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New Haven's historic Pirelli Building is set to become the country's first Passive House certified and net-zero energy hotel.
It's been said the most sustainable buildings are the ones that already exist, Indeed, adaptive reuse and historic renovation projects have the benefit of preserving existing building materials and the embodied carbon within them, diverting construction waste from landfills and utilizing less energy compared to new construction projects, However, transforming a 50-year-old office building into one of the most sustainable hotels in the country is another story altogether, But that's exactly what architect and developer Bruce Redman Becker of Becker + Becker set out to do when he purchased the historic Pirelli Tire Building in New Haven, Connecticut, in 2020,
Listed on the State and National Register of Historic Places, the icon of Brutalist architecture is now getting a second life as the Hotel Marcel (opening in April 2022), the country's first Passive House certified and first net zero energy hotel, and one of only about a dozen LEED Platinum-certified hotels in the U.S,
The hotel will feature 165 guest rooms and suites, full-service new American restaurant and bar, a lounge and 7,000 square feet of meeting and event space with penthouse courtyard and galleries, More importantly Hotel Marcel will be all-electric, generating 100% of its own electricity and energy for heat and hot water with a rooftop solar array and solar parking canopies,
The remodeled property will also include many cutting-edge technologies to modernize the building, including a Power over Ethernet (PoE) lighting system, renewable on-site energy generation, plus extensive upgrades to enhance interior temperature control and air quality, The building's Energy Use Intensity (EUI) rating is projected to be...