by Angela O'Byrne | Jun 1, 2016 | Amazing Buildings, Archives
In the rapidly renewing Porta Nuova district of Milan, two brand new residential towersone 250 feet and another 360 feet-stand well above the terracotta roofs of their ancient neighbors. Their stark white balconies jut out from what can be seen of the buildings’ smooth black facades. However, the distinctly modern character of the development-which was completed in 2014-is far from the project’s most distinctive feature. When the wind blows through Milan, these two buildings, known as the Bosco Verticale-come alive.
Because with every breeze, the thousands of branches and leaves protruding from the two buildings shimmer and sway. There’s something growing on nearly every surface of Bosco Verticale, which translates to “the Vertical Forest.” All told, the shrubs, ground cover, and 730 trees that make up these towering gardens represent a population of plant life equivalent to a hectare of forest.
Treescrapers
The work of Milanese architect and planner Stefano Boeri, Bosco Verticale has become the standard-bearer for an emerging class of buildings known as the “treescraper”, a phenomenon in which buildings are designed to incorporate significant populations of green life as they rise high above the ground. Placing plants on balconies is nothing new, but the scale of Bosco Verticale’s organic integration is. Altogether, it’s not a cheap idea. In construction, the buildings had to be reinforced to handle the added weight of the trees and soil, which may just increase the buildings’ carbon footprint and negate many of the promises of sustainability-and that’s just the startup cost. Every four months a team of daring botanists belay down the building on climbing ropes to trim the trees.
Incorporating ideas of high-density development and urban biodiversity, Bosco Verticale is as much of a feat of urban planning as it is an impressive feat of imaginative engineering. The development boasts many of the same benefits one might achieve with a park or green space, providing a carbon sink and habitats for native bird and insect populations.
However, it claims to manage to accomplish a host of sustainable initiatives by harnessing the most natural technology available, nabbing it a LEED-certified gold rating in the process. The diverse array of plants, selected by a team of consulting horticulturalists, helps filter dust, and air pollution, create oxygen and help regulate the temperature of the buildings, helping keep air conditioning costs low.
A Look Ahead
If Bosco Verticale is the pioneer of the “treescraper” movement, the helix-shaped Agora building in Taipei, Taiwan is the next-generation challenger. Designed by Vincent Callebaut Architecture, the dramatic building [still in progress] will feature twin towers wrapped around a fixed central core, resembling a strand of DNA. Like its Milanese counterpart, the building’s balconies will host extensive vegetationin this case, vegetable gardens, and fruit trees for the residents’ food needs. A rainwater harvesting system enables the gardening initiative to approach true sustainability, and a light funnel design will make the most of the daylight the tower receives.
While proponents of “treescrapers” may tout their overall sustainability, don’t expect to see towering forests proliferate any time soon. With higher construction and maintenance costs than their conventional counterparts, it will always be more efficient to plan for more parks and green spaces as we develop new neighborhoods or revitalize old ones. There are also physical limitations to the treescrapers’ development: as buildings climb higher, the environment for trees becomes less hospitable, as wind and extreme temperature may take their toll. Most trees, remember, grow in forests around other trees and supported by complicated ecosystems. By removing them from their natural context, we’re also altering their chances for survival.
The true value of the “treescraper” may just lie with the quality of life. There’s no denying our affinity for living in the canopy. Studies have shown what one might suspect: that our physical health and psychological well-being improves when we’re in close proximity to trees. Who’s to say the luxury residential market won’t demand condos that feel like forests?
Boeri, however, is doubling down on his vision. His next project, La Tour des Cedres, or the Cedar Tower, is scheduled to start construction in Switzerland in 2017. One thing’s for sure: if you’re a Swiss gardener, it may be a good time to take up climbing.
Originally Published in:
THE NETWORK / JUNE 2016 – Amazing Buildings
by Angela O'Byrne | Mar 1, 2016 | Amazing Buildings, Archives
When it comes to contemporary sustainable design, no maxim is more apt than “what’s old is new again.” We’ve reached a period of reassessment, asking fundamental questions about the cities we live in, the buildings we inhabit, the materials we use, and the construction methods we employ.
As we’re forced to consider climate and environmental context more than ever, we find ourselves looking toward ancient practices and synthesizing them with contemporary technologies. In past installments of this column, we’ve seen wooden skyscrapers and mansions fashioned from bamboo. However, some enterprising designers are looking even further back, reviving one of our oldest known processes to build breathtaking structures from the very ground we walk on.
Dating back to at least 5000 BC, rammed earth architecture has been employed throughout the world, from the Great Wall of China to the ancient city of Carthage. The process involves compressing dampened earth into building blocks or panels through the use of temporary frames. Historically, the practice was material-cheap but labor-intensive, relying on workers to manually tamp the soil (a mixture of sand, gravel, and clay) into building shape—a time-consuming and exhausting process. The formed blocks were remarkably resilient, and some of these earthen structures have stood for centuries.
Today, pneumatic rams have significantly reduced build-times and labor costs, ushering in a small renaissance of rammed earth construction among those seeking a unique and sustainable building method. Modern manufacturers have supplemented the construction process with various modes of stabilization, including rebar, waterproofing agents, and the addition of a small percentage of cement to the soil mixture. Nevertheless, the fundamental principles of rammed earth remain the same: fill a mold with soil, tamp it down, and repeat.
Sustainable And More
Without an energy-intensive production stage—as with bricks or cement—rammed earth is one of the most sustainable construction processes available. When completed, the thick walls boast both excellent soundproofing properties and thermal mass, absorbing and releasing ambient heat to provide a comfortable interior temperature.
Perhaps the most compelling reason designers are choosing rammed earth is a simple one: it can be beautiful. Taking on the hues and textures of the surrounding soil, rammed earth walls are rich with natural nuance, and builders can introduce color stratification by varying the soil content, allowing for a host of aesthetic possibilities.
One of the most striking examples of contemporary rammed earth construction sits in the middle of the Australian outback. Zigzagging through the desert in an arresting shade of red is the Great Wall of WA [West Australia], a 230-meter bulwark against the punishing heat and winds of the region. (See accompanying pictures.)
Carved into the side of a large sand dune, the Musterer’s Quarters is a compound of 12 dwellings erected to house cattle farmers during mustering or gathering season. Partially subterranean, the units require no air conditioning thanks to their superior insulation. The iron and clay-rich soil from the surrounding area makes up the massive wall, which is also dramatically exposed to the interior of the units.
Above the dwellings looms a turret-like, steel-capped pavilion, which serves as a meeting area and chapel. A project of Sydney-based firm Luigi Rosselli Architects, the Musterer’s Quarters makes a compelling argument for the process. And while the project’s architects claim that its commanding outer wall is the largest rammed earth wall in the Southern Hemisphere, the Quarters are gaining more contemporary company by the year.
North America has already seen a handful of rammed earth projects. The Nk’Mip Desert Cultural Centre in British Columbia, Canada boasts an 80 meter rammed earth façade, earning the project numerous design awards
after its completion in 2006. In 2012, the Southeast Wyoming Welcome Center opened in Cheyenne, incorporating a beautifully striated rammed earth exterior.
As rammed earth draws so much from its immediate environment, it’s not a universal building solution. Without suitable soil close at hand, the process becomes significantly less sustainable. Nevertheless, the technique could prove revolutionary to quality of life in developing areas. While boutique design firms have made bold forays into the field of rammed earth, modern codes and standards still lag behind one of the world’s oldest construction methods. Ironically, some ideas are so old that we simply haven’t caught up with them yet.
Originally Published in:
THE NETWORK / MARCH 2016 – Amazing Buildings
by Angela O'Byrne | Dec 1, 2015 | Amazing Buildings, Archives
When it comes to sustainable design, our thoughts often turn to the marvels of technology. Ultra-efficient LED lighting, cutting-edge photovoltaic solar panel systems, and wind turbines have all transformed the design landscape and feel pulled directly from the pages of science fiction. Sometimes, however, the most cutting-edge design finds its inspiration in looking backward, resurrecting some very old ideas about building sustainably. On the remote Indonesian island of Bali, a small design firm called Ibuku is making waves by finding the rich potential in an unsung-and completely renewable-material.
Rising above Abiansemal’s thick jungle canopy is a unique, magnificent structure of six stories. Its undulating roofs are shaped like massive lotus petals. Poles jut up in wild configurations, creating tiers of nooks and balconies. Visitors enter on a tunneled bridge as if passing through a portal to another world. There isn’t a single right angle or conventional rectangular room in sight.
If most sustainable buildings feel pulled from science fiction, Sharma Springs looks to be inspired by fantasy. The entire structure feels organic as if it has grown directly from the fertile ground on which it sits. And in a way, it has, because this four-bedroom, 750 squaremeter residence is built almost entirely from grass.
Building with bamboo is not a novel notion. For tens of thousands of years, the strong and flexible grass was used in crafting bridges and seabound rafts. All of these structures, however, had a crucial flaw: they were temporary. For thousands of years, bamboo has been an ephemeral material. While it grows famously quickly (with some species capable of shooting up a foot in a single day), it also decays rapidly. Rich in sugars, bamboo attracts jungle pests and deteriorates with continued exposure to water-both deal-breakers in the rainforest.
However, with modern waterproofing and insect-repelling treatment (non-toxic borax salt), bamboo’s lifespan increases considerably, creating a material with the compressive force of concrete and a tensile strength that outperforms steel. Plus, it is significantly lighter than its counterparts, making it ideal in remote locations thanks to the ease of transport.
Sharma Springs’ innovations don’t stop at its materials. The building is curious, playful, and whimsical throughout. Doors are circular or teardrop-shaped to reduce deterioration on their hinges. The kitchen’s countertops are carved from a single boulder and retain their rough-hewn edges. Areas that demand privacy, like the bathroom and television lounge, are sectioned with woven bamboo and resemble giant basket-like pods.
Directed by Elora Hardy, a Bali-raised fashion designer who returned to Indonesia to continue the design-build work of her father John Hardy, Ibuku is a collective of artisans, architects, and master craftsmen looking to help bamboo break big. Ibuku’s design process is perhaps as fascinating as its products and is informed by the realities and challenges of working with such a unique material.
Rather than designing the structure on computers or on paper, lbuku designs from scale miniatures. Designers create full models out of hand-whittled bamboo strips, including each and every pole that will create the building’s frame. This makes stress testing easy-as a curious designer can always give the model a hearty whack to test its strength. Thanks to its supple give, bamboo is an ideal material for building in earthquake-prone areas.
A large team of builders and artisans then recreate the structure on site by hand, finding the perfect bamboo poles for each beam (sourced from local family-owned farms). The process is meticulous and slow. The workers bend and tie lengths of bamboo. They weave and pin. The work takes both patience and an open mind, requiring a fair amount of “listening to” the materials rather than simply building from prefabricated, standardized building blocks. The sheer amount of labor and man-hours required is where bamboo construction fails as a perfect system. While bamboo is an entirely renewable and sustainable material, it demands a costly construction schedule.
While lbuku’s projects are awe-inspiring, they don’t realistically represent a magic bullet for sustainable building. Bamboo’s effectiveness is limited by climate and its high labor costs threaten its viability on non-boutique projects. Nevertheless, their projects boast a surplus of imagination and inspiration, as well as a reminder to consider the deep potential in what surrounds us.
If you’re curious about living in a bamboo house (and happen to be passing through Bali), you can indeed spend the night at Sharma Springs. It’s currently listed on Airbnb.com, commanding an impressive $695/night rate.
Originally Published in:
THE NETWORK / DECEMBER 2015 – Amazing Buildings
by Angela O'Byrne | Sep 1, 2015 | Amazing Buildings, Archives
In 2009, construction was completed on the Stadthaus, a nine-story, 29-apartment building in the rapidly gentrifying Shoreditch neighborhood of London. From a distance, the structure would have seemed to be a rather unremarkable postmodern addition to the neighborhood. Defin 2009, construction was completed on the Stadthaus, a nine-story, 29-apartment building in the rapidly gentrifying Shoreditch neighborhood of London. From nitively rectangular and rendered in pixelated shades of grey, the building would make for an entirely convincing urban dorm building.
Today, looking at Stadthaus, one wouldn’t imagine it was a prize-winning building, let alone an influential one. However, to understand its importance one must know the secret hidden within the building’s walls. Because from its frame to its elevator shafts to its exterior paneling, Stadthaus is built almost entirely of wood.
Long regarded as a limited and dangerous [historic city-wide fires tend to have a pretty awful effect on your reputation] material, wood may be making a major comeback. Thanks to a confluence of technological advances and ecological concerns, wood is developing a buzz as a kind of 21st-century wonder material. This shift in thinking is thanks, in part, to the success of the unassuming, grey Stadthaus building.
Designed by Waugh Thistleton Architects in London, the building is as much of a marvel of manufacturing as it is of design. The material used in the project, cross-laminated timber—or CLT—is a far cry from conventional lumber. With much of the world’s stock of old-growth lumber logged centuries ago, building massive projects with wood requires some technological enhancement.
Developed by KLH of Austria [a lumber-rich country no doubt thrilled to see wood make a comeback], CLT [also called massive timber] is produced by stacking strips of spruce crosswise and gluing them together under high pressure—essentially creating giant panels of super-plywood. The angled layering of CLT is the key to providing immense structural integrity, allowing the pre-cut panels to bear loads. Customizable in size and thickness, CLT behaves more like concrete slabs than lumber beams—and some of Stadthaus’s panels reach up to a foot thick. Whereas a conventional tall building may rely on a steel skeletal frame with beams and columns, CLT panels distribute the weight of the entire structure evenly, fitting together like a massive piece of Ikea furniture—albeit far sturdier.
The construction of Stadthaus proceeded in an Ikea-like manner as well. Thanks to the modular pre-assembly of the CLT panels, the completion of Stadthaus was remarkably speedy. Four workmen finished the project in just seven weeks, cutting the labor cost by approximately 30% against conventional steel and concrete construction. And so, while CLT is more expensive than traditional materials, its price was largely recouped in saved labor.
Technological advancements have quelled the single largest concern with wood as a primary material: fire. In a blaze, CLT’s outer layers char and seal the interior, keeping the building up longer. In testing, CLT has outperformed steel, which melts at high temperatures.
Perhaps wood’s greatest appeal, however, is its role as a sustainable resource. Wood is, of course, entirely renewable. It’s also nearly unbeatable when it comes to its carbon footprint. While producing steel and concrete requires the production of massive amounts of carbon, trees capture and store it. And so, timber represents locked carbon, or “embodied energy.” With 186 tons of carbon locked in its timber panels, Stadthaus is actually a carbon-negative building, offsetting its cooling and heating costs for the first twenty years of its existence.
While CLT and its ilk are promising advancements in reconsidering wood, we must be careful when we sing wood’s praises. In the United States, we still rely on cheap fast-growth lumber in framing most of our houses and end up paying dearly for it down the line. Wood stud framing is susceptible to rot, termites, and fire—and performs poorly in natural disasters.
Until CLT becomes more commonplace and less expensive, we’re in dire need of residential building code reform. What we may see is a cross-pollination of building materials, with taller buildings using wood and houses incorporating concrete, masonry, steel, and eventually CLT. It may also take a wide, international revision of building codes, as Stadthaus was able to proceed mainly because it wasn’t expressly prohibited in European building codes. To reap the benefits of more environmentally friendly applications, our codes have to keep up.
What is clear is that it’s time for a reassessment of our prejudices and assumptions about materials. Today there are plans for ever-taller wooden buildings around the world. The HoHo project in Vienna, currently underway, will stretch to 24 floors and 276 feet. It will save 2,800 tons of carbon dioxide emission in total and just might usher in the age of the wooden skyscraper—or the “plyscaper,” as some have begun to call it.
Perhaps in the future, we’ll be looking at entire cities of wood, remembering the short and strange age of concrete and steel.
Originally Published in:
THE NETWORK / SEPTEMBER 2015 – Amazing Buildings
by Angela O'Byrne | Mar 1, 2015 | Amazing Buildings, Archives
After the Second World War, one major trend seemed consistent and assured in the United States: suburbanization. In droves, Americans left cities for less-dense communities across the country for the promise of more room to raise their families. And in many cases, corporate workplaces followed. As office work became more common, major corporations built large campuses in smaller towns, where real estate was cheaper, there was room to expand, and parking was plentiful.
However, recent trends seem to indicate that cities are making a roaring comeback. As the very definition of cities has shifted from industrial centers to rich clusters of service-based businesses, young workers seem to be craving density and its benefits. And with talented entrepreneurs, tech workers, and creatives flocking to urban areas, some corporations have begun to take note and build their headquarters in highly desirable cities, surrounded by restaurants, nightlife, and culture.
Perhaps the most notable—and massive—among these city headquarters is Amazon’s Seattle complex, currently under construction. While the Seattle area is known for being the home to a number of high-profile corporations—including Microsoft, Boeing, and Nintendo—those complexes are tucked away in nearby suburban areas like Everett and Redmond. Amazon, however, is looking to build workspaces for its rapidly growing workforce right in the middle of Seattle—as part of one of the biggest development projects in the history of the city.
Well-known for industry disruption and making its own rules, Amazon is seeking to grow a sizeable presence in Seattle’s downtown. The centerpiece for this expansion is a 3.3 million square foot project over three city blocks of the Denny Triangle neighborhood. Designed by Seattle-based firm NBBJ, the project includes three 38-story buildings, two midrise buildings, and a large meeting center that holds 1,800 people—presumably to hold product launches as Amazon branches into the consumer electronics market.
However, the Amazon headquarters is not simply about slapping down a conventional corporate campus in an urban location. Rather than creating a monolithic presence, Amazon is striving to integrate its offices with its surroundings in a meaningful way—in a sense engineering its own neighborhood from scratch. And so, in a neighborhood dominated by street-level parking lots, Amazon’s ground floor space will house retail tenants and include a public dog park to encourage community involvement and interest.
For the most part, the buildings look relatively conventional, especially when compared with the space-age plans for Apple and Facebook’s headquarters. Instead of focusing on flashy architectural features, Amazon’s goal for the project follows its corporate philosophy of usability and efficiency. NBBJ is known for computational design, an approach that uses simulations to predict how building’s occupants will interact with their space and mapping their paths through the environment.
However, one eye-catching feature has captured the imaginations of those following the project: a biodome made up of three 95-foot glass spheres. Simulating a park-like environment, the area is meant to reduce stress and fatigue through biophilia. The orbs will house a flex workspace and a large atrium for collaboration and respite.
One of the major reasons for an urban campus is energy efficiency and conservation. Many of Amazon’s employees will be able to walk, bike, or take public transportation to work. Plans are already underway for an Amazon-subsidized light rail line through the district. The campus itself is also rich with its own sustainability features, including a two-way cycle track and separate entrances for bicyclists. The campus will also harvest heat generated from a nearby data center to warm the buildings via water pumped by underground pipes.
The initial phase of the headquarters project is slated to be completed this year, but Amazon’s not done expanding. They’ve already purchased an adjacent city block and plan to build two more buildings—one 24-story and one 8-story—to expand the complex. With more than 150,000 employees around the world, Amazon is projected to have 70,000 working in Seattle by 2019. The surge has had a notable effect on the city’s economy, where real estate prices have spiked in response to such high demand.
This kind of rapid, city-changing expansion has made some observers nervous—and exposes one downside of urban headquarters. A crash for the company would mean more than an abandoned suburban campus. Unless development is diverse and sustainable, we could be building a new Detroit—and Amazon’s biodome will look more like a giant, ironic bubble.
Originally Published in:
THE NETWORK / MARCH 2015 – Amazing Buildings
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