The 68,000-square-foot, two-story school serves 444 pre-kindergarten through fifth grade students. The cutting-edge building harvests as much energy from renewable on-site sources as it uses on an annual basis. Designed to comply with the SCA Green Schools Guide in lieu of LEED® certification, the project is the NYC School Construction Authority’s first “sustainability lab.” 

This exploration into ultimate sustainability will provide substantial benefits to the City’s School Design Program and help achieve PlaNYC goals for significant reductions in global warming emissions. The design offers an energy-use reduction of 50% over a SCA standard public school. The design optimized the orientation and massing of the courtyard-shaped building to take advantage of sunlight for both ample daylighting and photovoltaic arrays on the roof and south facade. 

Other sustainable and low-energy features incorporated in the design include an ultra-tight high-performance building envelope, daylit offset corridors, energy-efficient lighting fixtures, low-energy kitchen equipment, a greenhouse and vegetable garden, a geo-exchange system, energy recovery ventilators and demand-control ventilation, and a solar thermal system for hot water. Our Increased-resolution modeling reveals gaps in power supply from on-site systems due to time-of-use mismatch and daylighting/glare asymmetries.

Yale CEA (as CASE) performed a comprehensive ecosystems analysis of the potential for incumbent and emerging sustainable technologies to impact the energy consumption profile and to actively generate on-site heat and power in order to reach the NY Department of Education (DOE) goal to reach On-Site Net Zero. Subsequiently, Yale CEA team developed comprehensive ecosystematic design strategies throughout the entire technical and social systems for PS. 62 including an analysis of occupent behaviours and energy consumption profiles.