Meta, Twice

Once: I took the picture below during the first panel of the “Progress and Preservation: Reuse for a Resilient City” event yesterday, put on by the Municipal Art Society. The speaker at that moment was Emily Hoffman, the Director of Building Energy & Emissions Performance at the New York City Department of Buildings. Ms. Hoffman had a lot of interesting things to say, but I was moved to photograph that slide by the text in blue below the first bullet point. In the context of New York having (depending on how you count) somewhere between 1,000,000 and 1,100,000 buildings, the DoB deals with, annually, about 4,000 new building applications and 85,000 alteration applications. In other words, the field that OSE is completely immersed in – existing-building investigation, repair, and alteration – is the vast majority of projects here. What we do isn’t some fringe niche (Calling all linguists: can a niche be a fringe?) but rather the usual form of building work. To put it really…