The office polled its staff about the design of the work areas: Did they want conventional sit-down desks or standing ones? All opted for the latter, and management obliged, despite the costs involved. (There are 43 such workstations—Teknion’s Expansion Cityline collection—for a full-time staff of 35.) Both the architects and IWBI solicited products from manufacturers such as Kaiterra, which donated an air-quality monitoring system, and Teknion, which contributed furniture. Courtesy Eric Laignel
Newly ensconced on the eighth floor of a gracefully aging neo-Gothic Fifth Avenue tower, just below looming gargoyles, the 35 full-time New York employees of the International WELL Building Institute(IWBI) often get a little chilly. Or too hot, depending on the vagaries of the radiant pipes that still line the 1912 building. Staffers have figured out which spots on the floor are a better bet, intel that’s led to what IWBI president Rachel Gutter calls “the thermal comfort wars.”
“It’s like, if I’m running the meeting, then I get to set the temperature,” she says. “By giving people the ability to choose where they work, they get to be in a warmer section of the office or the cooler one.”
Such is the challenge of a retrofit, with acoustics running a close second: IWBI’s lease is blessed and cursed by original copper-framed, double-hung windows—easy on the eyes but rough on the ears, as the symphony of New York’s streets can become a little much. Project architect Bethany Borel of COOKFOX, the firm responsible for the office revamp, made sure the open floor plan included quiet getaways such as four peripheral conference rooms (each named after a different Beatle), 3-by-3.5-foot “phone booths,” and a lactation room.
Mitigating temperature swings and traffic Klaxons paled in comparison with the project brief, which compelled the architects to achieve the ambitious WELL Building Standard Certification (now in its v2 pilot) for the very team that administers it. That meant achieving enough credits on a 100-point scale to come in with a certification of WELL v2 Silver (at least 50 points), Gold (60), or Platinum (80 and up).
IWBI relies on Green Business Certification Inc. (GBCI) as a WELL third-party reviewer (GBCI also performs the service for LEED), so it wasn’t judging itself. But it was getting real-world experience in the design gymnastics necessary to lock in a variety of healthy building credits, all on a limited budget. Attempting this in a retrofit would pressure-test an overall ethos to make the WELL Standard accessible across the board.
“We wanted a space that would reflect the values that we were baking into WELL v2, which was designed to be more equitable and more inclusive, in particular to be friendlier to existing buildings and tenant spaces in existing buildings,” Gutter explains.