A Curious Eye

There are plenty of architects these days who are doing their best to design buildings that are energy efficient and utilize green technology. And then there’s Allison Dring and Daniel Schwaag of the Berlin-based firm Elegant Embellishments.

Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, an architect firm with offices here in New York, has proposed a futuristic-looking halo to be suspended between two buildings over Grand Central Station as part of an initiative to bring the travel hub back to its past glory, according to The Wall Street Journal.   

The redesign would help funnel pedestrian traffic and add a bit more glitz and glam to the structure.

The most striking thing about the halo is it would move up and down between the two new office buildings to give visitors views of the city from different heights.

Sure, they provide shelter from the elements—but roofs can be so much more! Here, we profile 10 remarkable living roofs around the globe, from Brussels to Vancouver.

Long popular in Europe, green roofs are gaining a sturdy foothold in the U.S. and beyond. A recent survey by Green Roofs for Health Cities shows that the green roof square footage has grown 115 percent since 2009. Increasingly, owners of all building types, from single-family dwellings to giant commercial complexes, are recognizing the economical and environmental payoffs of living roofs. And what about those aesthetic benefits! Who doesn’t love a gorgeous, verdant roof?

The race is always on. Within the span of just two years, the world’s tallest building was built three times in New York City – the 282.5-meter Bank of Manhattan in 1930, the 319-meter Chrysler Building in a few months after, and then 11 months later the 381-meter Empire State Building in 1931. The era of architectural horse-racing and ego-boosting has only intensified in the decades since. In 2003, the 509-meter Taipei 101 unseated the 452-meter Petronas Towers in Kuala Lumpur after a seven-year reign as the world’s tallest. In 2010, the Burj Khalifa in Dubai far surpassed Taipei 101, climbing up to 828 meters. Bold builders in China want to go 10 meters higher later this year with a 220-story pre-fab tower that can be constructed in a baffling 90 days. And then, in 2018, the Kingdom Tower in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia (below, right) will go significantly farther, with a proposed height of at least 1,000 meters.*

Keep reading at TheAtlanticCities.com

In Seattle’s South Lake Union neighborhood, you can use the white brick smokestack of the Supply Laundry Building as a landmark to help find your way among boxy new condominiums and low glass office buildings. The Space Needle is the western point of this local compass, and the smokestack is the east.
 
In the future, the Supply Laundry Building may also mark a new kind of path toward more energy efficient buildings. In early November, the city agreed to allow the building’s owner, Vulcan Real Estate, to renovate the building without adhering to the usual municipal energy code requirements.
 
Instead, the rehabbed building will have to meet an overall target: use 50 percent less energy than the national average for a building of its size and type of use.
 
The project will be the first major test of renovation under an outcome-based energy code, a concept that “turns the regulatory framework a little bit upside-down,” as Liz Dunn puts it.
 
Dunn is the director of the Preservation Green Lab, a Seattle-based think tank run by the National Trust for Historic Preservation. With technical help from the New Buildings Institute, the Lab has been developing the outcome-based code concept over the last several years.
 
Standard municipal energy codes are highly prescriptive, essentially presenting developers with a checklist: windows with a certain U-factor, interior insulation with a certain R-value. “For existing buildings, for older and historic buildings, the prescriptive energy code is just a really poor fit,” Dunn says.
 
For example, the western façade of the Supply Laundry Building has its original early-20th-century wood window frames. Such frames are often too thin to accommodate double panes, and have to be replaced in order to bring a building up to code.

Keep reading at TheAtlanticCities.com

This started out as an article on prefabricated modular housing, which can bring the construction price of new homes down considerably and lends itself well to use of green materials and straightforward replication. There’s a multi-part series on green prefab construction, including the history and evolution of the industry, on the always-fascinatingInhabitatsite.  

I knew from previous articles that I wanted to make container homes, or living quarters fashioned from recycled standard freight shipping containers, part of the story. They take recycling to a new level. But in the course of researching photos of container homes, I ran across something even more fascinating: large, colorful, multi-family “cities” of work spaces and homes built from shipping containers in London, Mexico, Amsterdam and, perhaps soon, New York.

The most well-known of these is London’s Container City, on the Thames at Trinity Buoy Wharf, across the river from the O2 Arena. Here’s howInhabitatwriter Jorge Chapa described the project in 2007:

 Keep reading and watch a video at TheAtlancticCities.com

Did you know that Milan is one of the most polluted cities in Italy? Apparently urban sprawl and increased emissions are major causes for slumping air quality in the international fashion capital. So Italian architect Stefano Boeri has formulated an unusual plan to give the city back what it’s lacking: namely, some greenery.

Bosco Verticale is Italian for “Vertical Forest.” The project took inspiration from traditional Italian towers covered in ivy. Boeri has simply multiplied the amount of foliage to a dramatic degree, envisioning residential buildings that resemble tall boxy trees. Each apartment unit has a balcony attached, with a lush garden enveloping the structure. The two towers will provide roots for 900 trees, as well as plenty of shrubbery and other floral vegetation. Their footprint, when flattened, is equal to 10,000 square meters of forest. Bosco Verticale provides a plan to make reforestation possible within the confines of a developed city.

There’s lots of science behind the project to prove that it’ll actually improve the city atmosphere, and not just the skyline. Boeri’s materials state:

The diversity of the plants and their characteristics produce humidity, absorb carbon dioxide and dust particles, producing oxygen and protect from radiation and acoustic pollution, improving the quality of living spaces and saving energy. Plant irrigation will be produced to great extent through the filtering and reuse of the grey waters produced by the building. Additionally Aeolian and photovoltaic energy systems will contribute, together with the aforementioned microclimate to increase the degree of energetic self sufficiency of the two towers.

The presence of this vegetation will also encourage the presence of birds and insects within the miniature gardens. Bosco Verticale intends to balance out the city’s environmental damage, and to create a self-sufficient ecosystem. And with construction costing only five percent higher than that of a typical skyscraper, the concept of a vertical skyscraper is incredibly accessible for other cities facing similar plights.