ARCHITECTURE:With space in cities at a premium, it's all about building upwards, but is it a sustainable plan? asks Clifford Coonan
SUSTAINABILITY IS THE new gravity. This is the opinion of the renowned architects and engineers who make up the true powerbrokers of the skyscraper business, gathered in the casual luxury of the Dubai Grand Hyatt. They are here to discuss what the coolest tall buildings in the world will look like and how they will transform our cities and our lives. Through the shimmering haze, you can make out the Burj Dubai, which will be the tallest man-made structure in the world when it is finished, looking out onto the surrounding desert from a point half a mile in the air, a needle surveying the unreal Emirati city and its artificial environs.
It is (mostly) men who make up the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat and they sip coffee and exchange business cards in the exquisitely air-conditioned lobby of the hotel as they theorise about the shape of our urban future. The last word always lies with the property developers, but the visions of these master builders will shape the topography of our future.
Outside the temperature is creeping higher than 40 degrees but inside there is only hushed, but focused, discussion of what is a key challenge facing mankind in the 21st century. Billions of people want to live in cities, intensifying competition for increasingly scarce natural resources such as water and iron ore, or heavy machinery such as cranes. One way to meet this problem head on is to render this move to urban centres environmentally sustainable. The theorists believe we can do this by building taller.
The construction industry accounts for around one-tenth of the world's gross domestic product, 7 per cent of all jobs, half of all resource usage and up to 40 per cent of energy consumption, meaning industry players have to think of building right. The right mix of design and greater use of energy saving technologies are needed to reduce carbon dioxide emissions.
London-based Malaysian architect Ken Yeang is a theorist who has a reputation as one of the most progressive architects in the world. His buildings are startling, beautiful, white edifices spilling over with greenery as they taper off into the sky. One way of explaining how his buildings work is a "vertical expression of horizontal design". Try to imagine a section of city, complete with parks, then picture it turned on its side and climbing into the air. The resulting skyscrapers, which have lush vegetation growing on them and lots of open features, are startling and handsome.
"Saving the environment from continued devastation by our built environment is the single most important issue for our tomorrow, feeding into our post-millennial fears that this third millennium will indeed be our last," says Yeang, who is part of the Llewelyn Davis Yeang partnership.
Despite his gloomy predictions, Yeang is an engaging and cheerful figure, difficult to interview because he is so interested in everything that's going on, from the interviewer's watch to the shape of the room we are sitting in.
Most skyscrapers are designed like a pile of plates, when they should be built "like a superburger", he says.
"Make it pleasurable for people. We have to design skyscrapers that make people happy. We need to intensify and maximise ground use. Make tall buildings as humane as possible," he says, although he is also convinced that there is no such thing as a truly green building and definitely no green tall buildings.
The two cities most discussed in the Cooz cocktail bar in the hotel have been Dubai and Beijing, between them home to the highest number of cranes anywhere in the world and where most of the globe's significant big buildings are being built.
Dubai property market stories are like their equivalent in Ireland two years ago, excited chatter and braggadocio. Hubris was still in evidence and the prospect of negative equity wasn't hanging over people's heads. There's no slowdown here. Within China, the focus is specifically on Beijing and what's going on there ahead of this summer's Olympic Games.
China's cities are already among the biggest in the world and the steady stream of migrant workers to the urban areas is not set to stop anytime soon. China's urban population is expected to pass the one billion mark by 2030, and the focus is on building 15 "supercities" with an average population of 25 million, according to the consultants McKinsey as a way of obtaining higher energy efficiency and curbing the loss of arable land.
Efficient use of resources is becoming essential. Beijing has sufficient water resources to sustain a population of about 10 million, yet today it is home to 17 million residents and counting.
Beijing has become a place where cutting edge architects come to ply their wares. Sir Norman Foster has just unveiled a stunning new airport, shaped like a dragon. Herzog & de Meuron's Olympic Stadium is due to open any day now. And Paul Andreu's giant egg-shaped National Theatre sits triumphantly near Beijing's Tiananmen Square downtown.
The CCTV headquarters in Beijing, designed by Rem Koolhaas and his protégé, Ole Scheeren, is already an icon in the city. The outside will be finished in time for the Games. Initial scepticism among the capital's difficult-to-please citizens about the unusual "twisted doughnut" shape turned to curiousity and then finally affection as the two towers kissed late last year, to form an "O". Generally Prada-clad and with a model's good looks, Scheeren is the young architect appointed by Rem Koolhaas to build the CCTV tower.
Koolhaas' firm, the Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA), spends a lot of time defying categorisation and Scheeren's view of the project is oblique, unexpected. Tall is not an issue with Scheeren and while he admires the Burj Dubai, size is not his point, there are other issues at stake.
"The Burj is the end point of a typology. The top has been reached. But it's not just about height, it's about the search for different qualities . . . sustainability in terms of social responsibility and technical performance," says the German-born architect.
"The organisational principle of this building is a loop, a principle of a non-hierarchical system. It's a true hybrid of architecture and engineering - a tube folded in space," he said.
By breaking down the large form of the building into a fractal pattern, it's a building "that announces its own stability and also its own instability," said Scheeren.
Scheeren has worked closely with Irish engineer Rory McGowan on the CCTV Tower. McGowan is project managing international engineering company Arup's many projects in China, including CCTV, the Bird's Nest Olympic Stadium, designed by Herzog & de Meuron, and the National Acquatic Centre, the Water Cube.
"Tall buildings can be sustainable. High density is the only sustainable solution for many urban realities such as Beijing, London and, dare I say, Dublin. For example London is reconsidering its planning limitations in order to facilitate high-rise next to the city's main public transport interchanges. This is because authorities are fully aware that sustainability is certainly not about sticking wind mills on towers but building them to the highest energy efficiency, flexibility and occupier comfort standards realistically achievable, on appropriate sites, using appropriate products and processes," says McGowan.
Stricter building codes in the United States and China are enforcing greener building practices, but there are rewards in the shape of lower running costs and longer lasting buildings.
There is an irony in hosting a conference on sustainability in Dubai, where average daily temperatures of 50 degrees mean cranking up the air conditioning on a scale that means the place has the biggest per-capita carbon footprint in the world.
The Burj al-Arab has a seven-star hotel and was so expensive that it will take 150 years to recoup the investment that went into it, legend has it.
But even here they are thinking again about environmentalism. Things are changing - the Emirate is making strides in solar power and, given there is little fresh water to speak of, Dubai is a leader in coming up with methods of desalinating seawater.
Dubai and the other Gulf states are keen to compete with Beijing for signature projects. Koolhaas appears to have adopted Dubai as his "postglobal" project.
He is building the Porsche Tower and the remarkable new Waterfront City, a "global city" on a one billion sq ft artificial island of generic skyscrapers, an 82-storey spiralling cone and a 44-storey sphere, which some architects have nicknamed the Death Star. The island is expected to be home to 1.5 million people, which will effectively double Dubai's population.
Dubai will have a Jean Nouvel opera house, with the Louvre opening up a gallery in Abu Dhabi. Zaha Hadid and Norman Foster are involved in skyscrapers and eco-cities in the city. Things are going up around here.
Certainly one of the oldest environmentalist arguments is that the greenest way to build a skyscraper is not to build it all, just as the greenest way to fly is not to fly. But these arguments have not made too many inroads among the architects and engineers. Capitalism is built on growth, after all, and they need to construct skyscrapers to survive.
But the discussion about ways to build higher in a more sustainable way is gathering momentum. "With rapid urban development worldwide, dense and more concentrated cities are widely seen now as an essential part of a more sustainable way of life," says Antony Wood, executive director of the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat.
"These dense, smaller-footprint cities can cut energy consumption and climate-change emissions by reducing the suburban spread of cities and therefore the need for extensive transportation and infrastructure networks. In this regard, tall buildings play a key role in creating denser cities by accommodating more people on smaller parcels of land and therefore reduce the overall impact of buildings on the environment and on the world's climate," says Wood.
"What people put in the buildings needs to change, to move beyond standard functions - office, residential, and hotel space - that account for around 95 per cent of space in tall buildings worldwide - to include more sustainable functions." Speaking animatedly in the searing heat outside the hotel, Brian Duffy of Traynor O'Toole architects in Dublin tells of how he likes the idea of grouping tall buildings in clusters, like clachan groupings from ancient Ireland.
"These might not be as tall as buildings such as the Burj Dubai, but you can have connections between the buildings. When you intensify you can group services in a very efficient way," says Duffy, who comes from Newry. He's not breaking a sweat in the afternoon heat.
"In Ireland there is an innate desire to live on the land and own the land. We need to initiate a process of collective analysis and thinking. Share our knowledge and aspirations," he says.
The focus with tall buildings needs to be to build on the relationship between people and the natural world. But something is needed soon, in Dublin as in any other city on the planet. Dublin is the size of Los Angeles in terms of land area, much of this due to the fact that it's so low-rise. Dublin's 1.5 million people compares with Dubai's 1.67 million, and Dubai needs 70,000 residential units per year, compared to 57,000 at the moment. In Dublin, 90,000 per year were constructed up to last year.
"The idea of sustainable tall buildings is emerging as a field of study and there's a huge learning curve. The building industry is central to any kind of response to climate change," says Duffy.
There is a hush when Leslie Robertson comes to the podium. Robertson is a legendary figure in the skyscraper business, having worked as lead structural engineer on the World Trade Center, as well as the Bank of China Tower in Hong Kong. For him it's about less being more.
"The role of the structural engineer in reducing energy is in reducing the materials in a project. So making a project bigger means building it lighter," says Robertson. He wants to see more steel used, because it is recyclable. The only way to recycle cement is to put it into the roads, which is not really practical.
There was a rumour that, when viewed from above, the hotel spelt out "Dubai" in Arabic. This may or may not be true, though the building is very curved and it is possible.
While enjoying the luxury of the Dubai facilities and the slightly surreal feeling that is impossible to shake off when in Dubai, Rory McGowan insists there is no real alternative to building sustainably.
"Sustainability is not a specialism, a nice thing to have, but a phenomenon that pulls us all in - engineer, architect, client, users and society in general. Those who doubt we need to change our habits I advise to think again."