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
by Staff Writer | Apr 4, 2014 | Archives, News
WWNO 89.9 – OUT TO LUNCH
We talk a lot in New Orleans about the “rebirth” of the city, but before the city was re-born it was born. The architects of what we all agree is our remarkably beautiful city were just that: architects.
The major architects of today’s New Orleans are Renaissance men and women. An eye for beauty and an ability to translate that into a design that can be engineered, once thought to be a singularly rare talent in itself, is today just the beginning of a far more complex procedure that involves knowledge of the law, investment skills, management ability and more than a passing knowledge of community dynamics. Click to listen.
by Angela O'Byrne | Mar 1, 2014 | Amazing Buildings, Archives
Ultra-tall skyscrapers continue to redefine the skylines of Shanghai and Dubai. One World Trade Center is now reaching completion in New York City, having recently topped out as the tallest building in the U.S. There can be no doubt that we are in the midst of another golden age of the skyscraper. After a long lull, architects are once again pushing the boundaries of height.
This new batch of behemoths have benefitted from incredible developments in planning and engineering, allowing them to be more sustainable and efficient than ever. Some function more like cities than office buildings, with unbelievable density and adaptability of use. In fact, as the last installment of Amazing Buildings reported, Gensler’s Shanghai Tower—currently the world’s second-tallest building—is geared to gain LEED Gold certification upon its completion.
However, important architecture is not always about creating completely new structures. Sometimes the greatest design challenges lie in improving pre-existing work. In 2009, the Sears Tower, one of the United States’ most iconic buildings [and at the time its tallest] was rebranded The Willis Tower in a deal with the London-based Willis Group Holdings. But the name wasn’t the only thing set to change.
BACK TO THE FUTURE
The 1,450-foot building, designed by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, was still a marvel of engineering in 2009. It had held the title of world’s tallest building for twenty-six years and had entered popular consciousness. Nevertheless, its 1973 completion date meant that sustainability and energy efficiency were not its strongest assets. The new management of the Tower turned to the firm of Adrian Smith + Gordon Gill Architecture [whose principals had recently left the building’s original design firm, SOM], to initiate a massive and wide-ranging study to modernize and increase the efficiency of the landmark building.
Smith and Gill’s greening study for the building is shocking in its ambitious scope and proposed effect. This should come as no surprise. With 416,000 square meters of building area and 104 floors, there’s a lot of room for improvement. The project promises an 80% reduction in the tower’s base electricity use—68 million kilowatt-hours or 150,000 barrels of oil worth of power. As with many efficiency schemes, the bulk of the project focuses on insulation: the 16,000 single-pane windows would be replaced, resulting in a 50 percent reduction in heating energy. New gas boilers, powered by fuel cells, would generate electricity and regulate the building’s temperature at nearly 90% efficiency.
The study also proposes a massive water use initiative that would result in 24 million gallons of saved water annually through condensation recovery and plumbing upgrades. Water for the building’s bathrooms would be heated by the highest solar panels in the United States, on the proposed green roofs of the building.
Perhaps most impressively, the architects also proposed the construction of a 500-unit, 5-star, LEED Gold-certified hotel addition to the tower. With strategically placed wind turbines and energy-efficient double-walled construction, the addition serves as a model of how far thinking about sustainability has come since the 1970s.
A MODEL FOR RETROACTIVE SUSTAINABILITY
As of today, the study’s actual implementation remains incomplete. Retrofitted plumbing has accounted for 10 million gallons of saved water annually and a green roof on the 90th floor is being used to test stormwater collection and reducing the urban heat island effect. And while the study remains largely theoretical, it still serves as a model for the possibilities of retroactive sustainability projects, even on a massive scale. Rather than simply rip-ping up and starting again, this type of engagement with careful energy analysis can significantly reduce maintenance costs for building owners and have huge environmental implications. If all of Smith and Gill’s recommendations were to be implemented, the Willis Tower would save the energy equivalent of the annual electricity usage of 2,500 average Chicago homes or five million miles of highway driving.
With such rapid advances in sustainability technology, it seems clear that we must design with obsolescence in mind. In terms of efficiency, a building will never be completely finished. There will always be methods to streamline and improve energy consumption on the horizon. The trick is to design with an eye for their eventual implementation further down the road.
Sustainability should now simply be regarded as a good business practice. On the strength of their work in sustainable design, Smith + Gill was recently awarded the bid to design the 2017 Astana World Expo in the capital of Kazakhstan, themed around Future Energy. The 173-hectare site will be powered completely by wind and solar power.
By 2019, Smith + Gill’s Kingdom Tower should be finished in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. While the exact measurements are still private, it is expected to be the tallest building in the world and will come at a cost of at least $1.23 billion. Its sustainability initiatives have yet to be announced, but we know that such an ambitious project, and future massive projects like it, will need to keep efficiency at heart to be feasible. Otherwise, it will mean retrofitting in the future.
Originally Published in:
THE NETWORK / MARCH 2014 – Amazing Buildings
by Angela O'Byrne | Dec 1, 2013 | Amazing Buildings, Archives
In the late 19th century, a rapidly growing Chicago, flush with railroad and manufacturing capital, gave birth to an architectural icon that would change the face of the modern skyline. The discovery and implementation of steel-frame construction, first successfully used on the 138-foot Home Insurance Building, would eventually herald an age of taller buildings, better views, and increased density. Matching the character of the age, the skyscraper became a symbol of American innovation and ambition in a rabidly commercial town, as Chicago architects made their names and fortunes with ostentatious, beautiful Beaux-Arts buildings.
TOO MUCH OF A BIG THING
The age of the skyscraper reached full-scale boom proportions in the years before World War I, spreading to New York and the world beyond as technical innovation made them cheaper and more viable. Eventually, though, the fervor for skyscrapers calmed. The accumulation of countless utilitarian rectangular towers in every city seemed to tarnish the very idea, and tall buildings came to seem uninspired; even gauche.
Today, with the world’s population increasing at an alarming rate and the trend of urbanization showing no signs of slowing, the skyscraper is seeming less like an ambitious display of man’s engineering prowess and more like a necessity in a rapidly crowding world. Nowhere is the crunch for space felt more acutely than in the developing world. It is projected that China will see its urban population grow from the current 600 million to more than a billion by 2030! In burgeoning cities like Beijing and Shanghai, this means that there’s only one direction to go: skyward.
This past August, the Shanghai Tower celebrated its topping out with a ceremony and the hoist-ing of its final beam. While the building is still incomplete–interior construction is still under-way–the topping out brought the Tower to 2,073 feet, making it the tallest building in China and the second tallest building in the world, behind only Dubai’s Burj Khalifa, the subject of our last installment of Amazing Buildings. Super-tall skyscrapers have been popping up throughout Asia, with American firms often finding homes for their most ambitious projects overseas.
YESTERDAY, TODAY AND TOMORROW
Designed by Jun Xia at Gensler, the Shanghai Tower consists of nine stacked cylindrical buildings totaling 121 floors. It is located in the district of Pudong, accompanied by two other super-tall buildings: the 101-floor Shanghai World Financial Center and the 88-floor Jin Mao Tower. The three buildings form a kind of narrative trio of the past, present, and future of China.
Like any super-tall building, the Shanghai Tower is a marvel of engineering. Ultra-futuristic in design, it is encased in a spiraling glass facade that was engineered for wind resistance–important in a city that experiences regular typhoons. A 16-meter scale model of the building was tested for earthquakes up to 7.5 on the Richter scale. Since the Tower sits on clay-mixed soil characteristic of a river delta, 61,000 cubic meters of concrete were used in the foundation slab, poured continuously in a marathon 60-hour session.
When the Tower is complete in 2014, it will be one of the most sustainably advanced skyscrapers and it is projected to be LEED Gold certified. Here, again, the outer glass shell comes into play. By creating a buffer between the outside and the inner buildings, the space between the two curtains acts as an insulator, reducing heating and cooling costs. The Tower will also house an advanced rainwater collection system and vertically aligned wind turbines. Taken together, the sustainability strategies used in the building will reduce the building’s carbon footprint by 34,000 metric tons per year.
NOT JUST A BUILDING IN THE CITY BUT A CITY IN THE BUILDING
The Shanghai Tower is also a feat of planning, constituting an entire city contained within the building. The space between the outer glass facade and the inner column of nine buildings allows for ‘sky lobbies’, which contain landscaped public gardens and serve as plazas or town squares, encouraging neighborhood-style interaction and community. The nine buildings or zones of the Tower are defined by their use. The ground floor will contain retail space, with luxury boutiques, high-end dining, and cafes. Above this are five office zones with more conventional commercial space. Sitting above the offices are two luxury hotel zones. The ninth and highest zone will house an observation deck and cultural facilities, including an exhibition center and gourmet restaurants.
Buildings like the Shanghai Tower may help change perceptions of what skyscrapers mean. By integrating urban planning, sustainability, and engineering, super-tall buildings are able to achieve things that smaller buildings simply can’t. “This tower is symbolic of a nation whose future is filled with limitless opportunities,” said Qingwei Kong, the President of the Shanghai Tower Construction & Development Co., Ltd. Of course, Mr. Kong is correct. However, the tower may also be symbolic of the future of building in general. The skyscraper is not a fad, and we very well may be seeing a second golden age of the form.
Originally Published in:
THE NETWORK / DECEMBER 2013 – Amazing Buildings
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