Imagination and green orientation

Architecture, construction, buildings on the streets of our cities and villages have always been the most visual showcase of the current state of technology and technology. What is a XNUMXth century showcase?

Today it is difficult to talk about one dominant style or direction. Perhaps this is a very common feature. striving for eco-friendly design, but is understood in different ways, and sometimes what some consider green projects, for others even anti-eco. So there is no clarity even in the most powerful architectural trend.

This is often talked about. According to the World Green Building Council, the energy needed to construct and operate buildings accounts for almost 40 percent of the total. global carbon dioxide emissions are greater than all cars, aircraft and other vehicles in the world.

If the cement industry were a state, it would be the third largest source of CO emissions.₂ around China and the US. Concrete, the most widely used man-made material, has an astonishingly high emission: the production and use of a cubic meter produces enough carbon dioxide to fill an entire single-family home.

Green designers are still looking for solutions that are more in harmony with the natural environment than traditional methods, with the lowest possible emissions and "fixing" of CO₂.

Designer houses made of cork or dried mushrooms. There are more and more inventions that capture carbon dioxide and bind it with other materials in the form of bricks, for example, from which they are made. eco-houses. However, it seems like a more realistic and compelling option is Cross Laminated Timber (CLT), a type of industrial plywood with thick layers of lumber glued at right angles for strength.

Although CLT cuts down trees, it uses a small fraction of the carbon released by cement and can replace steel in low-rise and mid-rise buildings (and because trees absorb CO₂ from the atmosphere, wood can have a positive carbon balance). The tallest CLT building in the world was recently built in Norway., it is a multifunctional, residential and hotel quarter. At 85m high and 18 floors, elegantly finished with local spruce, it seems like a real alternative to concrete and steel structures. We devoted an extensive report published in MT a year ago to ever-rising wooden structures and CLT.

Green offshore projects

Bold "green" projects and concepts, willingly published in the media, sometimes sound very radical and fantastic. In fact, before we see the biocities of the future, more and more buildings will be built that look like the new Apple campus in California. As much as 80 percent of the area surrounding the round area, resembling a UFO vehicle, has been turned into a park here.

Apple hired university tree experts to plant the area's unique species. The campus was built in harmony with the environment, including in terms of the height of the buildings. All buildings must be no higher than four stories. Although the main building should be dominant in size, it will not actually rise above the skyscraper. The campus has a backup power source, which, according to Steve Jobs himself, will eventually become the main source, as Apple intends to generate solar energywhich will be cleaner and cheaper than from the network and use the latter as a fallback.

In the spring of 2015, Google is also introducing an eco-shelf project with a new headquarters design in Mountain View, California. The design of the new Google campus was developed by two architects - Bjarke Ingels and Thomas Heatherwick. It includes sky-dome residential office buildings, bike lanes, extensive green spaces, and moving walkways. Without a doubt, the Google project is also a response to Apple's Campus 2.

Single buildings are definitely not enough for many contemporary designers. They want to build and rebuild entire neighborhoods and cities green. Vincent Callebaut, a French architect and urban planner, has demonstrated a project to turn Paris into a green and smart city of the future.

The concept, which Callebaut calls "Smart City", combines a trendy green concept with state-of-the-art technological solutions. The plan is to transform the bright city into a friendly one, in harmony with nature, while retaining its historical elements.

Vincent Callebaut's visualizations are full of "green buildings" using passive energy technologies, complete water recycling, green walls and gardens even on the highest floors. The walls of buildings made of honeycomb cells are certainly responsible for generating energy from sunlight. This energy is then mainly used to produce biofuels. green skyscrapers they should combine residential and business functions, which should reduce the need for commuting and free the streets from excess traffic.

It is worth remembering that the green way of thinking in architecture is also strongly promoted by modern authorities and established laws. for example, in France, a roofing law has been in force since 2015. From now on, the roofs of newly built commercial facilities must be partially covered with greenery, otherwise. This should help insulate the building, resulting in lower winter heating and summer cooling costs, increased biodiversity, reduced runoff problems by retaining some rainwater, and noise control. France is not the first country to introduce a green roof policy. Such steps have already been taken in Canada and Lebanese Beirut.

Architects are trying to bring nature back to cities. Combining the properties of living organisms with our ingenuity can blur the line between natural and artificial. And our lives will change for the better. The pioneers are looking for ways to tear down the walls we have fenced off and replace them with "living walls" covered in earth and vegetation and glass structures filled with algae. Thus, they could be used to convert gases and produce energy. Even the simplest biological systems can absorb rainwater, support life in a variety of forms, trap pollutants, and regulate air temperature.

Form follows the environment

Radical eco-projects are still mostly curiosities. The reality of modern construction is the emphasis on the energy efficiency of the building structures being erected so that they meet the highest requirements both in terms of economy and operation. This is a double "eco" - ecology and economy. Energy-efficient buildings are characterized by compact housing, in which the risk of thermal bridges and therefore heat loss is minimized. This is important in terms of obtaining good minimum parameters in relation to the area of ​​external partitions, which are taken into account together with the floor on the ground, to the total heated volume.

In May 2019, a group of British architectural firms called "Architects Declare" published a manifesto that, along with modest requirements (minimizing construction waste, controlling energy consumption), contains more ambitious assumptions, such as minimizing "life". cycle” - on the amount of CO₂ necessary for the production of concrete or mine stone for demolition energy. One suggestion especially controversial for an industry accustomed to getting rid of old buildings and starting over was that existing structures should be modified and upgraded rather than demolished.

However, as many have pointed out, there isn't really a consensus on what "sustainable" architecture and construction really means. When we delve into discussions on this topic, we inevitably find ourselves in a labyrinth of opinions and interpretations. Some will insist on going back to centuries-old building materials such as a mixture of earth and straw, others will point to buildings such as the luxury hotel in Amsterdam, built partly from reclaimed concrete and with an "intelligent" façade that controls the internal temperature. as an example of the right way.

For some, a sustainable building is one that lives in harmony with its environment, using local materials, wood, mortar with locally quarried sand, local stone. For others, there is no eco-architecture without solar panels and geothermal heating. Experts are wondering should sustainable buildings be sustainable in order to maximize the energy needed to build them, or should they gradually biodegrade when demand is gone?

The pioneer of ecodesign in architecture and construction is the famous architect Frank Lloyd Wright, who in the 60s advocated structures that arise and function in harmony with the environment, and the famous cascading villa designed in Pennsylvania became the tangible expression of these aspirations. However, it was not until the XNUMXs that architects began to think more about how to design in harmony with nature rather than trying to master it. Instead of the modernist principle of "form follows function", the Norwegian architect Kjetil Tredal Thorsen proposed a new slogan: "form follows environment".

In the early 90s, Wolfgang Feist, a professor at the University of Innsbruck, created the concept of the "passive house", a passive house that has been spreading throughout the European continent for many years, although it cannot be said that it was mass-produced. It's about making buildings "passive" by reducing their dependence on "active" energy intensive heating and cooling systems and instead making better use of the sun, occupant body heat and even heat radiated from household appliances. A prototype apartment building was built in Darmstadt, Germany in 1991. Feist and his family were among the first tenants.

In passive buildings, the emphasis is on perfect insulation. This is a carefully designed thermal packaging, as airtight as possible, with an internal temperature controlled by built-in air ventilation systems and heat recovery systems. The best passive designs provide a 95% reduction in average heating bills, a significant reduction in emissions. Higher construction costs are offset by lower operating costs.

However, many environmentally minded architects have serious doubts about whether a passive house is a green thinking project. If the goal is to keep in shape with the environment, why build an airtight enclosed space with triple-glazed windows where opening windows to hear birdsong disrupts the building's energy flow? In addition, passive architecture standards make sense mainly in climates where winters are quite cold and summers are sometimes hot, such as in Central Europe, Scandinavia. In contrast, in maritime temperate Britain it makes much less sense.

And if not only at home to save energy, but also, for example, to purify the air? Researchers at the University of California, Riverside have tested a new type of roof tile that they say can chemically break down the same amount of harmful nitrogen oxides in the atmosphere as the average car emits in a year. Another estimate says that one million roofs covered with such tiles remove 21 million tons of these compounds from the air per day.

The key to new roofing is the admixture of titanium dioxide. They pumped harmful nitrogen compounds into an "atmospheric chamber" and irradiated the tiles with ultraviolet radiation, which activated the titanium dioxide. In various samples, the reactive coating was removed from 87 to 97 percent. harmful substances. titanium dioxide. The inventors are currently considering the possibility of "staining" the entire surface of buildings with this substance, including walls and other architectural elements.

Despite the clash of concepts about residential buildings, the green wave of global redevelopment wants to penetrate further into all neighborhoods, landscape and environment. Today it uses computerized environmental design, i.e. CAED(). Using the practice of PermaGIS (), you can design and create self-healing farms, farms, villages, towns and cities.

Print and pads

Not only the scope of design is changing, but also performance. In March 2017, it became known that in the United Arab Emirates they plan to build the world's first skyscraper created using 3D printing technology. The plans were announced by Cazza Construction, a startup from Dubai.

“Using 3D printing technology will cut construction costs by 80 percent, save up to 70 percent of time and reduce labor use by 50 percent,” said engineer Munira Abdul Karim, local director of the Infrastructure Development Projects Implementation Department. Earlier, the Dubai authorities announced plans for a modern 3D printing strategy, according to which by 2030 all buildings in Dubai will be created using 25D printing.

Already in March 2016, the first office building built using this technology was built in Dubai. Its useful area was 250 m.². The object was created in collaboration with the Chinese company Winsun, known for being the first 3D printing house. In the fall of 2019, the world's largest 3D printed building was erected in Dubai (1).

1. The world's largest 3D printed building in Dubai.

The first known residential buildings in the world for normal use using this technique were built about 5 years earlier in China. This was done by the aforementioned company Winsun. At that time, a two-story villa and a multi-story residential building were built. The entire construction process took 17 days and was a success. A mixture of concrete, plastic and fiberglass reinforced plaster was used to print the building. The cost of implementation turned out to be two times lower than the price that would have been spent on the construction of a similar facility using traditional technologies.

In March 2017, the American company Apis Cor presented the first residential building, which was built in just 24 hours. The building was built in Stupino (Moscow region). Structural elements were not made in the production shop. The 3D printer printed them at the construction site. First, a complete wall structure was created. The printer then drove out of the building and printed the roof, which was installed by workers. The rooms did not require plastering. The only structural elements created outside the construction site were doors and windows. The area of ​​the house printed by Apis Cor was small - only 38 mXNUMX.². Apis Cor reports that the total construction cost was $10. The biggest expenses were for the purchase of doors and windows. Then, information began to multiply about projects made using the 3D printing technique.

In addition, printing is not only at home. The first in the world was installed in the Netherlands in autumn 3D printed concrete bike bridge. The design is the result of a collaboration between Eindhoven University of Technology and construction company BAM. The bridge, or rather the footbridge over the Pelse Loup River in Gemerte, is 8 m long and 3,5 m wide. The crossing was printed in one meter long segments assembled on site and placed between two pillars. The footbridge was also printed in Spain.

The technology of 3D printed houses, in addition to the fast pace of execution and low cost, offers many previously unknown opportunities. Printed buildings can take any shape that is significantly different from those built by traditional methods. Only the viability and comfort of buildings for residents is in question. Printing houses appeared only a few years ago. No one has yet carried out full-fledged examinations of the technical condition of long-term printing houses.

In addition, the trend of modular construction is developing. The dream of buildings, whether residential or commercial, easily built with bricks, such as LEGO, does not lose its popularity. It is no longer prefabricated elements and the “big slab” that may have pushed us a bit away from this type of technique. A more creative way of thinking is emerging that emphasizes the possibility of using different building block configurations.

The creation of ready-made modules-blocks at industrial enterprises, including the use of 3D printing technology, for use in construction has quite obvious advantages. There is no need, for example, to collect materials on the construction site or provide roads for their transportation for a long time. Factories are usually located near transport hubs, terminals, ports, which greatly facilitates the transportation of materials and reduces costs. In addition, factories, unlike construction sites, can continue to work around the clock.

modular building saves time. On site, you don't have to wait for one stage to complete before starting the next one. Different items can be made in different places, then delivered and assembled according to the plan and schedule. According to the American Modular Institute, 30-50 percent of modular projects are created. faster than traditional ones. The amount of waste in construction is also significantly reduced, as waste from industrial plants can be recycled. The production of "bricks" at factories is also a potentially higher quality of workmanship, because production conditions are more favorable for this than the "relief" and greater safety of employees, because. the workshop is easier to control and control than the plein air construction site.

However, building from blocks imposes new requirements, for example, on the accuracy of assembly. In this type of project, all electrical and hydraulic installations are part of the folding modules. When assembling, the wires or channels must match perfectly, connect immediately, as if “in one click”. The spread of such methods will also require new levels of standardization.

Therefore, in this technique, the importance of systems such as BIM (English) - modeling information about buildings and structures, begins to increase. A model is a digitally recorded representation of the physical and functional properties of a building object. Computer-aided design software is used for simulation. The model is created using XNUMXD objects such as wall, ceiling, roof, ceiling, window, door, which are assigned the appropriate parameters. Changes to the elements that make up the model are reflected in the three-dimensional representation of the model, in the lists of geometric and material data.

However, some examples of them dampen the enthusiasm for prefabricated buildings. Two and a half floors, over nine meters per day - at such a pace, according to loud announcements, the Sky City skyscraper in the Chinese city of Changsha was supposed to rise. The height of the building was 838 meters, which is 10 meters more than the current Dubai record holder Burj Khalifa.

This pace was announced by the company Broad Sustainable Building, which built the object from prefabricated elements that will only need to be connected to each other when delivered to the construction site. It took only four months to prepare the prefabs alone. However, due to structural stability concerns, work was halted shortly after the first floors were completed in July 2013.

Mixing styles and ideas

In addition to high-rise buildings, which we wrote about more than once in MT, and leaving aside the numerous green projects we have described, a lot of very interesting architectural projects are being created in the XNUMXth century. Below are some selected interesting designs.

For example, in the French town of Ouagny, an extraordinary Metaphone (2) concert hall was created, which the designers from the Herault Arnod Architectes bureau conceived as an independent musical instrument. All structural elements of the building must "harmonize" in creating and amplifying acoustic effects.

The building consists of a black concrete frame. Surfaces are covered with various types of materials, from steel or high-quality Corten steel to glass and wood. The sound generated inside the hall is transmitted through structural elements to the building lobby and outside. Not only acoustics play here. The vibrating wall panels are connected by wires and lead to the control panel. The music created by Metaphone also has an electro-acoustic character. You can "play" this huge instrument. The architects brought in musician Louis Dandrel to create this structure. The roof of the building is largely covered with solar panels. And even they serve as resonators.

There are many other interesting and not always known modern buildings. For example, Linked Hybrid (3) is a complex of eight interconnected residential buildings built between 2003 and 2009 in Beijing. The complexes consist of eight interconnected buildings with 664 apartments. In the passages between the buildings, located between the twelfth and eighteenth floors, there are, among other things, a swimming pool, a fitness club, a cafe and a gallery. The complex has deep wells providing access to thermal springs.

Another unusual new structure is Absolute World (4), consisting of two more than fifty-story skyscrapers in Mississauga, a suburb of Toronto. The angle of rotation of the building reaches 206 degrees. Although the project was originally planned as a single tower, the rooms in the original project sold out so quickly that a second building was planned. The structure is also called the Marilyn Monroe towers.

4. Absolute peace in Toronto

There are quite a lot of interesting postmodern projects in the world that fall out of the boxes. for example, the headquarters of BMW Welt in Germany, the City of Arts and Sciences in Valencia, designed by the famous Santiago Calatrava, the Casa da Música in Porto or the Elbe Philharmonic in Hamburg. And the Disney Concert Hall (5), although designed by Frank Gehry in the twentieth century, was created in the twenty-first, reminiscent of the famous Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao.

5. Disney Concert Hall - Los Angeles

Characteristically, the most striking diamonds of architecture of our time are largely created in Asia, and not in Europe or America. The Zaha Hadid Opera House in Guangzhou (6) and the Paula Andreu National Center for the Performing Arts in Beijing (7) are just some of the many great examples.

6. Guangzhou Opera House

7. National Center for the Performing Arts - Beijing.

, concert halls and museums. Creators in this area create entire complexes and structures that defy definition. These include the impressive gardens by the bay in Singapore (8) or the Metropol umbrella (9), built of birch wood almost 30 meters above the center of Seville.

8. Gardens by the Bay - Singapore

9. Metropol Umbrella - Seville

Architects are mixing styles, and new building technologies allow them to do so much more when it comes to creating solids and connections. Just look at a few projects of ordinary modern houses (10, 11, 12, 13) to see what you can afford and see in architecture today.

10. Residential building XNUMXth century I

11. Residential building XNUMXth century II

12. Residential building XNUMXth century III

13. Residential building XNUMXth century IV