Sendero Verde in TIME Magazine’s Portrait of America in 25 Buildings and Monuments

The highly sustainable and award-winning affordable housing complex Sendero Verde features in TIME Magazine’s “Portrait of America” list of 25 structures, monuments, and urban concepts that embody this moment in our nation’s history.

Redefining sustainable affordable urban housing, the three-building complex, which also features extensive educational and community program, stands as the largest Passive House affordable housing development in the United States. A highly sustainable design standard, Passive House dramatically reduces energy use and promotes healthier air quality within structures—especially important in urban areas where rates of environmentally related illness and conditions like asthma are high.

DeSimone designed the concrete block-and-plank structure for Sendero Verde—which holds a place on the list alongside such icons as Central Park, the Statue of Liberty, and the Getty Center in Los Angeles—as a model for of how sustainability, affordable housing, and community engagement can work in concert to create exceptional places.

Our structural engineering team, led by Managing Principal Mukesh Parikh, PE, and Associate Principal Lokanath Nagaraja, PE, collaborated closely with Handel Architects and developers Jonathan Rose Companies, L+M Development Partners, and Arcadia Network to support sustainable performance, detail for airtightness, and minimize thermal bridging across envelope transitions.

Frequent implementors of sustainable design principles, Mukesh and Lokanath designed the structures for the award-winning Winthrop Center in Boston, the largest Commercial Passive House in the world, and the upcoming One Third Avenue in Brooklyn, designed to become the tallest Passive House in the world.

Read full article here.

Photo: Albert Vecerka, ESTO