Mixed Greens: The New Color of the Skyline
From the “place-specific language” of architecture and “Archi-Neering” to vertical urban design and rooftop gardens, the sky’s the limit for today’s skyscrapers.
Published May 1, 2007
By Laura Buchholz
Academy Contributor
One of New York City’s first officially green office towers, 7 World Trade Center, the new home for The New York Academy of Sciences (the Academy), has the distinction of having earned LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) Gold Status for its environmental achievement. So it was only fitting that one of the first initiatives of the new Physical Sciences and Engineering program should be a series of lectures entitled “Mixed Greens,” an international survey of state-of-the-art, sustainable skyscraper design. Organized in collaboration with the city’s Skyscraper Museum, the series brought together for five lectures the world’s leading architects and engineers who have pioneered innovative green strategies ranging from high-performance structures to low-tech, bioclimatic towers.
To kick off the series in January, Ross Wimer, design partner with Skidmore Owings and Merrill (SOM) and one of the designers of the Skyscraper Museum, introduced the concept of “Environmental Contextualism.” Wimer’s track record demonstrates the global pervasiveness of the green skyscraper movement—buildings he has designed form part of the skyline of more than 20 cities on five continents.
“Place-Specific” Language
Using illustrations from design competitions ranging from a new New York City streetlight to the WTC Freedom Tower, Wimer emphasized SOM’s goal of finding in each instance the “place-specific” language of architecture. For streetlights, this meant striking a balance between city specifications, emergent light technology, and signage considerations. In Dubai, by contrast, SOM won the design competition for a residential tower by conceiving a twisting 75-story helical structure. The helix fulfilled the requirement that the building have an oblong base parallel to the marina, but the twisting enabled more of the apartments to have spectacular views of the Persian Gulf. For the tower’s skin, SOM used inset, perforated screens to regulate and diffuse the glare of the sunlight.
Currently, New York’s only other green skyscraper (besides 7 WTC) is the 46-story Hearst Tower, designed by Foster and Partners (F&P). In February, one of its senior partners, Brandon Haw, illustrated his talk on “sustainable works” by showing how F&P developed new approaches to sustainable design with each new project. Haw showed how, for instance, the cylindrical design of the Swiss Re London headquarters, with its innovative air circulation system, evolved from ideas first explored in the triangular design of Frankfurt’s Commerzbank, the first green skyscraper.
A current project, the design for the Moscow City Tower, “takes the Commerzbank design and turns it inside out,” according to Haw. F&P is designing WTC Tower Two, and Haw expects it to incorporate their research into a “new generation of cladding systems.”
Architecture + Engineering = “Archi-Neering”
The third speaker, Helmut Jahn, Director of Design of Murphy/Jahn Inc. Architects, might not call himself a green architect, but his approach to design takes efficiency into account at every step in a way that cannot help but yield green results.
In his March talk, Jahn explained how his work blends architecture and engineering in a system he refers to as “Archi-Neering,” a system that seeks to break down the barriers between the two disciplines so that new technologies, new concepts, new materials, and new systems of building will emerge, conserving resources and using recyclable materials to create buildings that rise to the level of art.
The Deutsche Post Tower in Bonn, for example, is an aerodynamic ellipse of a building that takes advantage of the winds that descend on the Rhone. The building’s visual transparency is matched by its functional transparency—winds move through the façade and throughout internal corridors, making air conditioning unnecessary. Interspersed throughout the building every nine floors are what Jahn calls “sky gardens”—five indoor gardens that also function as outflow elements of the ventilation system. Sunshades cool the building in the summer, and warm it in the winter. Furthermore, water from the Rhone helps to cool the building.
Vertical Urban Design
In April the Malaysian architect and London-based pioneer of bioclimatic towers, Ken Leang, delivered a passionate description of his passive, low-tech approach to skyscraper design. “Everything we build should be a balance of organic and inorganic mass,” says Leang, and a distinctive feature of his buildings is the continuous vegetation, inside and out. If you spread a 24-story building flat, Leang observes, it would cover six acres. When you design six acres, you are doing urban design and that, according to Leang, is what skyscraper design should be: vertical urban design.
In the final lecture on May 8, Roger Frechette, another SOM partner and an electrical/mechanical/pump engineer, will discuss the myriad systems that will interact to make the Pearl River “Zero-Energy” Tower in Guangzhou, China, the world’s tallest energy-efficient skyscraper.
The response to this series has been sufficiently enthusiastic that a new series of lectures, also co-sponsored by the Skyscraper Museum, has already been scheduled. Starting May 23, the “World’s Tallest Building” series will focus on Burj Dubai, soon to be the world’s tallest building.
Also read: Green Building and Water Infrastructure
About the Author
Laura Buchholz is a science writer and editor who lives in Brooklyn, NY.
