ABSTRACT
Whilst tall buildings offer important scope for sustainable urbanisation by limiting the uptake of land, and of vehicle travel when sited at public transport nodes, they tend to be resource-intensive in other respects. Addressing these characteristics, the paper identifies positive strategies for tall building sustainability — leveraging advances in energy-saving and other technologies that support facilitative design, thereby shifting the balance in favour of sustainable development. Its holistic perspective incorporates attention to social sustainability and urban design, in terms of both building occupiers’ experience and the public realm.
Offering a wide geographic focus, the paper draws instructive learning from London, where stringent heritage controls and a strong planning focus on sustainable building performance — coupled with high land values and an appetite to build tall — have catalysed the use of advanced modelling and analysis to design a new generation of tall buildings. Whilst these are not of the height of the very tall Asian structures, the evidence, argument and design quality that they must demonstrate to overcome its challenging planning requirements poises London as a valuable ‘design laboratory’, generating exemplar strategies.
Conceived to achieve a wide range of sustainable credentials — from internal environmental comfort and spatial quality for individual building users, and effectiveness for occupier organisations as dynamic entities, through limited energy consumption and increased use of renewables, to benign external impacts in terms of microclimate and positive contributions to the public realm, these exemplars offer a useful mapping of considerations and strategies to optimise tall building design and operation. Focused on embodied energy, performance in use and urbanistic criteria, the approaches referenced have relevance for wider geographic application.
Keywords: Façade, Form, Lighting, Planning, Social sustainability, Structure, Thermal management, Urban design, Vertical circulation.
