Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM) has revealed an update to its Urban Sequoia project it says can be built right now, during a presentation that took place today at the COP27 climate summit in Sharm El-Sheikh, Egypt.

SOM Partner Chris Cooper was on hand to make the presentation of his firm’s refined design for a carbon-sequestering building that can be used as a weapon in the fight against carbon emissions globally, three-quarters of which are generated from urban areas alone.

“We recognize the need to alter the trajectory of climate change by going beyond net zero,” Cooper said during the presentation. “We need to take carbon out of the atmosphere through the built environment, and we have developed a design to do just that.”

Despite some considerably less-marketable obstacles to its effective implementation, the technology for carbon sequestering has come a long way in its development to offer itself as a plausible answer to the challenge posed by the need to accommodate the explosive growth of populations in cities that is projected to take place by 2060.

SOM’s high-rise concept inverts the traditional building process and layout by incorporating its MEP systems into an expanded set of floor slabs. Each slab would support an underfloor ventilation system underneath its timber floor finish. The ceilings are, therefore, removable, which cuts down on materials usage. Finally, sky gardens and other capture technologies are embedded into the building’s core and roof, with the ability to be reused in industrial settings elsewhere.

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SOM says its design will absorb more than 300 percent of the amount of carbon emitted during its construction and operations during the building's planned 100-year lifecycle. The concept can be adapted to be used in a variety of different building types and leverages the most technically advanced materials — including bioconcrete and solar glass — in order to achieve the “beyond net zero” standard in multiple offshoots to be spread throughout the world for years to come.

“Urban Sequoia is a systems approach, a philosophy,” the firm’s Sustainability Director, Mina Hasman, said in a press announcement. “It is a way of thinking about cities as ecologies, as living and breathing systems that can be reconfigured to achieve dramatic reductions in whole life carbon, reframing the built environment as a solution for the climate crisis.”