Prefab is taking center stage this summer at The Museum of Modern Art in NYC with the Home Delivery: Fabricating the Modern Dwelling exhibit opening in July. As part of the exhibit, five renowned architects will bring a mix of existing and prototype prefabricated designs to full form on a exterior lot adjacent to the museum!
One Bryant Park is the first LEED platinum “skyscraper”; what is your favorite LEED aspect of the project? Aside from LEED, what was the most interesting or exciting part of the project for you?
For me, the best part of this project isn’t a single element or technology but rather the chance to work with an incredible team of dedicated professionals all driven by the same goal. Having the backing of the Bank of America and the Durst Organization has made a tremendous difference in setting the bar high in terms of sustainable design. On top of that, each consultant on the team is top notch and fully engaged with the project.
What was your least favorite or the most difficult thing about the project?
Certainly the most difficult part of this project has been the intense and detailed coordination required for such a large and complex building. The vast majority of that has far less to do with the green elements than with the requirements of a major banking institution being built in the middle of midtown Manhattan post 9/11.
Architecture has delayed gratification in terms of realization when compared with other design fields. OBP has been under construction for three years and has one year to go. To what extent are you involved in the process? What is it like to work on a project that takes six years from first sketch to completed structure?
I’m still involved daily in almost all aspects of the project, from the spire detailing to quality control on the installation of the curtain wall. Even after several years, there’s always something exciting and new right around the corner - not to mention that One Bryant Park is not your ordinary office building. Even still, staying personally motivated and keeping a team of people working over many years requires a strong sense of ownership and responsibility, as well as a fair amount of patience. Fortunately, projects this large are always broken down into smaller pieces, each with its own bit of gratification.
Can you explain how the big ice cubes in the basement will work?
They’re not exactly giant ice cubes, but the thermal storage system basically works like a “battery” for cooling. In the basement, there are 44 10-foot high, cylindrical tanks with water and a cooling coil inside. At night, when electrical production from the co-generation plant exceeds the building’s needs, we use that excess to run the chilling equipment to freeze the water in the tanks. During the day, the ice melts and provides cooling to the building. This shifts some of the electrical load from daytime to nighttime, which reduces the impact on an already stressed NYC electric grid.
How about those waterless urinals?
Waterless urinals are pretty straightforward; from the point of view of the user, there is no real difference. We have them in our own office, which we moved into last year and is also LEED Platinum - the first in New York. Instead of flushing, the urinals have a special drain fitted with a cartridge full of a liquid less dense than urine, which “floats” on top and seals out odors. Like all urinals, they have to be regularly maintained and cleaned and the cartridge has to be changed on occasion.
People are still wondering if “green” is just a trend. Where it often costs more to produce green products, in terms of buildings, the energy savings seem to actually make building green more cost-effective in the long run. Were there any environmental aspects of the design that needed to be compromised due to cost?
Building green is not a trend, at least not in our minds. The idea of building green really is about building smarter, higher performing buildings which are considerate of the people who live or work in them. Like any other aspect of the building, the benefits need to be weighed against the costs. There were several items which just couldn’t be justified today. When we started the project, we were sure that there would be building-integrated photovoltaics, but the more we looked at the amount of electricity generated, the less it made sense. We also looked seriously at including a wind turbine - in fact, the building originally had two spires, one architectural and one for the wind turbine. We even set up an anemometer on top of the adjacent 4 Times Square and took a full year of wind measurements. What we discovered is that while there is sufficient “quantity” of wind, it isn’t consistent enough to make the power generated worthwhile, at least not at the current state of the technology.
Maybe this is a question for Jordan Barowitz over at the Durst Organization, the developers of the project, but do you know to what extent being LEED platinum has been a selling point for the building, which I believe is almost completely leased?
The building is almost fully leased, and from what we have heard being green has made a significant difference. We are designing one of the tenant floors at the moment for fashion designer Elie Tahari LTD, and the green elements of this building were very important to them.
The challenge set forth by the AIA was to create ‘A House for an Ecologist’, a home base from which a US Fish and Wildlife Service Ecologist in Residence could live and conduct field research. Raphaelle and Alfredo Maul, of Maul Dwellings in San Sebastian, Spain, answered the call with The Landscape House - a site-sensitive, passive solar dwelling designed to fuse environmental performance with aesthetic integrity, building science with architectural excellence.
Meant to be oriented along an east-west axis on the highest elevation of the rural West Virginia site, The Landscape House takes advantage of prevailing winds with a double roof system that improves air circulation around the structure and generous, adjustable openings on the north and south façades. Passive solar heating and natural daylighting are controlled by a system of operable louvered shutters which incline on the north and revolve on the south. On the roof, a highly efficient Sphelar (3D cell) photovoltaic system collects sunlight for on-site energy.
The Landscape House is an exercise in water conservation. Water usage is clustered within the dwelling to minimize material consumption. The kitchen and bathroom are equipped with low-flow fixtures, dry-compost toilet, recycling area and compost unit. Rainwater is harvested and stored under the solar roof providing grey water to fixtures, thermal mass and a source of heat in winter through circulation in a radiant floor system. A solar dehumidifier draws moisture from inside and outside the building to produce potable water for drinking.
Although meant to pass through many seasons, The Landscape House’s locally-sourced, recycled and renewable materials are easily disassembled for reuse at a different site. The AIA competition jury from the Architecture of Sustainability conference took note saying, “We like the pre-fab-ness of it—from prefabricated elements. We also had a lot of discussion about ‘touching lightly’—what a small footprint means. It could be totally non-physical, the footprint.”
The Landscape House won the 2006 AIA Committee on Design Ideas Competition. Although it exists only in concept we’d certainly like to see it built.
+ Maul Dwellings
+ AIA ‘House for an Ecologist’
The past few weeks have seen shock waves resonating throughout the world of sustainable architecture as two monumental reports on green building confirmed its clout and cache. First, the CEC released “Green Building in North America: Opportunities and Challenges”, which lauded sustainable buildings as the quickest, cheapest, and most substantive way to cut down on North American greenhouse gas emissions. Next, CoStar released a comparison report stating that LEED buildings consistently outperform their peers in terms of occupancy rates, sale prices, and rental rates, with demand far outnumbering their supply. These two developments signify a significant shift towards a market-driven era of economically and environmentally viable buildings.
Beautiful national parks, luxury vacation rentals, green building and sustainable development. Sounds like a great next trip. Natural Retreats is a chance to get away from it all, explore the beautiful national parks, bask in luxury, and feel confident that your stay has a low environmental impact. Currently Natural Retreats has sites or residences in 4 of the UK national parks, but their goal is to acquire sites in or alongside all 14 of UK’s national parks. Sites currently include Yorkshire Dales, Snowdonia, Lake District, and North York Moors. Unfortunately, my knowledge of the countryside in the UK is limited to descriptions from Jane Austin novels and the A&E movies made from them. But the pictures on Natural Retreat’s website make it look worth the trip.
If current trends of foreclosures and suburban flight continue, we can expect that the suburbs of the future will be desolate, abandoned places. How will we ever recover those large swaths of land and put them back into good use? Enter the CV08, a suburb crushing, land restoring robot designed by Australian architect, and Inhabitat favorite, Andrew Maynard. Its mission is to bring Mother Nature back into the areas left unoccupied thanks to the rising costs of fuel and energy. A provocative, polemical and impossible solution? Sure. But, absolutely awesome at the same time.
Eye-catching aesthetics and implementation of a bevy of green building practices have brought a new oxymoron into consideration in the form of the Santa Monica Civic Center parking structure. This building is on its way to becoming the first LEED certified parking garage in the United States, shifting the sustainability merits of LEED debate into impassioned overdrive with plenty of fuel fodder for both sides of the argument.
Optimizing passive solar gain and using untreated local wood, this sustainable home on Lake Laka in Poland was designed by architect Piotr Kuczia. The south side soaks up the sun reducing the amount of active heating, while the north side opens up to vistas of the lake. Many of the materials were locally sourced, reducing the amount of unnecessary transport required for construction, hence the moniker CO2 saver. But there are many other ways that this home saves on CO2.
Architect Dustin Ehrlich has created a custom prefab home near Chapel Hill, NC. Commissioned by his parents and constructed by WIELER, the structure mixes stone, wood, stainless steel and rusted corrugated metal to create an extraordinary first, and lasting, impression. While undeniably modern, the structure’s aesthetic also draws on the local architectural styles of nearby tobacco barns from previous centuries.
The 2008 Olympics have found China caught in the center of a heated nexus of political and social controversy, with human rights and of course the Tibet issue popping up to disturb Olympic revelers’ idealist visions for the celebration. While originally commissioned as a monument to Beijing’s might, Herzog and deMeuron’s stunning Bird’s Nest Olympic Stadium, (looking as spectacular as we imagined it), perhaps now better symbolizes the complex web of problems and paradox assailing modern China. Photographer Andy Ryan has recently released a eye-catchign set of photos depicting the structure silently weathering its storm-ridden cultural context. Divorced from scenes of social turmoil, these frames capture the architectural marvel’s complex and implacable beauty.
You may remember that about a year ago we brought you news of the Bahrain World Trade Center, which was designed to have three giant turbines provide power to the building. Well, this past Tuesday, the project was finally completed, with the final testing and installation of the enormous wind turbines which power the building. This week, Bahrain WTC has, for the first time, activated all three 29m-diameter turbines at the same time!
Invoking the shape of myriad objects, this futuristic architectural design is shortlisted in an international contest to create a new observatory in Liverpool, England, reminding us that space-age proposals have a great way of stirring the imagination. Charged with reinventing the Mersey riverbank, Duggan Morris Architects‘ structure will supplant an obsolete radar tower with a luminous cathedral-like shell that offers unparalleled views of the heavens while keeping its environs in close consideration.
It’s not always our style to point out celebrity lives but when they involve a super green, LEED Gold rated building with stellar views across the Hudson River it gets our attention. The New York scoop is that the three-time Academy Award-nominated actor/environmentalist Leonardo DiCaprio has found shelter in Riverhouse, one of NYC’s greenest condominiums.
Founded in 2001, Berg Design offers gorgeous sustainable solutions to residential projects. Their Old Stone Highway house was designed by John Berg as a “Single Family Residence with Environmentally Low Impact Building Technology”. We totally dig their uncompromising approach to housing that is luxurious, super green, and chock full of mid-century charm.
Just off the Brazilian coast in São Paulo, architect Andrade Morettin has created Residencia RR - a stunning summer abode nestled amidst the dense vegetation and semi-tropical, hot, humid climate of Itamambuca in the state’s north coast. Responding to the local environment, House RR is selectively protected from and open to the elements. Under a primary “shell” the home shelters from intense sun and rains but allows much desired natural cross-ventilation to permeate through living spaces. With prefabricated components and an elevated foundation, the construction sits lightly on its site with a low ecological impact.
We’ve seen a whole slew of gigantic, volcano shaped, city-in-a-building towers, each promising to be the largest building in the world. First it was the wacky X-Seed design for Tokyo, and then even Norman Foster got into the game with his proposal for the massive ‘Crystal Island’ development in Moscow. Well now, architect Eugene Tsui is taking the gigantic volcano tower concept to a whole new eco level, by taking design inspiration from the natural world. His new design for the Ultima Tower – a 2-mile high Mt Doom-esque structure - borrows design principles from trees and other living ystem to reduce its energy footprint. We are always intrigued by architecture that uses biomimicry – the borrowing of principles from nature’s designs - and Tsui’s concept for this towering, ultra-dense urban development has certainly captured our attention with its thought-provoking design.
Sure, you’ve heard of the insular and aesthetic merits of green roofs. How about green walls? Enter Oulu, an eco-chic bar and lounge situated in southern Williamsburg. Designed by architect, sustainability expert, and Inhabitat contributor Evangeline Dennie, Oulu takes a literal approach to fresh design. Wrapped in a herbaceous façade, the LEED gold certified building bears its green cred for all to see.
In the spirit of Daekwon Parks’ stunning sustainable Symbiotic Superstructure, we’re continuing coverage of the eVolo Skyscraper Design Competition with another incredible entry. This dispatch from the future of skyscraper technology takes us to the northern coast of Chile, where Alberto Fernández and Susana Ortega have conceived of a Fog Tower that absorbs and channels water from its mist enshrouded environs. This pristine helical structure would allow for the development of a sustainable agriculture environment at the edge of the Atacama Desert, one of the driest places on earth.
It is not often that an architecture master reinvents himself, but that is precisely what Pritzker Prize winning architect Frank Gehry has done. Gehry, who first won international recognition with his own residence, a masterpiece of post-modern architecture, has revealed what can only be described as the first post post-modern architectural work, the New Gehry Residence, completely confounding both his critics and promoters alike.
One of the oldest museums in the Mid-West was recently relocated to an elegant new LEED Gold certified structure, garnering accolades from art aficionados and sustainability advocates alike. Kulapat Yantrasast of wHY Architecture designed the new Grand Rapids Art Museum to be as beautiful as the artworks within, placing a premium on public space and ultra-efficient modern design. Situated downtown amid Maya Lin’s “Ecliptic” park and Alexander Calder’s “Grand Vitesse”, the museum is an impressive addition to the renowned architecture of the “sculpture city”.
Groundreaking architect Jean Nouvel has inspired and influenced international architecture (and many of us here at Inhabitat) for over three decades with creative interpretations of culture, location, program and client that have resulted in some of the world’s most unforgettable structures. In recognition of his abundant career and persistent imagination, he has been chosen as the 2008 Pritzker Architecture Laureate, the world’s highest architecture honor.
Up until fairly recently, Rocio Romero fans could only visit a fully realized public version of her enormously successful LV prefab in Missouri. Then, last month, a privately-owned and newly completed Rocio Romero LV home was open to the public in the Hudson Valley, NY. When we ran the news of the New York LV open house tour, many of you asked us to keep you posted when Romero’s homes were accessible elsewhere. Well, West Coasters, hang on to your hats because there’s a new LV in town - a Rocio Romero LV is open for tours and much more against the amazing backdrop of Napa County, just a short drive north of San Francisco, and Inhabitat’s hometown in Marin County.
Ever dreamed of owning a completely self-sufficient home that produces its own energy, water, and is completely customizable? New York architect Scott Specht has the answer to all of our zero-energy prefab dreams with the new ZeroHouse™. This completely self-sustaining prefabricated house generates its own power, collects its own water, processes its own waste and is 100% automatic. Versatile, durable and site-sensitive, ZeroHouse can be erected in almost any location in one day with steel frame components and a helical-anchor foundation system that requires no excavation.
The Adrian Smith and Gordon Gill architectural firm has been busy stirring up the world’s skyline with a slew of lean, green superstructures that push the energy-neutral envelope. AS+GG recently unveiled plans for their latest oeuvre: a Clean Technology Tower in Chicago that takes a multi-generative approach to producing its own energy. Harnessing an atrium of wind turbines beneath a roof-top solar shell, the building “utilizes advanced technologies and climate-appropriate building systems to foster a symbiotic relationship with its local environment.”
We’re crazy about this gorgeous botanical garden in Medellin, Colombia that was recently renovated by Plan B Architects. The Orquideorama is an organically expanding wooden meshwork of modular “flower-tree” structures that weaves its way through the garden’s heart. A stunning study on structure and scale, the project unites the micro and macro worlds through an elegant synthesis of cellular and architectural forms.