Star architects’ high ambition for skyscrapers of the future
Sir Terry Farrell and Lord Foster share blue-sky ideas
From the Lighthouse of Alexandria through the spires of the medieval cathedrals and the Tuscan towers of San Gimignano, the building that aspires to the heavens keeps on coming back.
Cass Gilbert, the architect of one of the first modern skyscrapers, New York’s 1913 Woolworth Building, called the form a “machine for making the land pay”. Yet the idea of the tall building as a product of land value was always questionable. It might have made sense in Manhattan but in Chicago, spiritual home of the skyscraper, in the middle of the great plains of the Midwest? Or in Saudi Arabia, home to the skyscraper that will surpass Dubai’s Burj Khalifa as the tallest building? The Jeddah Tower, to rise more than 1km, is due to be finished in 2019 and will be further proof that height is only tangentially related to land value. It is an expression of desire.
“You can rationalise anything,” says Lord Foster, architect of London’s Gherkin and New York’s Hearst Tower, “but you don’t have to go up to achieve high densities — look at London’s densest neighbourhoods, Notting Hill and Kensington. Really, skyscrapers are built for the hell of it. They’re much more about civic pride. If you cluster skyscrapers together you can make instant urbanity and intensity and create a civic identity.”
Foster admits that in the immediate aftermath of the 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center, the future looked uncertain. “There was a fundamental questioning of the skyscraper,” he says. “But the groundbreaking ceremonies for both the Gherkin and the Hearst Tower happened very soon afterwards.”
The skyscraper dream seems impossible to destroy, but how is it changing? How are technology and concerns about climate, security and energy affecting it?
Steel frames and elevators made these towers possible. Without them, building more than six or eight storeys was impractical. But then lift runs became limited by the weight of steel cables. The development by Finland’s Kone of carbon fibre “ultra rope” will allow a doubling of runs to about 1,000m, which may transform the heights of towers that now rely on people switching between lifts midway.
Sir Terry Farrell, the architect of the 100-storey Kingkey 100 tower in Shenzhen, reinforces the idea that the future may be all about elevators. “In Hong Kong,” he says, “there’s a culture of lifts so that they become, in effect, a part of the public transportation system.” In the Mid-Levels, a district with many towers, “people use lifts as an extension of the street”, he adds. “The interiors of high-rises become vertical streets and public spaces, there are barbers and doctors’ surgeries 50 floors up.”
So could the city be connected at high level? Kuala Lumpur’s Petronas Towers are linked by a bridge but US architect Steven Holl’s Linked Hybrid Building in Beijing with its tangle of “skybridges” suggests a more radical future.
The Empire State Building, completed in 1931, had a mooring mast for airships. Only one docked there and the idea was largely forgotten, bar a few helipads, but the advent of delivery drones raises the question of whether it might be revived. Some recent skyscrapers, such as Herzog & De Meuron’s 56 Leonard in New York, have protruding bays and balconies. Could these accommodate a new, 3D view of urban transport? The increase in home deliveries may make docking stations a necessity and this in turn might affect the appearance of the skyline, transforming smooth-sided towers into more complex clusters.
Underground, too, skyscrapers are linking in to public transportation. Foster’s new Comcast Building in Philadelphia has a huge underground transport interchange — part of a growing trend.
Sir Terry also raises the possibility of the greening of skyscrapers: “[Stefano Boeri’s] Bosco Verticale in Milan is remarkable because it isn’t just a series of shelves for plants but a complex ecosystem. You might also see urban vertical farms appearing, functional not just decorative green.”
Green in a different way is the proposal for a timber skyscraper in London from architecture firm PLP. At 80 storeys, it would be the first real structural innovation since the steel frame. Still a speculative project, the design is a focus for discussion and serious research into the use of strong and sustainable cross-laminated timber.
Some innovations in form are still driven by economics. The newest is the “skinnyscraper” or “pencil” tower. Rafael Viñoly’s 432 Park Avenue and Christian de Portzamparc’s One57 are made viable by real estate prices around New York’s Central Park. Often with one or two apartments per floor, they are architectural expressions of wealth.
Hanif Kara, co-founder of AKTII, the structural engineering firm, and professor of design engineering at the Graduate School of Design at Harvard, says: “We’re past simply extruding towers and into an era of data which will allow us to build better and more forensically, grabbing energy at high levels — the wind and the light and converting them to power.”
But Mr Kara also asks: “What are we going to do with the existing towers? In China and Turkey, we have 20-year-old towers which are out of date — can we give them new functions?” An important concern for architects looking to a sustainable future will be the repurposing of older towers — even if it is more expensive in the short term. Future skyscrapers might be built in a modular manner so that their cladding and systems can be upgraded as technology changes.
The architects and engineers agree on the importance of mixed-use towers. “The tower should be like a club,” says Lord Foster, “with housing, work, leisure and retail totally integrated, and it should be open and accessible to the city.” Sir Terry, meanwhile, refers to buildings like his own Kingkey 100 and London’s Shard, which might have hotels as well as retail, commercial and residential space, much as the architects of the early skyscrapers envisaged.
Architect Rem Koolhaas noted the intensity of activity squeezed into 1920s skyscrapers, including athletics clubs, hotels, shops, pools and apartments. When Renzo Piano designed London’s Shard he talked of it as a “vertical city”.
Sir Terry and Lord Foster also seem to concur that future of the skyscraper resides in its integration into the urban fabric at different levels and in escaping the idea of the exclusive ivory tower. To avoid the impression of the imposition of the power of wealth on a city, designers of the next generation of skyscrapers may need to find ways for them to open up and become public at every level.
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