Guardian Service Industries, Inc.

By  RONDA KAYSEN Scented candles. Fragrance sticks. Incense. Potpourri. Many of us spend a lot of time (and money) trying to make our homes smell pretty. Hotels have been dousing their lobbies with fragrances for years, hoping we’ll keep booking rooms at the Westin because it smells like White Tea. Now, rental buildings and condominiums in  New York City  have caught onto the idea, infusing lobbies, hallways and fitness centers with fragrances. Sometimes they are blown in through the ductwork, other times stand-alone machines do the job. Either way, the building smells a whole lot fresher than a city sidewalk. Take  21 West End , a rental on the Upper West Side. Ever since it opened in September, tenants have been attributing its summery aroma to the floral arrangements. Building staff members are quick to set the record straight: The lobby smells like a beach because of Ocean Mist, a fragrance pumped in through the ductwork. “You really pick your head up and take notice,”

The largest US state-owned utility is a believer in "what gets measured gets improved" and can show the results, says NYPA CEO Gil Quiniones by Gil C Quiniones It gets harder by the day to prioritise the waves of data coming at us to determine what’s relevant, what’s noise and — most importantly — what to do with what the data we consider relevant. At the New York Power Authority, the largest state-owned utility in the US, we had the opportunity to harness the potential of Big Data and the deep trove of analytics it provided to take on the challenge of how it could cut energy use in New York state. Suffice to say, this was no small undertaking — data gets unwieldy in a hurry. But we’ve managed to tame the digital beast. The results are now apparent at our New York Energy Manager Network Operations Center (NYEM) in Albany, the capital of New York state. NYEM will use its trove of information to dramatically reduce energy consumption in more than 3,000 state bu

How to Keep Buildings From Killing Hundreds of Millions of Birds a Year SAM LUBELL DESIGN   DATE OF PUBLICATION: 11.01.16. 11.01.16   TIME OF PUBLICATION: 7:00 AM. 7:00 AM ARCHITECTS’ GROWING AFFINITY  for glassy buildings has given the world better views, more natural light, sexier skylines—and a lot of dead birds. The US Fish and Wildlife Service estimates about 750 million birds perish annually flying into glass façades, which can be hard to distinguish from open airspace. The problem is so bad in some places that skyscraper owners hire workers to remove expired birds from the bottoms of their buildings. Guy Maxwell, a partner at New York-based Ennead Architects, is on a mission to mitigate this fowl holocaust. A bird lover his entire life, he first became aware of architecture’s deadly impact on avifauna 15 years ago, shortly after the completion of his firm’s Rose Center for Earth and Space at NYC’s American Museum of Natural History. The enormous glass cube afforded un