Urban Discoveries Baltimore

Occasionally it’s nice to be reminded of the good that big corporations can accomplish by way of their corporate bigness. Two years ago, ground broke on a new Fairfield Inn and Suites in the Inner Harbor (101 President Street) on the site of the old Baltimore Brewing Company. Aside from the usual fanfare that accompanies any expansion of Marriott’s bargain brand, there was some additional to-do over the Brewer’s Park location due to the company’s plans for not-yet-mandatory greenness. This summer the Fairfield Inn and Suites at President and Lombard will open as Baltimore’s first LEED-certified hotel.

LEED, which stands for Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design, is an adaptable metric devised by the U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC) to accredit buildings at any and all stages of construction, use, and renovation. Greenness is a quality the categorical validity of which we’ve gradually come to accept as a culture, but if it is to have application beyond the realms of the Giving Tree and the Lorax, we need to recognize that it is not an innate quality like, say, redness, but rather a relative quality, like relevance. (Berkeleyites, relax.) As a yardstick for such things, LEED does an excellent job. It assesses not simply the PR friendliness of the building’s recycling program, but also its basic contextual soundness through evaluations of things like water and energy use, CO2 emissions, efficiency of materials, and structural compactness. Among other accomplishments, the Inner Harbor hotel has earned points for drawing power from the wind and the sun as well as incorporating signs, bricks, and storage tanks from the old brewery.

Thursday’s first-look construction tour of the site is already sold out, so you’ll have to wait until doors open in July. Then you and your sweetie can splurge on an environmentally responsible night of anonymous local romance. Or just stroll by and gawk.
What new green scenes have you noticed around Baltimore lately?

Posted in: Development News, Inner HarborNo Comments