Architect Randolph Gerner Leads Decarbonization Project to Save Co-Op Building

Randolph Gerner has certainly been a boon to his building. The New York City native, who earned a master’s degree in architecture from the University of Pennsylvania, is a board director at 420 Beekman Hill, a 14-story, 110-unit co-op on East 51st Street. A principal and founder of Gerner Kronick + Valcarcel Architects, Gerner spoke with Habitat about how he draws on skills from his day job.

Double duty. I moved into the co-op about seven years ago, and what attracted me most was the location. It’s on two square blocks just north of the United Nations building overlooking the East River and is quite secluded. It dates back to the 1960s, and I’ve always loved midcentury modern architecture. And it had really good bones. I was tapped to join the board pretty early on. Many boards have lots of lawyers, accountants and financial people, but tend not to have many architects or engineers. My wife, who is in construction management, is also an architect, and when my term limit was up she became a board member, and then when her term limit was up I became a board member again.

Staying in character. Over the years, buildings start to be faceless and need to be reinvigorated. That’s part of my practice, so it made perfect sense to head our lobby and hallway upgrade project. The character of the building didn’t hold together anymore. So we restored our rosewood paneling in the lobby, which had been varnished over and over, and we were able to restore the beautiful Carrara marble floors as well. We also installed a large glass-panel entry door so that the lobby had a nice visual connection to the street. The light fixtures were changed to midcentury design, and we’re now doing the same thing with the furniture. Finally, we created package bins and storage closets that were also reminiscent of the original lobby design.

Top-to-bottom repairs. Another major project was our roof replacement. We ripped up the entire roof, laid down a new one and increased the insulation with a spray foam, which has given us a better thermally performing building. Then we coated the insulation with a silicone waterproofing membrane — it’s manufactured by a company called GacoRoof — which solved all our water issues.

When Facade Inspection & Safety Program repairs had to be done, my wife took over that project. There was a lot of repointing and brick-replacement work. Dealing with contractors on a daily basis for a living, we understand how projects are priced — and how expensive they can be. Quite frankly, in Manhattan, when contractors get a project to bid on, the first thing they look at is the address. And they tend to price projects as much on the address as they do on the set of drawings they’re looking at. But there are people we’ve worked with for years who are trusted contractors and give fair prices.

On the energy forefront. We’re now undertaking the decarbonization of our HVAC and domestic hot water system. We have a traditional 1960s HVAC system using Con Edison steam and depend on hot water to pass through the coils to heat and cool the apartments. But over time, Con Ed no longer had steam as a by-product of generating electricity and
had to generate steam just for the sake of generating steam, which became very expensive.

We decided to switch to a large-scale electric heat pump to provide hot water by replacing the cooling tower on the roof with 10 modular heat pumps, using heat exchanges that transfer water into the existing fan coils in each apartment. We’ve gone so far as to create a second loop in the system that captures the expelled heat from the pumps to heat our domestic hot water, and installed 500-gallon tanks to store the hot water. 

Since the heat pumps are electric, we had to reinforce the electrical capacity of our building and triple the capacity on our switchgear. Interestingly enough, when the building was designed there were additional conduits brought in from the street that had been left empty. With the spare conduits, we didn’t have to dig anything up to bring in more power.  

We’re probably one of the first buildings in New York City being designed and retrofitted using the system. Because we are a leader in this decarbonization project, Con Ed’s clean-energy program stepped up to the plate and gave us a very large incentive. The New York State Energy Research and Development Authority followed up and did the same. So after it’s all said and done, we saved about $700,000, which is about 35% of what we would have paid to upgrade our standard gas system.

Making a difference. You feel a little bit helpless in the world these days when it comes to making a contribution to save the environment. Our residents are feeling that they can do that now, and everybody is really excited because we’re no longer sitting on the sidelines. We are going to meet our LL97 carbon-emission goals for the next 40 years. So you can make a difference, and do it affordably.