In honor of Earth Week, we’ve made a temporary change to our logo.

While efforts to make everything—including buildings—“greener” tend to dominate the environmental conversation (especially around Earth Day), the energy already embodied in existing buildings should be higher on the sustainability agenda. SUPERSTRUCTURES has long subscribed to the National Trust for Historic Preservation’s position that “the greenest building is one already built.”

The concept of embodied energy in the built environment has been described as, “An accounting, derived from models of economic and ecological systems, of the total expenditure of energy…associated with the life cycle of any given artifact.”¹ This calls for a fundamental shift away from disposable buildings toward a new gospel of adaptive reuse, one that honors embodied energy as an “unnatural resource” we can’t afford to waste.

SUPERSTRUCTURES’ growing list of Lucy G. Moses Preservation awards from the New York Landmarks Conservancy attests to the firm’s commitment to preservation that maintains the embodied energy of landmark buildings while often improving their future performance.

If you’re intrigued by our mission to preserve New York City’s landmarks using state-of-the art tools and methods, consider joining our team of skilled, resourceful architects and engineers.

¹Thomas de Monchaux, “No New Buildings,” Metropolis Magazine, November/December 2019