Bright Power Invited to Furman Center Retrofit Solutions Workshop

NEWS

Bright Power’s VP of Engineering Andy McNamara, along with Mike Brusic and James Hannah, will be participating in this American Institute of Architects New York (AIANY) event on Saturday, 1/11/14.

Furman Center for Real Estate and Policy

From the event description:

The invitation-only Workshop is a one-day event that is part of our project (funded by the Donor’s Collaborative) to develop implementation plans and identify barriers for innovative retrofit strategies to protect affordable multifamily housing from future climate threats. The work done that day, and the Furman Center’s related research, will be published in a report in Spring 2014. 

This project builds on the work completed by the AIANY housing taskforce identifying innovative retrofit solutions. Our goal is to move some of the ideas generated from that work—and from the work of other resiliency efforts—closer to implementation in vulnerable multifamily buildings that provide affordable housing. At the Workshop, we will convene teams of experts to plan how to implement retrofits on actual buildings. It will also help us identify the regulatory barriers to implementation that we will then research and detail in the report that we produce.

Working with the AIANY and Enterprise Community Partners, we have identified three affordable rental buildings, broadly representative of NYC’s rental housing stock, that the teams will use as case studies. Ahead of the Workshop, the team members will be divided into three groups. Each group will be assigned to a building; given detailed information about that building; and assigned a retrofit strategy to apply to that building. Each team will include architects, engineers, cost estimators, and other technical experts. At the Workshop, each team will be tasked with developing a retrofit plan for the building (including but not limited to the retrofit you’ve been assigned) and identify all obstacles an owner would face in implementing the plan.