June 3, 2009
Yuri is our 2009 summer intern, hailing from LaGuardia Community College.
February 20, 2009
Having grown up in various countries and developed a love for traveling,
Olivia Susai Eckfeld found a passion for the urban environment at an early age. After attaining her bachelor’s degree in urban planning in Perth, Australia (her hometown) she moved to Canada and received her Master of Planning degree at Queen’s University focusing on city planning (public space design and environmental psychology). She then worked in strategic planning policy and real estate development for a few years in Toronto. Since moving to New York in early 2008, she has been involved with green organizations and became a LEED AP. She hopes to combine her passion in planning and sustainability into a dream career in sustainable development in this city. Outside of work, Olivia enjoys a good hot chocolate, photography and painting.
February 4, 2009
Chris Benedict is an architect in New York City. Her firm, Chris Benedict, R.A. specializes in the design of energy efficient, durable, healthy housing projects that are built for the same price as typical construction.
Chris has rehabilitated eighty-one apartment buildings in New York City. Eighteen of these buildings were the first sustainable and energy efficient gut rehabilitation projects in New York City (1997). The project was awarded Environmental Project of the Year by The New York Chapter of The Association of Energy Engineers (AEE) and Chris was awarded Environmental Professional of the Year in 1999 by AEE International. Chris’ ground breaking strategies for gut rehabilitation in New York City have become the basis for The City of New York’s new guidelines for construction. Four new construction residential buildings with 104 apartments designed by Chris are complete. These new buildings each use 15% of the energy of a typical building of the same size for heat and hot water, and 50% of the electricity but cost the same to build as typical residential buildings.
Brian Cheigh is currently managing an ARRA-funded, 1000+ unit Weatherization Assistance Program as the Community Weatherization Partners Program Coordinator at Enterprise Community Partners. He was previously a Senior Project Manager at the New York City Department of Housing Preservation & Development, and more recenlty, the Deputy Director for Housing Development at St. Nicholas Neighborhood Preservation Corporation in Brooklyn. While at St. Nicholas, Brian and his team have focused their efforts to ensure the long-term affordability and sustainability of St. Nicholas’ rental housing portfolio through the sale of Inclusionary Housing Benefits and implementation of energy efficient retrofits.
Brian holds a Masters Degree in City Planning from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he was awarded the Graduate Student Community Service Award from his Department for his work with the greater Boston community. He wrote his master’s thesis on the economic revitalization impacts of Dominican entrepreneurs in Lawrence, Massachusetts, a small post-industrial just northwest of Boston. Prior to becoming a City Planner, Brian worked for South Brooklyn Legal Services as a paralegal representing low-income households in Brooklyn on tax controversy disputes and providing know-your-rightsworkshops in immigrant communities all over the City.
Brian serves on the board of
Community Tax Aid, a non-profit that has been preparing tax returns at no cost for low-income taxpayers since 1969.
Evangeline Dennie, LEED AP is an architectural designer, green building consultant, and founder of EDennie Design for Sustainability. Her most notable design work includes the Tribute Center, which serves as an interim memorial and educational center at Ground Zero (BKSK), and Oulu Bar and Ecolounge in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Since 2003, Evangeline managed the green building process and facilitated workshops for dozens of educational and commercial projects, as well as co-authored high performance building guidelines with Hillary Brown, AIA, and lead the green consulting team for the first LEED for Existing Buildings high-rise in New York for Random House Bertelsman. She practices, and will soon start teaching green building design by providing workshops from her design studio in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. For more info, email: office AT edennie.com
Tony Daniels is principal of Cycle Architecture, a full service architecture and green building practice in New York. His career has focused on buildings and projects known for their outstanding environmental performance and design excellence. He has served clients including single individuals and large government agencies, ranging from very large to very small. A graduate of Columbia College, he resides in Brooklyn with his wife and two sons.
Architect
Mark Helder is completing ‘439 Metropolitan Green’, his first project as both designer and developer. The building is a high-performance LEED registered building located in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Mark is committed to bringing highly energy-efficient, environmentally responsible design to the high-end as well as the lower income and affordable housing sector. Mark’s past projects include private homes, not-for-profit spaces, multi-family complexes, and commercial spaces. Mark Helder expanded his studio, Helder Design, from the Netherlands to New York in 2002. The work of Helder Design has been exhibited in the Chicago Architecture Foundation, the South-Eastern Center for Contemporary Design in South Carolina, Gallery 312 in Chicago, and the AIA Center for Architecture in New York City.
Architect
Matthew Skjonsberg works as a project leader for West 8, a leading international office for urban design and landscape architecture, founded by Adriaan Geuze in 1987. A native of the state of Wisconsin, and of the first generation in his family not to farm, Matthew built projects in the private and public sectors in WI, MN, MI and NM prior to joining West 8. He has been a faculty member teaching architecture at Taliesin, the Frank Lloyd Wright School of Architecture, Lawrence University, University of Wisconsin-Stout Polytechnic, and has given lectures and expert workshops at numerous institutions, including the ETH in Zurich, the Berlage Institute in Rotterdam, Parsons in New York, and Harvard GSD in Cambridge. He has participated in diverse symposia, and in 2008 his work ‘Performative Corridors’ (Addis Ababa, Ethiopia) was featured in the Swiss Pavilion at the 2008 Venice Biennale, ‘Out There: Architecture Beyond Building’.
Jeff Perlman is the President of
Bright Power, an energy consultancy. Before founding Bright power, he co-authored (with Greg Kats at Capital E) “The Costs and Financial Benefits of Green Buildings”, a ground-breaking report used economic cost/benefit analysis to show that building healthy, energy-efficient, and environmentally responsible buildings make economic sense, too. He has a degree in Applied Physics from Yale University, and believes that buildings that do well are buildings that benchmark.
January 3, 2009
Robbie Holden has an interest in sustainable building practices and how it can enhance one’s emotional and physiological well being thus impacting behavior. She is particularly interested in research that confirms that sustainable medical facilities can improve recovery time after surgery, and that green educational institutions are more conducive to learning. She currently is a mental health therapist in private practice in lower Manhattan. Robbie also provides services to patients at a Davita Dialysis Clinic in the Bronx, NY. She has been in the behavioral health field for approximately 12 years. She has 5 ½ years of management experience with non profits in New York City and has performed post deployment assessments and brief treatment to Iraqi and Afghanistan veterans in the States of NY and NJ. Robbie has her undergraduate degree from Rutgers University and her graduate degree from the University of Maryland.
