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
by Angela O'Byrne | Dec 1, 2014 | Amazing Buildings, Archives
This past fall Apple went bigger than ever, expanding their iPhone 6 offerings in size to satisfy a market hungry for screen space and digital content. But it’s not just their devices that are growing. In Cupertino, CA, a gargantuan new headquarters—called, naturally, Apple Campus 2: is currently under construction. Once it’s completed in 2016, the ring-shaped building will take up 2.8 million square feet, house 13,000 employees, and cost more than $5 billion. And with a company as influential and trendsetting as Apple, it may help define how we think of the tech workspace.
Apple Campus 2 seems to be part of a trend of larger, more centralized corporate headquarters. Perhaps ironically in an age of telecommunication and increased specialization, planners have started to see the rewards of aggregating talent and resources in a single location. And after years of delays, permitting hassles, and ballooning budgets, Apple Campus 2 is finally back on track.
The mega-structure is the work of famed British architect Sir Norman Foster, whose high-tech-styled work has included skyscrapers, office buildings, and the high-profile Reichstag building renovation in Berlin. However, it’s Foster’s work on Beijing’s Airport—one of the world’s largest buildings by floor space—that seems closest in spirit to his Apple Campus 2.
The Best Office Building in the World
In undertaking the Campus project, Foster will be carrying out Steve Jobs’s grand vision to build “the best office building in the world.” In fact, Jobs’s last public appearance was made before Cupertino’s city council, where he advocated for the massive building’s construction. Just as with Apple’s detail-focused products, the construction standards for the Campus are at the mercy of the late Jobs’s perfectionism—as he demanded that all gaps in Campus surfaces be no greater than 1/32 inch—far more precise than the industry standard of 1/8 inch.
Jobs’s vision for a headquarters was a space that physically encouraged collaboration, congregation, and chance encounter. Jobs was also proud to eliminate right angles and boxy design, favoring curved surfaces wherever possible.
As the name suggests, the Apple Campus is largely modeled after a university concept. Instead of the conventional collection of separate, purpose-specific buildings, however, Foster has integrated them all into one continuous circle. The interior green-space, too, is based on a collegiate concept: Stanford University’s large central Main Quad.
Variously called “the Mothership” and “the Donut” by observers and critics, the four-story Kubrickian structure is set to rise over 176 acres of prime Silicon Valley real estate. What’s surprising, however—considering the substantial cost and hassle of wrangling all of that land—is how much of it will remain green. Whereas a year ago, the site consisted of only 20% landscape and 80% asphalt and building, the Apple campus will reverse the ratio and create a plot that is 80% green-space and 20% developed.
Both the Campus’s surroundings and the large interior section of the ring is meant to resemble undeveloped and natural California landscape, evoking the environment where Jobs himself grew up. The site will provide a home to more than 7000 trees. In other words, Apple is building itself a massive orchard—including cherry, plum, apricot, and yes, apple trees.
Just Like Apple…
To complete the visual picture, cars have been “banished” from the plan. One large parking garage will lie underground to preserve the pristine, natural landscape, while another parking complex will be placed far from the main building, out of view. To encourage easy on-site mobility, the Campus will include 1000 shared bicycles. On-site jogging trails will promote a healthier lifestyle for employees, as will a massive, 100,000 square foot fitness center.
The view from the workspaces, too, should be magnificent. In lieu of opaque walls, Foster has opted for windows wherever possible. The building’s custom concave glass will stretch 40 feet from floor to ceiling, offering uninterrupted views of the verdant surroundings.
What might be most impressive about the building, however, is its host of sustainability initiatives. Apple’s CEO Tim Cook has promised that the Campus will be “the greenest building on the planet,” matching the company’s recent commitment to reducing its environmental impact. The goal for the building is to meet net-zero greenhouse gas emissions, with natural ventilation maintaining interior temperature 75% of the year. Solar panels will cover the main building and parking structures, and the Campus will use 100% renewable energy.
We’ve become used to the world turning its attention to Cupertino for buzz-filled product launches. Now, with the Apple Campus 2, it may be the venue itself that draws the most attention. A planned 1,000-seat all-glass auditorium dedicated to its famous keynotes is also included in the Campus plans. Get ready for some breathless blog posts.
Originally Published in:
THE NETWORK / DECEMBER 2014 – Amazing Buildings
by Angela O'Byrne | Sep 1, 2014 | Amazing Buildings, Archives
We’ve all heard the stories from the Bay Area. From the lavish, ego-driven spending of the young techies to the stark income rifts developing in San Francisco real estate, no Gold Rush comparison feels unwarranted. And so in 2012, when the poster child for the current hyper-valued tech-boom, Facebook’s multi-billionaire CEO Mark Zuckerberg, tapped one of the world’s best-known architects to design the corporation’s new expansion of their West Campus in Menlo Park, CA, no one was particularly surprised. But what may surprise onlookers is what Zuckerberg and Gehry actually have planned: a thoroughly green and decidedly open-plan monument to collaboration, not individual achievement.
Known for his signature dynamic and deconstructivist buildings—exemplified by his legendary rippling, metallic Guggenheim Bilbao and the smashed-guitar shock of Seattle’s Experience Music Project —Gehry’s Facebook campus seems downright functional, and even a departure from form, by comparison. The significantly and deliberately toned-down effort is clearly geared toward kindling creativity inside its walls rather than reveling in ostentatious and eye-catching forms.
As seen from above, the 22-acre structure might not even register as a building at all. The West Campus will be covered by an expansive green roof that acts more like a sizeable and functioning park than the standard, token collection of decorative foliage that has accompanied the ‘greening’ trend. Native grasses, sizeable trees, and even a vegetable garden will sprawl over the space. Cafes, grills, and workbenches will facilitate outdoor employee interactions, capitalizing on the Bay’s temperate climate. And of course, green roofs have a cost-cutting effect, reducing the need for excessive heating and cooling.
The green roof also allows the 430,000 square foot building to blend in with its marshland surroundings more seamlessly, easing neighborly tensions and maintaining the affluent Menlo Park neighborhood’s character. Facebook made significant contributions to the town to gain approval for its expansion, including civic donations and building low-income homes in the area.
The new campus extension will also be linked to Facebook’s nearby main offices by an underground tunnel. The tunnel will include an airport-style people mover and a bike lane, allowing employees to access the main office’s considerable suite of amenities—including a full gym, a number of restaurants, a bank, and even a dentist’s office.
The West Campus, which will sit atop a massive surface-level parking garage, fluctuates in height between 45 and 73 feet. It is unlikely to draw the kind of architectural tourists that flock to Gehry’s Dancing House or his Walt Disney Concert Hall. What is most distinctive about the building is inside: the West Campus features an unprecedented amount of open-plan space. To encourage conversation and interaction among employees from various departments, the building eschews conventional closed-off office spaces in favor of a more social, dynamic plan.
The whole campus has been designed to take into account Facebook’s way of working and culture. It is one large office that will be broken up by conference rooms and breakaway spaces, with a parking structure underneath. There will be a rooftop garden, as well as a ground-level one. The building is designed to be simple—almost like a giant warehouse; its emphasis is on functionality, rather than extravagance. Housing up to 2,800 employees, it will be an engineering-only office. Facebook will keep its old campus and use a tunnel under the highway to connect the two.
In a field where roles, tasks, and titles are comparatively malleable, and where most work is being done on laptops anyway, the work environment has been built to match the tasks at hand. And so, the majority of the campus’s 2,800 engineers will be toiling, coding, and poking away in a giant, single room. Angled walls and meeting spaces peppered throughout were introduced to reduce the potentially alienating feeling of working in a giant hangar.
With 70% of all modern offices including an open floor plan, Facebook is not inventing anything new. But as with its social network, it’s certainly the largest-scale experiment yet. A common criticism of the open-plan scheme is that it encourages constant, focus-ruining distraction and seriously cuts down on privacy—two critiques that could be levied at Facebook itself. However, the positive aspects are clear: encouraging serendipitous sparks of collaboration and breaking down the silos of conventional corporate organization. Slated to open in the spring of 2015, the campus is sure to encourage reflection and speculation.
Facebook’s campus extension comes as part of a recent construction boom of giant tech projects, along with new Silicon Valley behemoths for Google and Apple and an ambitious new headquarters for Amazon in Seattle. Flush with record-breaking profits, the tech giants are moving beyond their former rental spaces and into flexible but massively ambitious and progressive campuses. Considering the industry’s past volatility, one hopes that they never become the hubristic ruins of the future. If they do though, at least they’re already covered with trees.
Originally Published in:
THE NETWORK / SEPTEMBER 2014 – Amazing Buildings
by Angela O'Byrne | Jun 1, 2014 | Amazing Buildings, Archives
There are buildings that quietly serve their function utilitarian and sometimes even elegant. There are buildings that push the envelope with their design striking onlookers with their unique perspective or form. And then there are buildings that cement a legacy. Whether achieving their greatness out of daring, innovation, or sheer scope, these are the buildings that will follow their designer’s name in all future records. They are the kind of buildings everyone can name: the Sydney Opera House, the Chrysler Building, and the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao. If all goes to plan, Adrian Smith’s Kingdom Tower could very well be this kind of building.
More Than Computing in the Clouds
When it comes to skyscrapers, Adrian Smith seems to be only in competition with himself. Having already dazzled with the super-tall [2,722 feet] Burj Khalifa in Dubai, which stretches into the clouds like a sumptuous, self-contained luxury city, Smith is now eyeing a site in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, to one-up himself yet again. The proposed Kingdom Tower would entail more than a slight nudge at the world’s tallest marker, however. It’d be yet another giant leap into the clouds.
With its pilings just completed in December, the Kingdom Tower promises to stretch to a full kilometer [more than 3,200 feet] in height, with 167 floors, 50+ elevators, and more than 3-million square feet of floor area. [Formerly known as the Mile-High Tower, the building has since been scaled down and converted to metric.] Construction is slated to take anywhere from three to six years and began in earnest in April. The project will reportedly require half a million cubic meters of concrete and 80,000 tons of steel. Just getting the concrete pumped to such heights has already proved to be challenging in theory.
Commuting by Elevator
With a Four Seasons hotel as its primary tenant, the tower will also include luxury apartments, office space, and the world’s highest observation deck. Elevator transfers will be required to reach the highest floors, as no single elevator could make the journey from the bottom to top. At that length, the cables would simply be far too heavy. In fact, elevator rides may constitute significant commute times. Some estimates put full-building journeys at twelve minutes of elevator time. Much faster and the trip up would be uncomfortable due to change in air pressure.
Even in the design phase, it is hard to not be impressed by the Kingdom Tower’s ambition and scope. The renderings depict a giant, slightly asymmetrical shard rising above the clouds, culminating in a pointed spire. The building’s profile is triangular with concave sides to reduce wind resistance, feeling simultaneously precise in its geometry and plausibly naturalistic.
One of the most striking features of the building’s design looks like something straight out of science fiction: the aptly named ‘sky terrace.’ On the 157th floor and connected to the building’s penthouse, the sky terrace may be the world’s most prestigious balcony. Jutting out from the building, smooth and disc-like, it looks like a landing deck for some yet-to-be-designed aircraft.
At a preliminary estimated cost of $1.2 billion, the Kingdom Tower is an investment that must pay off. However, with Prince Al-Waleed bin Talal, a member of the Saudi royal family and one of the wealthiest men on earth as the driving force behind the project, the Tower’s construction is said to be moving forward without delay, having finally secured its finances in 2012. Surprisingly, the building’s cost is actually lower than its shorter predecessor, the Burj Khalifa, thanks to lower labor costs in Saudi Arabia.
Kingdom Tower will not only be a feat of architecture, however. It is also an ambitious step forward in urban planning. First, with a diverse array of tenants and features, the building promises to be yet another “vertical city.” Second, the very project speculates a city that does not yet exist. The site for the building is relatively isolated, and Kingdom Tower survives on an “If you build it, they will come” ethos. As the anchor tenant for the future Kingdom City (one of a number of planned cities around Jeddah), the Tower will essentially be responsible for driving the proliferation and success of its surrounding region. However, as Jeddah serves as the principal gateway to Mecca, planners predict that the city will only expand and gentrify in the future.
Super-tall skyscrapers like the Kingdom Tower may not necessarily be the future of architecture. The footprints required to build so high are enormous, and most urban areas don’t have the available real estate. However, Adrian Smith’s experiments with hyper-dense living may have a profound impact on how we look at cities. And one thing is for sure: if the Kingdom Tower goes up as planned, it will be an icon. It may even be Adrian Smith’s legacy.
Originally Published in:
THE NETWORK / JUNE 2014 – Amazing Buildings
Recent Comments