Gilbane Building Co. and architect Marvel have finished a $128 million all-electric building in Brooklyn that New York City says came in $10 million under budget and two years ahead of schedule. The city announced completion of the Brownsville Multi-Service Center on Sept. 28 and gave the credit to design-build, a delivery method its agencies are still new to.
The four-story, 60,000-square-foot center will house community organizations and Brooklyn Community Board 16.
What the All-Electric Building Includes
There’s no gas service. Solar panels sit on three levels, green roofs cover other areas, and the city expects the project to meet or exceed LEED Gold. Expects is the operative word. Certification hasn’t been awarded.
The demolition numbers are more concrete. Crews removed about 11,000 tons of material from the structure that previously stood on the site, and the city says 85% of it went to recycling facilities.
The program is ordinary by design: 10 office suites, three conference rooms that combine into one hall, a commercial kitchen and a 1,600-square-foot community garden.
How Design-Build Saved Two Years
The Department of Design and Construction ran the job for the Department of Social Services under a two-step procurement. Jade Bailey, DDC’s assistant commissioner for alternative delivery, told Construction Dive that the format let the agency bring Gilbane up to speed early and pull forward work that normally waits for an award. Gilbane took down the old structure while the team was still designing the new one.
That overlap is the whole trick. Under traditional design-bid-build, demolition would have waited for completed drawings and a low-bid award.
Raquel Diaz, Gilbane’s New York City business leader, said the method let the Providence, Rhode Island-based contractor work with Marvel earlier to match key decisions to the schedule. Bailey called the result “another feather in the cap for design-build.”
Reading the $10 Million Savings and $2,133 a Square Foot
Some caution on the savings. Both the two years and the $10 million are measured against the city’s own estimate of what the same building would have cost and taken under the old method. Nobody built the control case. The city’s numbers imply an original budget of about $138 million.
And $128 million over 60,000 square feet is roughly $2,133 a square foot, by the city’s project figure, which covers demolition as well as the new building. That would stop a private developer cold. Under budget and cheap are different things.
Still, the direction matters for contractors chasing public work in New York. DDC has been pushing all-electric and low-waste requirements through its clean construction program, which traces to Executive Order 23 in 2022, and it’s now pairing them with a procurement model that rewards early contractor involvement.
The state is paying for the same shift in housing, with a $75 million heat pump incentive aimed at all-electric new homes. And the LEED target deserves context: USGBC’s own data, which we covered last week, shows entry-level certified projects cutting emissions 14% a year and Platinum projects 41%. Where a Gold building without a gas meter lands, the city hasn’t said.
The center opens to its tenants in the coming months. The next test is whether DDC can post the same result on a job where the comparison is a real bid, not an estimate.