers and tenants in 2020. With the answer of how precisely to achieve it in the built environment ever-changing, it’s helpful to have a north star.

As such, many look to torchbearers such as the International Well Building Institute (IWBI), which pioneered the Well Building Standard rating system to help pinpoint the paradigms of building efficiency and user wellbeing.

So, in an age of unprecedented focus on health and safety, LoopNet checked in with the vanguard group of thought leaders to learn more about its most recent Well benchmarks and how the principles influenced the buildout of its own New York City headquarters, which it spawned through a feat of its own: retrofitting an iconic, century-old building in Midtown Manhattan.

A Gothic Revival tower built in 1912 — the landmarked Croisic Building, in this case — wouldn’t generally serve as an archetype of efficiency or sustainability. But the IWBI’s occupied space in it now does, the institute says, considering it exceeded top metrics among its “concepts,” ranging from air quality to behavior policies, which each have preconditions and can be scored on a points scale, to obtain its “Platinum” certification.

Not many would undertake such a task — to crack open a historic monolith and create in it a sanctity of modern standards — but along with architecture firm CookFox, IWBI says it chose to take on that challenge for the very sake of sustainability. “Rather than tearing down an architectural gem that is a part of the character and historic fabric of New York City, we were able to renovate using less resources than a ground-up development would and continue to improve upon the space,” Liz Miles, IWBI’s vice president of stakeholder relations, told LoopNet.

Hitting the platinum ranking, the highest level among IWBI’s set of wellness concepts, would be laudable in any structure, considering it requires satisfaction of all Well preconditions and 80 points on its scale, the organization explained. It was even more challenging within a building that’s been standing for more than 100 years.

But IWBI, which manages and administers the third-party-certified Well Building Standard program for buildings, said the experience was crucial to understanding its role in driving equitable opportunity among participants throughout the global commercial real estate industry, which must work with a wide-range of approaches and resources and buildings of all ages and types.

The challenge of targeting an old building — and purposefully doing so on a relatively conservative budget — provided IWBI a clearer view of what its clients and followers across the globe experience in their own endeavors to achieve these standards, Miles said. Despite a “limited budget and little control over architectural and engineered aspects of the building,” the team achieved the certification by offsetting the buildout burdens with nuances in interior design, operations and policy.

Around the time of the 2017 buildout, IWBI was just launching the pilot program of its updated version of the Well standards, Well v2. “Our key goal was to drive equity into the architecture of the standard,” she explained. Crafting guidelines for a more accessible path to certification involved removing “barriers of entry … so that different building types, buildings in various stages with a range of budgets, and buildings in all parts of the world” could pursue it, she said.

The range of structural elements of the historic building were both a blessing and a bane, CookFox Senior Associate and Project Architect Bethany Borel explained. For instance, its grand, brass-clad windows, important at construction due to the illumination needs of the time, are relevant now in providing abundant natural light that IWBI considers paramount to human wellbeing. The retrofit’s engineers didn’t have much choice in changing the windows anyway, due to preservation parameters, Borel explained, but they were able to use them to the building’s advantage.

That doesn’t mean the windows didn’t provide challenges. “The large and stunning … gold-framed windows are original and operable,” Miles pointed out. “For an ample amount of golden natural light, beautiful views of the treetops changing during the seasons and the ability to get a bit of fresh air, they are wonderful. Unfortunately, [the single-pane, wood-frame windows] don't perform as well acoustically or thermally.”

There are workarounds to such setbacks, though. “A simple solution is to introduce noise machines that add ‘white’ or ‘pink’ noise and can come with a variety of options to help mitigate the exterior noise infiltration,” Borel said.

As for the thermal aspects and temperature control, the building’s interior infrastructure, clearly designed for a different era as well, also needed to be addressed to meet today’s standards. “Historic office building structures typically have lower slab-to-slab heights, thus lower ceiling heights,” Borel noted. “This was adequate for natural ventilation of the time but can often pose a unique challenge when introducing modern overhead or underfloor mechanical systems.”

The solution for Borel’s team, in this instance, was to keep all overhead air distribution systems exposed and doused in white. “This allows our eyes to gaze past the edge of the sheet metal … to read the underside of the slab as the highest point, so the daylight and the play of light and shadow can travel up into the ceiling plane beyond the ductwork.”

As for the airflow, mitigating respiratory disease through air quality was already a chief concern of Well standards prior to the coronavirus outbreak, Miles said, so the pre-pandemic buildout already incorporated elements such as outdoor air supply, direct exhaust in restrooms and personalized ventilation features.

But the Well body’s 600-member COVID-19 task force continued the efforts of targeting ever-changing ideals, responding by revising seven out of the 10 official Well concepts. Refined guidelines included promotion of tenets such as 100% outdoor-supplied air systems and treating recirculated air through media filters for particulate matter; ultraviolet germicidal irradiation (UVGI) for microbes; and carbon filters for volatile organic compounds (VOCs).

For designers, science plays a key role in the process. “We are not doctors nor mechanical engineers,” Borel said, “so we must rely on our consultants for their expertise … and we’re learning from them that, if larger-scale mechanical system filtration upgrades are not an option due to the air handling unit sizes, [particle-size filtration limits], or budget constraints, for example, there are many standalone filtration units that are great options for smaller office spaces like IWBI’s [6,000-square-foot] headquarters.”

The minimum efficiency reporting values system, or MERV, another touchstone for filtration standards, are also coming into play more than ever in these changing times, Borel continued. “Many clients are also looking into upgrading from the standard MERV 7 – MERV 13 filters — which are up to 50% effective for particles ranging from 0.3 and 1.0 microns — to MERV 15 filters, which are 85% effective.”

Other factors the firm is seeing demand for include increased implementation of systems with higher air exchange rates — a measure of how often HVAC systems replace air per hour — and “bipolar ionization,” which Borel explained uses a “combination of agglomeration, sterilization and oxidation, rather than filtration, to reorganize the ions within the air passing through the system.”

Thoughtful features didn’t stop at structural and mechanical elements, though. The CookFox partnership was paramount to achieving IWBI’s goals, as both sides strove to satisfy mutual ideologies, which involve numerous intangible considerations as well.

In fact, it required a lot more than simply a rigid adherence to parameters, Borel said. Instead, it called for thinking about the ultimate purpose of the design challenges at hand. “Certification standards such as LEED, Well, Fitwel and others are helpful tools to benchmark and determine if our initial health and wellness goals have been achieved, but we do not specifically design to meet a certification requirement: our design approach is goal-focused, not certification-focused.”

CookFox’s ability to deliver Well metrics at IWBI’s office, however, was due in large part to it having already achieved Well performance measures on many projects of different scales,” she added. Examples include the firm’s own office, which it completed in 2017 and a “large, master-planned community” designed to Well standards in Tampa, Florida, currently under construction.

“Working with IWBI as a client for their own space was a dream — we knew from the beginning that our goals and mission were perfectly aligned to create the healthiest work environment for their team,” Borel said. “We worked closely with [IWBI CEO and Chairman] Rick Fedrizzi and his team on each design selection, from the aspects of planning and engineering of the space, down to the selection of the color of the ceiling, to the final carpet tile.”

To round out the space, the team included ergonomic furniture, reflective finishes, biophilic textures, patterns and colors, Miles said, and “lots and lots of plants.”

That extended into human resource policies outlined in Well’s official concepts, such as “nourishment,” “movement,” “mind” and “community,” and involved both introducing new benefits and adjusting existing ones. Well standards rely on “just as many policy interventions as design interventions,” she pointed out, and scoring the highest certification at its headquarters relied heavily on these soft principles, including incentives for volunteering, telework flexibility, mental health considerations, subsidized bike share memberships and health-focused wearables.

Another thoughtful touch for the office included a pet policy for employees. As to how it fits in with Well standards overall, Miles explained that the organization does not have an official stance on pets in the office and instead encourages firms to “weigh the benefits within their own unique organizations and workplace culture.” Her firm did just that, through employee feedback, to come to the decision to allow pet-owners to bring their four-legged friends in under certain company guidelines.