https://newrepublic.com/article/178452/clean-air-rich-luxury-good
"When I stepped into John Roe’s apartment early last December, slipping off my
boots at the elevator that opens into the home, it wasn’t immediately clear
that people inhabited the space, let alone a child. The four-bedroom,
four-and-a-half bath Manhattan residence looked like a showroom. In the living
room, a white minimalist couch with no arms confronted two white bouclé chairs.
White couch, white lamps, white walls. Even Roe’s wife, Cherry, wore white.
Charlotte of the Upper West Side has no dust, she told me—unlike the couple’s
previous home, on the sixty-second floor of the Four Seasons Private
Residences. Above my head, gentle classical music issued from invisible
speakers.
Roe, a ruddy Asian man who wore a pink polo shirt tucked into khaki pants, is
the developer of this nine-story brick and terra-cotta building, named after
his daughter. His goal, Roe said, was to create the most immaculate and
sustainable indoor environment possible. He obtained a Passive House Institute
certification, which recognizes when buildings minimize the energy used for
heating and cooling with airtight seals and insulation. (Such measures can
decrease energy consumption by up to 90 percent.) To reduce residents’
inhalation of volatile organic compounds, Roe employed nontoxic building
materials. Indeed, the star of Charlotte is its air. Each unit sports its own
Swiss-engineered ventilation system, called Zehnder. On an iPad, Roe showed me
the app that gives residents control over what they breathe.
The building’s approach to filtration is undeniably sophisticated. The air in
each unit isn’t shared with any other. Outside air is brought in, filtered,
treated with an ultraviolet-C light that kills 99.9 percent of pathogens, and
completely changed out once per hour. Circulation can be boosted or slowed.
Most apartments with similar systems recycle the air every four to five hours a
day. “We were thinking, if we’re already going to build a Ferrari, then why
would we only give it a 200-horsepower engine?” Roe said. “Let’s put a
1,000-horsepower engine into it.” The quadruple-layer, triple-paned windows
feature museum-quality glass and are generally opened only for cleaning.
Otherwise, you’d let in air far dirtier than what’s circulating inside.
At night, when Roe’s family is sleeping, it “smells like you’re camping,
because the fresh air is getting pumped in at such a rapid rate,” he said. You
know the air is good, he told me, because the hydrangeas last. Typically, when
cut at the stem and arranged in a vase, the delicate flowers wither and droop
in a few days. In his apartment, the blooms will stay perky for nearly two
weeks.
Walking down the long hallways, I took deep, greedy breaths. There was a
complete absence of odor, yet somehow the air felt bright, abundant—the
opposite of stuffy, the inverse of stale."
Via Violet Blue’s
Pandemic Roundup: February 29, 2024
https://www.patreon.com/posts/pandemic-roundup-99442377
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
