THE Condé Nast building at 4 Times Square was completed in 1999 and was the Dursts’ first environmentally responsible office tower.

When I was a child, I told my father that I wanted to work in real estate when I grew up. He said not to do it, because the business had so many ups and downs. Early in my career, I saw my father go through one of the worst of the downturns, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, when New York City almost went bankrupt.

Since then, though, many of the luxury office towers my father envisioned in the once-seedy area of Times Square have been built. My cousin Jody and I completed one of them, the Condé Nast building at 4 Times Square, in 1999. It is the first New York skyscraper designed from the drawing board to be fully environmentally friendly. I have come to realize that people either care about environmental degradation or do not. Rather than trying to convince those who do not care, I prefer to describe this as the intelligent way to build a building, because most people do not want to build stupid buildings.

None of this was a grand design, but my family has been projecting visions of what can be accomplished in Manhattan for 90 years. My grandfather, Joseph Durst, came to New York in the [early] 1900s from a part of the Austro-Hungarian empire that is now in Poland. He was in his 20s and arrived with a grade school education and three or four dollars in his pocket. He began as a peddler, then went into manufacturing children’s clothing, and eventually began investing in property. He started the family real estate company in 1915. He did deals with a handshake, and that is how we still try to do business.

We used PV panels on the facade at 4 Times Square instead of regular mirrored glass to show that they can be economical.

My father, who died in 1995, was a great walker. He used to say, “Never buy anything you can’t walk to.” He was known for seeing the potential in underdeveloped neighborhoods, and also for assembling plots one by one until he had enough land to build something significant. In the 1960s, he attempted to buy all of the property from 42nd Street to 47th Street between Sixth Avenue (Avenue of the Americas) and Seventh Avenue, envisioning a development in that area that would be something like the complex of Rockefeller Center a few blocks north. He got most of the land under contract before the recession hit. We were not able to close on any of the properties and we had to give up some of them.

My father became increasingly negative on development and turned to other interests. In the early 1980s, he became very concerned about the looming national debt and tried to find ways to publicize it. He had an idea to put up an outdoor clock in New York that would tick off the value of the federal deficit from one second to the next. It was not until 1989, however, that technology caught up to the point that we were able to create the clock. It is now on West 44th Street over the entrance of the Internal Revenue Service building, which seems appropriate. We shut it off for about four years when the country had a surplus.

[I took over] the family business more or less by default. My father was one of four brothers, and there were others in my generation who also worked for the business, but then pursued other paths. I went to the University of California, Berkeley during the time of the free speech movement, and I sometimes say I studied civil disobedience along with economics. I was planning to work in developing countries. Instead, I went on to study urban planning at NYU and got married. Not long after our two older children, Anita and Alexander, were born, my wife Susanne and I packed up the family and moved to Newfoundland. We lived in a cabin without any electricity. Then one day, our wood-fired hot water heater blew up and a piece of it went through my leg. I had to be evacuated by air back to New York. After that, I decided the safest place to be was here in the city.

Builders, Not Developers
My cousin Jody and I are copresidents now, and since he is 13 years younger, he will be my successor. Before he came into the family business, Jody studied engineering at Tufts University and worked for Chrysler. We do not call ourselves developers. Those are the bad guys. We are owner/builder/managers; we build and manage what we own.

In the 1990s, as Jody and I became more responsible for what was going on in the office, we began a program of retrofitting our buildings. I cannot say either of us woke up one morning and had an “Aha!” experience. We just decided, when we were in the process of removing some air conditioning systems that were creating pollution problems, that we wanted to take an environmentally responsible approach to new construction.

Undoing a mistake is costly. There was a time when we saved 50 cents a foot by using asbestos as a fire retardant in the building that housed our office. Twenty-five years later it cost us $30 a foot to take it out. The major cost in building an intelligent building is the time and coordination it takes to examine what can be done, and the viability of doing it. Each building is going to be different. The actual cost of the environmental features is really very small, probably around 3 percent of the total building cost. The exception to that is the cost of photovoltaic (PV) paneling, which captures solar power. At its present cost, the payback period is 25 years, while the life expectancy of the panels is 20 years. That could change if the demand for panels was large enough that they could be manufactured with greater economies of scale. Nevertheless, we used PV panels on the facade at 4 Times Square instead of regular mirrored glass to show that they can be economical if they replace other materials.

Now in the works is our second green office tower, One Bryant Park, near the main branch of the New York Public Library. It will house Bank of America and a theater. There will be tremendous demand on the energy supply, so we are building a large cogeneration plant that uses waste heat to generate more electricity (but we can also use it to cool the building), and capturing rainwater for the plumbing system.

Between the two buildings will be a pass-through called Anita’s Way, named after my daughter. Anita runs an organization called Chashama, housed in a corner of 4 Times Square, which provides performance and studio spaces for artists. Originally we were going to build a hotel on the site of One Bryant Park. We were searching for a name and someone said, “What about Helena?” which is my younger daughter’s name. We all liked the sound of it. Just as that project fell apart, we decided we would build an environmentally friendly residential tower at 57th Street and 11th Avenue, and it seemed natural to keep the name. Helena was a little embarrassed at first, but she got over it.

At the Helena, scheduled for completion in March, the floors will be made of a manufactured wood that looks spectacular but does not destroy forests. We have insisted that the contractor replace part of the cement with fly ash, which is a waste byproduct. We had to fight to get them to do this, but in the end they said it set faster than cement, so it saved time and brought the costs down. It was only because we spent the time investigating different ways of using recycled materials that we knew this was feasible. Intelligent—by which I mean green—standards could be used in most urban settings, and certainly in New York. Manhattan could be a much more pleasant place.