Commercial/Office
Cosentini focuses on designing sophisticated high-performance systems for the commercial and corporate building sector. Our engineering designs create flexibility for office environments, support energy-efficient systems, and produce superior indoor air quality with a high degree of user control. In our constant search for new solutions to improve indoor environments, we pioneered the use of underfloor air systems, packaged floor-by-floor HVAC units, and atrium displacement ventilation. Our work spans the full range of office and interiors projects ranging from small spaces to more than three million square feet, and includes general and executive office space, conference facilities, data centers and trading installations, employee amenities, and upgrades to emergency equipment.
Cultural
Cultural institutions present many engineering challenges that have inspired Cosentini to create ingenious solutions. The firm’s cultural portfolio encompasses specialty spaces within museums, libraries, performing arts centers, religious institutions: archives and research rooms, exhibition spaces, theatres, concert halls, conservation labs, and storage areas. Our cultural buildings experts integrate sustainable building systems with the architecture, develop indoor environmental controls, and incorporate risk mitigation strategies to deal with flooding and fire.
Education
Cosentini generates superior learning environments for pre-K-12 and higher education institutions that are flexible, easy to maintain, and energy-efficient. For each project, we develop phasing and maintainability strategies, reduce operating costs, meet or surpass sustainability requirements, and create long-lasting systems. Our experience ranges from classrooms and auditoriums to state-of-the art research facilities and teaching laboratories, and includes dormitories and dining facilities, gymnasiums and public spaces for public- and private-sector schools and universities.
Financial Services
Financial services clients demand the highest levels of security and redundancy in their building systems and technology infrastructure. In response to those demands, Cosentini designs advanced MEP and IT systems that routinely become benchmarks for that sector. These systems support optimal workplace environments, allow flexibility, are energy efficient, provide reliability and redundancy, and minimize service interruptions. Our fully integrated set of service offerings includes information technology (telecommunications, audiovisual, and security design), commissioning, specialty lighting, and building automation engineering, giving us the ability to provide a completely coordinated and expedient design process. Cosentini’s Mission Critical Group provides consulting, engineering design, and commissioning services for data centers and other mission-critical facilities.
Healthcare
Healthcare facilities are complex entities that present very specific design and engineering challenges in terms of circulation, ventilation and indoor environments, and sanitation. Cosentini’s experience ranges from large, standalone medical center facilities to surgery suites, critical care units, imaging, and patient rooms, as well as renovations of all sizes and programs. We have also engineered a significant portfolio of long-term care and assisted living facilities throughout the Tri-State Area.
Headquarters
Corporate and institutional headquarters embody each company’s image, brand, and culture in a very real way. Over the years, Cosentini has engineered many headquarters projects of more than a million square feet in both high-rise buildings and entire campus complexes. Our extensive experience in designing office buildings and interiors for high-profile clients has made us experts in delivering beautiful buildings featuring optimal work environments, technologically advanced spaces, and efficient systems.
High-rise Buildings
Tall and supertall buildings are in a category of their own, typically regarded as cultural and economic symbols. Cosentini has collaborated with many internationally-recognized architects to design some of the tallest buildings in the world. We approach these projects as vertical cities, incorporating hotels, residences, offices, and retail into a single tall building. Cosentini collaborates with architects and structural engineers to assimilate energy-efficient systems into the building design, minimizing the size of the MEP systems by integrating them into the structure whenever possible.
Hospitality and Retail
Hospitality and retail is a broad category comprising hotels, resorts, convention centers, casinos, restaurants, retail stores, and shopping malls. Cosentini’s work includes special MEP systems for customer comfort for hotel clients, flexible core-and-shell retail spaces that accommodate current tenant uses and anticipate future needs, and full IT and audiovisual services.
Interiors
Bringing vital systems from a building’s core into separate offices to serve individual tenants has always been a major portion of Cosentini’s practice. Our interiors experience encompasses millions of square feet of space – open and closed offices, conference and broadcast facilities, employee dining and other amenities, as well as mission-critical spaces such as data centers and trading installations. Our approach combines thorough knowledge of each client’s culture with the know-how to deliver exactly the right power, heating, cooling, and fire suppression capacities on a space-by-space basis. Our fully integrated set of service offerings allows us to provide a completely coordinated and expedient design process.
Master Planning
Every campus master plan–for a university, healthcare provider, corporation, or other entity – is based on several important objectives: defining all utility needs for the proposed program; evaluating solutions and alternates with respect to financial objectives; and making recommendations for how utility distribution systems can be implemented effectively for the campus and its various structures. Cosentini’s designs and studies explore different options, including the possibility of serving the new campus’s utility loads with utility systems already existing on campus or in the immediate area; establishing a new central plant for the new campus; or providing smaller plants that serve discrete zones within the new campus.
Mixed-use
Large-scale mixed-use projects dominate much of current development in major metro areas. Cosentini offers proven strategies to meet the requirements presented by each program component - retail, residential, hotel, restaurant, and cultural - by creating independent zones for each area of a project, and by providing tailored MEP systems to service each space type. Our deep portfolio of mixed-use projects has led to the firm’s involvement in creating hubs in many major cities.
Public Buildings
The civic realm, as embodied in public buildings, parks, and open space, expresses the vision and values of government. Cosentini has collaborated with federal, state, and municipal public agencies on United States embassies and courthouses, county courthouses, public libraries, transportation and fire departments, and government offices. Our familiarity with each agency’s mission, security requirements, and budgetary constraints informs our approach to what are often very complex projects. We have been responsible for engineering many new facilities and the renovations of historic public buildings that play major civic and symbolic roles in our cities.
Renovations and Historic Restoration
Cosentini’s approach to the renovations of and additions to historic structures is informed by the special circumstances presented by each project. We conduct feasibility and due diligence studies to determine the most cost-effective solution to updating building systems within historic fabric. These studies evaluate the building’s historic character, its lack of appropriate systems and infrastructure to sustain the new program, and the need to stay operational during construction. We balance providing the latest technologies, flexibility, and energy efficiency with aesthetic considerations, often concealing new systems on the exterior so as not to interfere with historic interiors.
Residential
With the residential sector dominating real estate for the last five years, Cosentini has developed an extensive portfolio of market-rate housing in high- and low-rise condominium and rental buildings, with some affordable housing projects coming on line more recently. Our residential team evaluates different HVAC systems to identify the most effective system for each project. We pioneered the use of water-source heat pumps and VAV water-cooled units in residential buildings, and produced many of New York City’s first LEED-certified residential towers.
