One Bryant Park: Coronation for Urination Innovation

Popular Science magazine names the construction of the Bank America Tower at One Bryant Park the top tech innovation of 2005 in the Engineering category.

Set to rise 54 stories above Manhattan, the crystalline Bank of America Tower at One Bryant Park will incorporate an unrivaled number of environmentally friendly technologies, from its windows to its toilets. The building will supply 70 percent of its own energy with an on-site natural-gas-burning power plant. For climate control, One Bryant Park will rely on excess thermal energy from the power plant, a groundwater heat exchanger that is the first of its type, and an air-conditioning system cooled by ice made with excess power during off-peak hours. The building will even have waterless urinals and use water collected from the roof to flush toilets. Together, these systems are designed to earn the building a Platinum rating—the highest possible—from the U.S. Green Building Council when construction is completed in 2008 and, the builders hope, will also save the kind of green that matters to shareholders.

Do you see Little 4 Times Square, home of Conde Nast, in the background at the bottom of the picture? Here's pissing on you, Si.

One Bryant Park: The most ambitious eco-friendly skyscraper [Popular Science]