The tall builing itself incorporates much infrastructure (if you consider the lifts as extensions of mass-transit, and the office/resi space as a required part of the city), and they fulfill many needs of expanding populations, and expanding economies without expanding, horizontally, the cities.
The tall building allows better use of land and mass transit, and if well-designed might outlive its shorter counterpart (partly due to iconicity, partly to higher design standards required by planning authorities), thus reducing/concentrating infrastructure needs and reducing the energy embodied in the structure/year of use.
The tall building in construction and use takes 30% more energy than its shorter counterpart (Yeang), partly due to the lifting and pumping requirements, and the increased volumes/weights of structure/plant.
Above is the bare bones of the high-rise debate. Jane Jacobs would chime in with comments on social integration. New Urbanists might have something to say, sustainability types too.
I have been trying to balance the many sides to this argument, yet struggle to frame the debate between national resdiential needs, city economic needs, global sustainable resource needs, cultural aesthetic needs...
and I wonder what I might have missed, do you think that curbing city sprawl is more important than reducing embodied energy. Do you have a view on where the balance lies? Perhaps you think that new energy sources will mean that the debate about energy consumption will not be important in 30 years time whereas the need for materials might become critical. Design for deconstruction anyone?
It's a conference paper I have (collaboratively) written. I'm trying to engender some debate (that's en-gender, nothing to do with your winkie mdler)
if you only care about energy consumption and ghg emissions of an isolated building, then the sprawl over the short term wins. if you care about holistic environmental quality, then reducing sprawl becomes much more important since preserving farmland and wilderness is emerging as a major issue, along with water quality driving choices. sprawl requires proportionately more infrastructure then high density and destroys much more habitat...
pliny fisk loves designing for deconstruction. cradle-to-cradle also embraces this concept but has only really explored small scale objects like furniture, not complex and massive bits like buildings and infrastructure.
density is the solution. The energy that is spent moving water vertically is far less than that spent moving people horizontally. Also, buildings can be designed to use energy in off peak times to move water horizontally and then let gravity do its work.
It may have already been done, but it would be great to have pumps operate in the off-peak hours to pump water to a storage tank on the roof. During the day, the water could be released and power turbines to generate electricity.
I know that they have a system like this near Valencia, CA on the 5 (outside of LA) which uses the topography of the land to create the change in potential energy.
If this hasnt been used in buildings yet, it is my idea...
tk - you say that sprawl wins over the short-term in lower ghg emissions. However you go on to say that sprawl requires more infrastructure. I agree with the second point, yet haven't found the figures are out there to confirm whether the first is true if you add the ghg embodied in the sprawl, and its infrastructure.
Preserving farmland: this becomes a question of the net present value of the space that farms people (offices, resi etc), and the space that farms plants and animals (gardens, rainforests etc). Is the increased economic activity going to, long-term, produce more of what we need in the future (brighter, more versatile people who know how to manage their environment), or is the greenery more valuable, now (remember, net present value)? what are the drivers of their relative values, at what point does pressure to increase occupiable space overtake, or cede to, the need for biodiversity and green carbon sinks?
For the C2C and D4D (cool that, eh?) I think that the solution might lie in the use of RFID tags attached to building components during prefab and construction derived from information in whichever BIM was used in the design. This I first heard suggested by Andy Watts (cited in another thread for his handbook of construction, or similar). In one way this would allow for something similar to the WEEE directive in the EU where disposal of electronic waste becomes the responsibility of the manufacturer. Impossible to administer in the case of building materials, but, if there was a responsibility to re-use all components of a building we might design a little differently.
mdler
Moving water vertically might be cheaper than moving people horizontally but I would think that moving water and people vertically, as has to happen in the high-rise, might be more expensive. No?
The off-peak use of energy is a very sensible idea, also for making ice during the night to provide coolth in the day: Reduces the peak loads on the local grid which means that less of the dirtier power stations are called into action during the day. For water pumping I would (at a glance) think it was sensible to fill the high tank at night and let the tank be mainly empty by the end of the work day. I don't see much future for hydro-electric energy generation within a building. for many of the reasons of scale that make building mounted wind turbines so ineffective.
namhenderson
A very interesting article, thanks. The research on tenant acceptance of high-rise living is equivocal. The (more recent) work from the Far East suggests a preference for what they call the "royal floors", the 6-12th or similar. This is at odds with the agents selling these buildings in the UK, US and Middle East who add 3-4% to the sale price for each floor higher in the building (suggesting higher is preferable), and at odds with some (seriously flawed) UK research that said that 0% of their sample, no-one, would choose a high-rise as their favourite home.
The cultural and Futurist SciFi spins taken by the blog you link to do in fact suggest (in some way) this result. The higher human densities are made acceptable by cultural acclimatisation, learning, need. I was surprised that the blogger, in his discussion of metropolitan dystopias didn't make some link to Borges, but then I haven't read enough Borges to know...
there are no answers in generalities. low density is appropriate in some situations, high density in others. to imagine that one is "better" than the other is misguided.
jafidler
high-rise, dense or otherwise, as you say, decided with respect to context. No point building bungalows in a flood plain. Part of what I am wondering is on what axes will the issues of density/sprawl come to a head or is rising density inevitable? Will we run out of materials to cover the earth with?
Get academic or political:
What the state of the evidence?
What is your position?
Are ghg emissions going to become the primary global taxable good and currency of transaction? Perhaps the need to offset the ghgs embodied in a building or car, burger or trip to the loo: A country's prosperity indicated by its carbon-(trade)-deficit. How do you see the value of ghgs changing, as their effects become more pronounced. What can we invest in now that will not look like a dirty planet-threatening endeavour 50 and 150 years hence.
And, if you are technically minded, how do you think these things should be measured in the building industry and indeed what's your hypothesis on how to mitigate industry emissions?
Well...
A few points. Density is inevitable if one assumes continued population growth and development along current trend lines. Sao Paolo and China are in this context nothing.
However, can this be sustained ecologically? Obviously, not in all localities..But, then again i have friends who can't wait till we have friends living in off-planet colonies..
With regards to more academic measurements. I think that something like cradle to cradle is desired and inevitable. Just look at everyone's interest in digital fabrication and modularity. This also, i would imagine makes measurements of "embodied" and non-embodied costs easier..
Including but not limited to ghg, meaning other and all true "costs".
I personally, think this is a good thing. Did you see the recent Denari house, news item?
This though is small scale..Unless we start thinking of recyclable skyscrapers...
However, i know that if it ever gets to mega, conurbation, Sci-Fi style living i hope i am long past.
you only need look to the london olympics for the complexity of making sustainable urbanism as infill and brownfield restoration.
back to the california aqueduct, it takes the entire output of a nuclear power plant to pump the water up and over the tahachipi mountains. some of the potential energy is recaptured by turbines along the way, but most of this juice is lost. on the older aqueduct serving LA, there is lots of hydro power being generated in the 2679 foot drop from the owens valley down to los angeles putting the 'power' into the LADWP's name.
There are lots of off peak power managament systems available including freezing giant icecubes at night and getting cooled by them in the afternoon (from residential scaled ice systems to institutional/municipal scaled systems).
Density is good as long as it is fully taken advantage of and controlled. High rise buildings can produce just as much energy as they use. With things like water, gravity, the sun, wind, even people. Elevators use energy going up and then produce it as gravity pulls them down. Grey water can be filtered through vertical or interior gardens. Sure it takes energy to pump the water to the top of the building but whose to say it cant produce that energy back as gravity pulls it down, as well as filtering that water and making it more pure than it was before. Everyone has read C2C, buildings can begin to give back to the environment what they take. We have only touched the surface but i think we should keep scratching. Perhaps the tops of buildings could be populated like the ground they are built on. There could be a whole second floor to a city. Kind of like Corb's envisioned but better. Density also supports mass transit as well as pedestrian traffic, which begins to eliminate the amount of vehicles on the road.
My one grip about high rise buildings is there connection to the pedestrian on the ground. Sure they look great and iconic from a distance, making landmarks. But when you stand next to a high rise you lose connection to the top of the building. I just recently went to NYC for the first time and this is how I felt. I saw so many standout high rise buildings from a distance, but when I got up close to them and I looked up all I could think was, what the hell is the top of the building doing that for, why is it shaped like that, what is going on up there! Maybe thats a good thing. But for me, I felt disconnected. I felt like the building only wanted me to look at it from 5 blocks away. This is why I think density needs its limits, and once the limits are reached then the city can begin to expand horizontally.
I dont have as much personal experience with this topic as I would like, (i live in suburbia) but I find it very interesting and very valuable to the future of the way we live and the many ways I can enhance it as a future architect.
arup reported for dongtan that 8 stories/mid-rise density seems to have the best balance with efficiency and density. at least in developing countries, 8 stories is still considered a walk-up.
but with density comes the urban heat island and I'm not sure that even with the latest in greenroofs, cool roofs, pervious/low albedo paving, et cetera, that this rise in temperature can ever be eliminated. there is always going to be waste heat from machines and buildings altering the local climate (and all the existing paving/tar roofs are going to take a long, long time to be replaced).
i live in a 5 story walk-up. it is a hard walk for the elderly who share the building. my girls have developed awesme calves though, so maybe it is healthy. it is quite liveable, and i am content, but i wouldn't mind a garden of my own, and my flat is not normal cuz it is designed around solar access and natural ventilation, not profitibality (built in the 60's by good planners) and is therefore not likely to happen again in the near future (the typology has not been built in tokyo for maybe decades now). because of that upfront and running cost premium mentioned above the developer is not inclined to aim for quality of life type designs...luxury (materials and extra services) is more common but that is to me a substitute for quality of space and access to light/air...or at least that is how it seems in tokyo.
you can make a case for either low or high density living in terms of sustainability. check out mike jenks' series on sustainable planning theories. not architecture. so the research is based on scientific method more than design intentions (which is where most architects lose credibility; if you have a design to push it is hard to be objective about reality)...
the discussion above is largely limited to energy questions. there are many answers and modes of living that can be more sustainable if limited to those terms, at any density, so i am not convinced by high-rise life as an answer that emerges from that logic (it seems to me to be a retroactive rationalistion rather than a natural result of the issues at hand). the negative externalities (to borrow from economic terminology) attached to high-rise and dense urban life are also very substantial and need to be overcome simultaneous to the design of the building(s) if the option is ever going to have a chance in the real world.
there are ways to be sustainable in any mode of inhabitation, if that is the goal. but first it is necessary to define sustainability. i am still unsure about this, but in my own work i have broken the concept down into two parts - efficiency (physical organisation), and equity (equality of access to services, healthcare, nature, employment, etc). each one has different requirements and both are susceptibale to both physical and cultural solutions. what role design has in that context is problematic for me still. is it about policy or making a new building? and why does the high-rise offer itself as a solution?
if you can answer those questions i for one would be totally ecstatic...
i like jump's last paragraph a lot. to it i would add that while the environment is an increasingly important design idea, projects need to be understood through multiple lenses (social, technological, economic, ecological, and political) and as well as the more architectural lenses of space, time, and program. the more one of these lenses is privileged over the others, the closer the project comes to being codified and subsequently the worse its role in an urban context that is increasingly interconnected through these systems.
I really like breaking "sustainability" down into those two categories effeciency and equity.
From an energy perspective (and within the context of Glbal warmign trends etc) i think effeciency is the most immediate important concern. And it is also likely the easier one to do. Simply because it adds to the bottom line, at least long term of a project. Also, because we know how to make things efficient even if we haven't been implementing such strategies.
However, over the long term equity is of more interest to me. And i think this is really where designers can have the most impact. Effeciency is almost an engineerign issue. Whereas design i think has the potential for real impact in issues of access.
jump, good thoughts. I would add to efficiency and equality, habitat. we can't forget that us humans are just another resident of this spinning rock and all the other creatures can't be ignored in our quest for personal fame, and fortune.
thanks for kind words. all due goes to my prof/advisor.
my phd is about the compact city and how suburbia can fit into the concept in japan (suburbs here are ugly but a new urbanists wet dream in planning terms)...anyway, he pointed out that sustainability is bandied about so much that no professor would take my work seriously if i used the term in my paper. or worse they would bring their own version to the table and suddenly my paper about suburban morphology would be judged on energy use, and i would be fcuked...so i broke the concept down after reading maybe 15 definitions... and realised they all had those 2 components...and if i talk about them seperately i can still talk about sustainability...but without invoking it as a buzz-word...and incidentally, more clearly...or so the theory goes.
whether it is valid ot not it has helped me to organise my paper and clarify what exactly i am addressing (NOT energy use)...a similar approach may be useful for this problem.
what nemhenderson says above also rings true for me. i have always wondered about reducing sustainability to energy issues, which is what they inevitably come down to in architecture projects...cuz, if energy were suddenly free and without problems would all the hard work suddenly be meaningless? if cars didn't pollute in any way would suburbs still suck? would high-rises and density make any sense at all? i suspect they would but it is hard to say so objectively...and so i always want more from architecture than low flush toilets and wind-turbines. that stuff is cool, smart...but easy. the rest is where we have a chance to earn our keep...
What degrees do you already have a B.A. and M.A. or is your PhD instead of an M.A. From a school in Tokyo and in architecture specifically or?
As for the points you made.
I think your right sustainability as it is focused now would go right out the window as a trend if energy and especially all resources were free or at least not hard to come by. However, that is why i highlighted
your equity aspect of sustainability.
I think from a design and quality of life aspect bad design would continue to matter at least to me.
I want to live in a well designed house or city regardless of whether it is still recquired (from an energy pespective)..
It is more about lifestyle to me, than just energy.
Your PhD sounds very interesting....From what i understand of Japan, density is pretty high for the large urban areas, even though the cities are for the most part not that vertical. At least not over a few stories.
Obviously this changes depending on location, but as a general rule?
I don't think you have to go high to be "sustainable". Certainly there is plenty of suburb and exurban land that will need to be "retrofitted' at some point. Urban infill etc. How do we do this correctly. I don't think it is simply by putting up a bunch of tall buildings. We have to think of the spaces holistically. How do we build communities including infrastructure, green/open space, housing etc...
i have a B. environmental design, and M. Arch - both architecture degrees, both earned in canada. when i finish phd it will be dr. engineering ( i believe), but my work is on urban planning, under the tutelage (is that a word?) of an architect + planner.
agree with your take on things. the image you paint of japan is about right, which is impressive. very cool. the point you make is more or less the justification for my research. with about 40% of japanese urbanites living in suburbs i am convinced the only way to work towards a future that is sustainable in a real way is to include them as part of the solution. so i am more or less documenting the suburbs as they exist and pointing out how some aspects can be used in a positive way...i am neither for or against suburbs or tall buildings as answers to the problem of being sustainable.
tokyo is a special case and not really useful as an example, but it is remarkable that 33 million people, the same as the entire population of canada, live in a single city, and at quite high densities, tied together by rail network of amazing technical sophistication. for some researchers, who equate sustainablity to energy use as embodied in the automobile tokyo is a kind of nirvana...and where i live it is quite ok, but there are disadvantages, and as Ande Sorenson has pointed out the idea that tokyo is sustainable is hard to support given the harsh reality of the city in terms of quality of life and access to green space, etc...it is an amazing place, but as a model for sustainability? i don't know. i think we need more. no idea what, mind. which is a cop out. maybe i will know in another 20 years. or maybe someone here will come up with some cook answers. i sure hope so.
another dynamic in the high density urban sustainabilty discussion is food production. Just cause living in urban places reduces your personal energy use (when compared to suburban folks with 'similar' lifestyles/income) doesn't quite resolve the food-miles issue. There is a self-sufficiency ethos that is the foundation for the jeffersonian/wrightian american right of the green party concept of sustainabilty. Mother Earth News is a prime example of the hippie-libertarian coalition that reflects more 'green' americans then the al gore supporter.
Vertical farms are a theoretical attempt to bring food production to high density places. There are many off-the-grid folks who define sustainability as being self sufficient: growing all their food, generating all their energy, and making everything you need. This romantic ideal doesn't work in urban areas where surplus of production has freed us to pursue more abstract activities.
Broad-acre city is a failed utopian vision - but is there a future with patrick blanc's living walls meeting vertical farming?
Mean that Vegas is ahead of the curve now? Although keep in mind i think they said it would provide enough food for 70.000 people..I don't know if that is per year, per day....
Also, didn't i hear somewhere that Beijing still has many small plots within city limist where resident grow food??
If so it reminds me of discussion Archinect has had regarding redesigning old vacant city lots (particularly in the Rustbelt) as farms....
Jump..
Going back to your equity vs efficiency access..It seems as if Tokyo because of density and good rail systems etc may be very efficient in use of space/energy?
Equity however, would be the issue with regards to green space etc.??
Or do those more social design issues affect everyone in Tokyo including ones with money?
Ie: there is just little green space period...
Jan 12, 08 11:29 am ·
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Density and High-Rise: needs, infrastructure, sustainability and embodied energy
Folks,
a new/old tangent:
The tall builing itself incorporates much infrastructure (if you consider the lifts as extensions of mass-transit, and the office/resi space as a required part of the city), and they fulfill many needs of expanding populations, and expanding economies without expanding, horizontally, the cities.
The tall building allows better use of land and mass transit, and if well-designed might outlive its shorter counterpart (partly due to iconicity, partly to higher design standards required by planning authorities), thus reducing/concentrating infrastructure needs and reducing the energy embodied in the structure/year of use.
The tall building in construction and use takes 30% more energy than its shorter counterpart (Yeang), partly due to the lifting and pumping requirements, and the increased volumes/weights of structure/plant.
Above is the bare bones of the high-rise debate. Jane Jacobs would chime in with comments on social integration. New Urbanists might have something to say, sustainability types too.
I have been trying to balance the many sides to this argument, yet struggle to frame the debate between national resdiential needs, city economic needs, global sustainable resource needs, cultural aesthetic needs...
If you think it, write it down:
and?
small penis
and I wonder what I might have missed, do you think that curbing city sprawl is more important than reducing embodied energy. Do you have a view on where the balance lies? Perhaps you think that new energy sources will mean that the debate about energy consumption will not be important in 30 years time whereas the need for materials might become critical. Design for deconstruction anyone?
It's a conference paper I have (collaboratively) written. I'm trying to engender some debate (that's en-gender, nothing to do with your winkie mdler)
if you only care about energy consumption and ghg emissions of an isolated building, then the sprawl over the short term wins. if you care about holistic environmental quality, then reducing sprawl becomes much more important since preserving farmland and wilderness is emerging as a major issue, along with water quality driving choices. sprawl requires proportionately more infrastructure then high density and destroys much more habitat...
pliny fisk loves designing for deconstruction. cradle-to-cradle also embraces this concept but has only really explored small scale objects like furniture, not complex and massive bits like buildings and infrastructure.
PsyArch
density is the solution. The energy that is spent moving water vertically is far less than that spent moving people horizontally. Also, buildings can be designed to use energy in off peak times to move water horizontally and then let gravity do its work.
It may have already been done, but it would be great to have pumps operate in the off-peak hours to pump water to a storage tank on the roof. During the day, the water could be released and power turbines to generate electricity.
I know that they have a system like this near Valencia, CA on the 5 (outside of LA) which uses the topography of the land to create the change in potential energy.
If this hasnt been used in buildings yet, it is my idea...
Density is better...
Although, once you start talking about super-tall buildings like Burj and the next generation of mile high plus bldgs.
I don't know if the measurements have been done...
Anyone know?
Also, somewhat related...
http://speedbird.wordpress.com/2007/12/29/along-the-dystopia-line-1-i-am-your-density/
tk - you say that sprawl wins over the short-term in lower ghg emissions. However you go on to say that sprawl requires more infrastructure. I agree with the second point, yet haven't found the figures are out there to confirm whether the first is true if you add the ghg embodied in the sprawl, and its infrastructure.
Preserving farmland: this becomes a question of the net present value of the space that farms people (offices, resi etc), and the space that farms plants and animals (gardens, rainforests etc). Is the increased economic activity going to, long-term, produce more of what we need in the future (brighter, more versatile people who know how to manage their environment), or is the greenery more valuable, now (remember, net present value)? what are the drivers of their relative values, at what point does pressure to increase occupiable space overtake, or cede to, the need for biodiversity and green carbon sinks?
For the C2C and D4D (cool that, eh?) I think that the solution might lie in the use of RFID tags attached to building components during prefab and construction derived from information in whichever BIM was used in the design. This I first heard suggested by Andy Watts (cited in another thread for his handbook of construction, or similar). In one way this would allow for something similar to the WEEE directive in the EU where disposal of electronic waste becomes the responsibility of the manufacturer. Impossible to administer in the case of building materials, but, if there was a responsibility to re-use all components of a building we might design a little differently.
mdler
Moving water vertically might be cheaper than moving people horizontally but I would think that moving water and people vertically, as has to happen in the high-rise, might be more expensive. No?
The off-peak use of energy is a very sensible idea, also for making ice during the night to provide coolth in the day: Reduces the peak loads on the local grid which means that less of the dirtier power stations are called into action during the day. For water pumping I would (at a glance) think it was sensible to fill the high tank at night and let the tank be mainly empty by the end of the work day. I don't see much future for hydro-electric energy generation within a building. for many of the reasons of scale that make building mounted wind turbines so ineffective.
namhenderson
A very interesting article, thanks. The research on tenant acceptance of high-rise living is equivocal. The (more recent) work from the Far East suggests a preference for what they call the "royal floors", the 6-12th or similar. This is at odds with the agents selling these buildings in the UK, US and Middle East who add 3-4% to the sale price for each floor higher in the building (suggesting higher is preferable), and at odds with some (seriously flawed) UK research that said that 0% of their sample, no-one, would choose a high-rise as their favourite home.
The cultural and Futurist SciFi spins taken by the blog you link to do in fact suggest (in some way) this result. The higher human densities are made acceptable by cultural acclimatisation, learning, need. I was surprised that the blogger, in his discussion of metropolitan dystopias didn't make some link to Borges, but then I haven't read enough Borges to know...
Did I miss any?
Heh. Mostly because Borges is reportage, not dystopia. : . )
there are no answers in generalities. low density is appropriate in some situations, high density in others. to imagine that one is "better" than the other is misguided.
jafidler
high-rise, dense or otherwise, as you say, decided with respect to context. No point building bungalows in a flood plain. Part of what I am wondering is on what axes will the issues of density/sprawl come to a head or is rising density inevitable? Will we run out of materials to cover the earth with?
Get academic or political:
What the state of the evidence?
What is your position?
Are ghg emissions going to become the primary global taxable good and currency of transaction? Perhaps the need to offset the ghgs embodied in a building or car, burger or trip to the loo: A country's prosperity indicated by its carbon-(trade)-deficit. How do you see the value of ghgs changing, as their effects become more pronounced. What can we invest in now that will not look like a dirty planet-threatening endeavour 50 and 150 years hence.
And, if you are technically minded, how do you think these things should be measured in the building industry and indeed what's your hypothesis on how to mitigate industry emissions?
When does the game start?
And what time is supper?
Well...
A few points. Density is inevitable if one assumes continued population growth and development along current trend lines. Sao Paolo and China are in this context nothing.
However, can this be sustained ecologically? Obviously, not in all localities..But, then again i have friends who can't wait till we have friends living in off-planet colonies..
With regards to more academic measurements. I think that something like cradle to cradle is desired and inevitable. Just look at everyone's interest in digital fabrication and modularity. This also, i would imagine makes measurements of "embodied" and non-embodied costs easier..
Including but not limited to ghg, meaning other and all true "costs".
I personally, think this is a good thing. Did you see the recent Denari house, news item?
This though is small scale..Unless we start thinking of recyclable skyscrapers...
However, i know that if it ever gets to mega, conurbation, Sci-Fi style living i hope i am long past.
psyarch-
you only need look to the london olympics for the complexity of making sustainable urbanism as infill and brownfield restoration.
back to the california aqueduct, it takes the entire output of a nuclear power plant to pump the water up and over the tahachipi mountains. some of the potential energy is recaptured by turbines along the way, but most of this juice is lost. on the older aqueduct serving LA, there is lots of hydro power being generated in the 2679 foot drop from the owens valley down to los angeles putting the 'power' into the LADWP's name.
There are lots of off peak power managament systems available including freezing giant icecubes at night and getting cooled by them in the afternoon (from residential scaled ice systems to institutional/municipal scaled systems).
Density is good as long as it is fully taken advantage of and controlled. High rise buildings can produce just as much energy as they use. With things like water, gravity, the sun, wind, even people. Elevators use energy going up and then produce it as gravity pulls them down. Grey water can be filtered through vertical or interior gardens. Sure it takes energy to pump the water to the top of the building but whose to say it cant produce that energy back as gravity pulls it down, as well as filtering that water and making it more pure than it was before. Everyone has read C2C, buildings can begin to give back to the environment what they take. We have only touched the surface but i think we should keep scratching. Perhaps the tops of buildings could be populated like the ground they are built on. There could be a whole second floor to a city. Kind of like Corb's envisioned but better. Density also supports mass transit as well as pedestrian traffic, which begins to eliminate the amount of vehicles on the road.
My one grip about high rise buildings is there connection to the pedestrian on the ground. Sure they look great and iconic from a distance, making landmarks. But when you stand next to a high rise you lose connection to the top of the building. I just recently went to NYC for the first time and this is how I felt. I saw so many standout high rise buildings from a distance, but when I got up close to them and I looked up all I could think was, what the hell is the top of the building doing that for, why is it shaped like that, what is going on up there! Maybe thats a good thing. But for me, I felt disconnected. I felt like the building only wanted me to look at it from 5 blocks away. This is why I think density needs its limits, and once the limits are reached then the city can begin to expand horizontally.
I dont have as much personal experience with this topic as I would like, (i live in suburbia) but I find it very interesting and very valuable to the future of the way we live and the many ways I can enhance it as a future architect.
An interesting example of scratching the surface I think.
http://www.melbourne.vic.gov.au/info.cfm?top=171&pg=1943
arup reported for dongtan that 8 stories/mid-rise density seems to have the best balance with efficiency and density. at least in developing countries, 8 stories is still considered a walk-up.
but with density comes the urban heat island and I'm not sure that even with the latest in greenroofs, cool roofs, pervious/low albedo paving, et cetera, that this rise in temperature can ever be eliminated. there is always going to be waste heat from machines and buildings altering the local climate (and all the existing paving/tar roofs are going to take a long, long time to be replaced).
i live in a 5 story walk-up. it is a hard walk for the elderly who share the building. my girls have developed awesme calves though, so maybe it is healthy. it is quite liveable, and i am content, but i wouldn't mind a garden of my own, and my flat is not normal cuz it is designed around solar access and natural ventilation, not profitibality (built in the 60's by good planners) and is therefore not likely to happen again in the near future (the typology has not been built in tokyo for maybe decades now). because of that upfront and running cost premium mentioned above the developer is not inclined to aim for quality of life type designs...luxury (materials and extra services) is more common but that is to me a substitute for quality of space and access to light/air...or at least that is how it seems in tokyo.
you can make a case for either low or high density living in terms of sustainability. check out mike jenks' series on sustainable planning theories. not architecture. so the research is based on scientific method more than design intentions (which is where most architects lose credibility; if you have a design to push it is hard to be objective about reality)...
the discussion above is largely limited to energy questions. there are many answers and modes of living that can be more sustainable if limited to those terms, at any density, so i am not convinced by high-rise life as an answer that emerges from that logic (it seems to me to be a retroactive rationalistion rather than a natural result of the issues at hand). the negative externalities (to borrow from economic terminology) attached to high-rise and dense urban life are also very substantial and need to be overcome simultaneous to the design of the building(s) if the option is ever going to have a chance in the real world.
there are ways to be sustainable in any mode of inhabitation, if that is the goal. but first it is necessary to define sustainability. i am still unsure about this, but in my own work i have broken the concept down into two parts - efficiency (physical organisation), and equity (equality of access to services, healthcare, nature, employment, etc). each one has different requirements and both are susceptibale to both physical and cultural solutions. what role design has in that context is problematic for me still. is it about policy or making a new building? and why does the high-rise offer itself as a solution?
if you can answer those questions i for one would be totally ecstatic...
Thankyou for your contributions: many leads to be followed (and work to do) and I'll be back with more.
i like jump's last paragraph a lot. to it i would add that while the environment is an increasingly important design idea, projects need to be understood through multiple lenses (social, technological, economic, ecological, and political) and as well as the more architectural lenses of space, time, and program. the more one of these lenses is privileged over the others, the closer the project comes to being codified and subsequently the worse its role in an urban context that is increasingly interconnected through these systems.
Jump...
I really like breaking "sustainability" down into those two categories effeciency and equity.
From an energy perspective (and within the context of Glbal warmign trends etc) i think effeciency is the most immediate important concern. And it is also likely the easier one to do. Simply because it adds to the bottom line, at least long term of a project. Also, because we know how to make things efficient even if we haven't been implementing such strategies.
However, over the long term equity is of more interest to me. And i think this is really where designers can have the most impact. Effeciency is almost an engineerign issue. Whereas design i think has the potential for real impact in issues of access.
jump, good thoughts. I would add to efficiency and equality, habitat. we can't forget that us humans are just another resident of this spinning rock and all the other creatures can't be ignored in our quest for personal fame, and fortune.
@ treekiller..
Unfortunately i think that the issue of habitat or bio-equity etc is not going to be mainstreamed any time soon..
Why should humans take the needs of other creatures into our planning etc?
We are human centered. Does a spotted owl deserve habitat as much as humans deserve a home yes...
Will such thinking ever effect plannign and building guidelines. I doubt it.
thanks for kind words. all due goes to my prof/advisor.
my phd is about the compact city and how suburbia can fit into the concept in japan (suburbs here are ugly but a new urbanists wet dream in planning terms)...anyway, he pointed out that sustainability is bandied about so much that no professor would take my work seriously if i used the term in my paper. or worse they would bring their own version to the table and suddenly my paper about suburban morphology would be judged on energy use, and i would be fcuked...so i broke the concept down after reading maybe 15 definitions... and realised they all had those 2 components...and if i talk about them seperately i can still talk about sustainability...but without invoking it as a buzz-word...and incidentally, more clearly...or so the theory goes.
whether it is valid ot not it has helped me to organise my paper and clarify what exactly i am addressing (NOT energy use)...a similar approach may be useful for this problem.
what nemhenderson says above also rings true for me. i have always wondered about reducing sustainability to energy issues, which is what they inevitably come down to in architecture projects...cuz, if energy were suddenly free and without problems would all the hard work suddenly be meaningless? if cars didn't pollute in any way would suburbs still suck? would high-rises and density make any sense at all? i suspect they would but it is hard to say so objectively...and so i always want more from architecture than low flush toilets and wind-turbines. that stuff is cool, smart...but easy. the rest is where we have a chance to earn our keep...
Jump..
What degrees do you already have a B.A. and M.A. or is your PhD instead of an M.A. From a school in Tokyo and in architecture specifically or?
As for the points you made.
I think your right sustainability as it is focused now would go right out the window as a trend if energy and especially all resources were free or at least not hard to come by. However, that is why i highlighted
your equity aspect of sustainability.
I think from a design and quality of life aspect bad design would continue to matter at least to me.
I want to live in a well designed house or city regardless of whether it is still recquired (from an energy pespective)..
It is more about lifestyle to me, than just energy.
Your PhD sounds very interesting....From what i understand of Japan, density is pretty high for the large urban areas, even though the cities are for the most part not that vertical. At least not over a few stories.
Obviously this changes depending on location, but as a general rule?
I don't think you have to go high to be "sustainable". Certainly there is plenty of suburb and exurban land that will need to be "retrofitted' at some point. Urban infill etc. How do we do this correctly. I don't think it is simply by putting up a bunch of tall buildings. We have to think of the spaces holistically. How do we build communities including infrastructure, green/open space, housing etc...
namhenderson,
i have a B. environmental design, and M. Arch - both architecture degrees, both earned in canada. when i finish phd it will be dr. engineering ( i believe), but my work is on urban planning, under the tutelage (is that a word?) of an architect + planner.
agree with your take on things. the image you paint of japan is about right, which is impressive. very cool. the point you make is more or less the justification for my research. with about 40% of japanese urbanites living in suburbs i am convinced the only way to work towards a future that is sustainable in a real way is to include them as part of the solution. so i am more or less documenting the suburbs as they exist and pointing out how some aspects can be used in a positive way...i am neither for or against suburbs or tall buildings as answers to the problem of being sustainable.
tokyo is a special case and not really useful as an example, but it is remarkable that 33 million people, the same as the entire population of canada, live in a single city, and at quite high densities, tied together by rail network of amazing technical sophistication. for some researchers, who equate sustainablity to energy use as embodied in the automobile tokyo is a kind of nirvana...and where i live it is quite ok, but there are disadvantages, and as Ande Sorenson has pointed out the idea that tokyo is sustainable is hard to support given the harsh reality of the city in terms of quality of life and access to green space, etc...it is an amazing place, but as a model for sustainability? i don't know. i think we need more. no idea what, mind. which is a cop out. maybe i will know in another 20 years. or maybe someone here will come up with some cook answers. i sure hope so.
another dynamic in the high density urban sustainabilty discussion is food production. Just cause living in urban places reduces your personal energy use (when compared to suburban folks with 'similar' lifestyles/income) doesn't quite resolve the food-miles issue. There is a self-sufficiency ethos that is the foundation for the jeffersonian/wrightian american right of the green party concept of sustainabilty. Mother Earth News is a prime example of the hippie-libertarian coalition that reflects more 'green' americans then the al gore supporter.
Vertical farms are a theoretical attempt to bring food production to high density places. There are many off-the-grid folks who define sustainability as being self sufficient: growing all their food, generating all their energy, and making everything you need. This romantic ideal doesn't work in urban areas where surplus of production has freed us to pursue more abstract activities.
Broad-acre city is a failed utopian vision - but is there a future with patrick blanc's living walls meeting vertical farming?
Barry.
Agreed food production is a key area. Because we all need food, right? And most of a cit-dwellers food nowadays comes from very far away.
Does this
http://archinect.com/news/article.php?id=69738_0_24_0_C
Mean that Vegas is ahead of the curve now? Although keep in mind i think they said it would provide enough food for 70.000 people..I don't know if that is per year, per day....
Also, didn't i hear somewhere that Beijing still has many small plots within city limist where resident grow food??
If so it reminds me of discussion Archinect has had regarding redesigning old vacant city lots (particularly in the Rustbelt) as farms....
Jump..
Going back to your equity vs efficiency access..It seems as if Tokyo because of density and good rail systems etc may be very efficient in use of space/energy?
Equity however, would be the issue with regards to green space etc.??
Or do those more social design issues affect everyone in Tokyo including ones with money?
Ie: there is just little green space period...
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