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09 Jul 2008
Jason Pomeroy, Director of Broadway Malyan, in Singapore, discusses new approaches to designing tall buildings and the growing power of the green consumer.
What do you think are the key considerations for sustainable tall buildings?
We have to be realistic in knowing that half the world’s population are living in city centres. With population growth, we’re going to see increasing inner city migration and the tall building typologywill not vanish overnight. So we need to try and mitigate those fundamental problems.that beset the airconditioned tall building. One way is using brownfield sites in inner city centres and locating them near transport interchanges thereby committing a greater volume of people to move into these high density environments via sustainable transport means.This will negate the need for increasing, sprawling transport infrastructure to the suburbs which would be equally detrimental to the environment.
Do you have an example on which you have worked?
We are looking at a development in Kuala Lumpur which is in central KL. It is a great opportunity to put in a mixed use tower and we are looking at the tall building being a vertical extension of the city. If we consider the city as a disparate series of land uses and different functions, ranging from residential to office, to retail, it will be the challenge of the 21st century sustainable tall building to try and incorporate a disparate mix of functions, not just horizontally but vertically.
How do you extend the city vertically?
The idea is that you offer the same diversity you find on the ground in the sky, i.e, having retail, office and residential all in the same tower separated by sky gardens. These are the open spaces that encourage social interaction, amenity, health and wellbeing. If we are creating high density developments that historically would always have a certain proportion of open space for recreation and amenity, we should be doing exactly the same in the sky. These sky gardens can then culminate in rooftop bars and restaurants that will provide wonderful views across the cityscape and beyond.
How do you think tall buildings will develop in the future?
Currently In terms of construction, we should be considering how we can profile the building to minimise the wind pressure and therefore minimize the loads onto structure. So profiling the building creates a less structurally intensive solution will then have economic benefits.
The testing of products and materials, recyclability and reuse of the material, the relative travel distance of the material from the depot to the site to minimize the carbon emissions produced through transporation. We also need to consider the orientation of buildings to minimize heat gain and the impact of the sun and we should consider alternative energies and renewable energies.
For example, Vauxhall Tower, the scheme we are undertaking in London, which will be the tallest residential tower in Europe when completed in 2011, has a proposed wind turbine at the top to harness the increasing wind speed, which will specifically provide the energy required for common areas.
I think in the future, we will see densification at an unprecedented scale which will lead to accessibility suffocation unless we create a greater sense of permeability between tall buildings. This won’t be just at ground level but we will see people circulating in the sky as well via skybridges, ramps and travelators. Currently, what the tall building is able to do is confine the building onto a smaller footprint, maximizing land values, minimizing the penetrations into the ground and safeguarding the sprawling nature of some developments. In many respects that is a good way of preserving the Greenfield sites and densifying inner city centres.
What aspects are important in social sustainability?
People’s lives are not just about the nine to five anymore, it is the idea that people can work where they want, when they want. blurring of the boundaries between live and work. The importance of creating a socially responsive mix that does not cater for one particular age group, race or gender but is something that will try and attract a multitude people in a new urban living environment in the city is key.
Does it add significant cost to building when incorporating sustainable technologies?
There is the common belief that tall buildings are a third more expensive. However, if you’re talking from an environmental technology point of view, it is not so fair to say anymore that such technologies are adding 30 or 40% on top of buildings. It has been suggested that the wind turbine technology applied to the Bahrain World Financial Centre was actually 3 - 4 % above the normal building costs because it used tried and tested technologies, that apart from the historical standard that tall buildings cost a third more, we should not think that environmental technologies are adding 30-40%. It is more in the region of 3-5%.
Are developers becoming increasingly willing to take on the additional costs?
As the technologies improve and as we constantly develop on those existing technologies, we should see that cost coming down. It shouldn’t be something that is dissuading developers, it should be something developers increasingly want to do. That is certainly what we are finding in South East Asia. Developers want to make a point of difference from their competitors, they need to respond to their own corporate social responsibilities. They are realizing that the green consumer is very powerful and this is certainly influencing their creation of sustainable work and lifestyle environments that are not just driven by the bottom line.
Is demand from green consumers influencing developers?
Developers are waking up to the needs of the green consumer:- an audience that has watched An Inconvenient Truth; school children who are taught sustainability as part of their curriculum and igenerally a broader spectrum of society that is aware of the delpletion in natural resources and the need to reduce carbon emissions and preserve the natural environment. It is at government levels whereby sustainability is becoming legislated that can make a difference. Developers are realizing that to ignore this would be a huge economic social, environmental and political mistake.
They also have to understand that sustainable policies are being incrementally added to become intrinsic aspects of planning legislation.
Do you think there needs to be guidelines/legislation?
. In the UK you have BREEAM, in the US you have LEED and in Singapore you have the BCA Green Mark. In many respects governments taking a hard line on sustainability is a good thing because when it is legislated people have to take more notice and developers have to do something about it in order to preserve their statutory permissions.
Do you think there are financial benefits in the long run?
We are helping several developers look at their own sustainability policies towards property development and it will certainly allow them to be positioned in a different light. It highlights for them that it is not necessarily going to cost them more money to do so but is actually creating a more sustainable and more efficient building product at the end of it that will hopefully increase the value of their property, provide a better longevity to the development and attract a broader spectrum of clientele either for rental or for sale.
I think we should be making best use of our transport interchanges and try to densify inner city centres. I am an advocate for brownfield development and reusing inner city sites as well as refurbishing and extending old buildings.
As far as social sustainability is concerned, there needs to be a greater understanding of the societys’needs:- e.g:- what is required by a young professional couple, a family with two children or the individual. We need an understanding of their lifestyles, understanding what they do when they wake up, what they do during the day, what they do at night. . It is important to create a diverse mix that replicates the sense of neighbourhood on the ground and then try to do that vertically. It does sound utopian and there haven’t been so many models but . If we don’t move forward in this way, we run the risk of continuing this vertical floor plate monotony that does not necessarily cater for a range of individuals but just tries to create a series of cells that forces everyone to live and workin a particular way.
What factors do you think will be important in the future?
What is going to be really important in the future is a greater ease of movement. What we are finding on the ground in urban city centres is that it is the space that permits the movement, provides permeability and also social interaction. It is this return to old urban design principles i.e, that place making is more important than the object building that I think is key.
How does that translate to the tall building?
In many respects the tall building has always been this 20th century air conditioned object that hasn’t really had space as its central theme. It has always been about the object as a stand alone icon. What the tall building typology needs is for it to be broken down and revisted as a piece of vertical urbanism. This is why I’m advocating the mixed used tall building as a sustainable vertical extension of the city, a series of disparate land uses that are vertically stacked, separated by open spaces and sky gardens that will hopefully then provide for a new tall building architecture.
How much space do you put up there in the sky? Is there a particular ratio of open space to the object?
On the ground you always have a ratio of open space to built up area that permits movement and social interaction. There should potentially be a similar ratio in the sky and it is then a question of how do you then quantify the movement. Space syntax is a predictive theory that can quantify pedestrian flow. We could be thinking of a similar strategy vertically and it then creates a new type of tall building architecture which will change the way that we experience at tall buildings. They will be far more representative of the feeling that we get on the ground walking around cities and we will start to have a similar feeling when walking through tall buildings. This is what we are doing in a number of schemes.
The issue of space is something that could be legislated. For example, a particular percentage of renewable energies has been legislated in developments in London. In the future they may legislate that when you are creating a tall building development you must put in a particular ratio of open space. If you legislate, developers will have to incorporate open space. We are starting to see tall buildings going through planning in London which are already incorporating sky gardens and open space for the public because of particular planning that is being passed in the design and development of tall building. It will only be a matter of time before it becomes legislation.
Jason Pomeroy BA (Hons) BArch (Hons) Mst IDBE (Cantab) RIBA ASIA
Biography
Jason is a Director of International multi-disciplinary design practice, Broadway Malyan. He joined in 2005 to support the cause of progressive tall building design and vertical urbanism and employs these skills in both practice and the lecture theatre.
His research at Cambridge considered the notion of the tall building as a vertical city and the sky court as an alternative civic space for the 21st century within the sustainable mixed use tall building typology. He continues to pursue this vein of PhD research at the Bartlett school of graduate studies.
In addition to co-directing the Singapore office, he lectures and publishes widely, and is a visiting professor at the University of Hawaii, Nottingham University and Imperial College London.
Source: CMIS