 |
||
 |
Home Site
map About FIDIC FAQ Contact
FIDIC |
|
 |
||
| BOOKSHOP | RESOURCES | CONFERENCE | FEDERATION | REGIONS | INTERNAL |
| WELCOME | 1990 | 1997 | 1998 | 1999 | 2000 | 2001 | 2002 | |||||
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
Monday, 3 September: 10.30 — 17.00 FORUM SUSTAINABILITY - The Challenge for the Architect Michael Rayner This presentation introduces sustainability issues faced by architects and proposes guiding priciples to address these issues. Several methods for measuring sustainability are discussed. Examples of buildings and developements, each with unique challenges from a sustainability perspective are presented and evaluated using the criteria for sustainability explored.
3. SEEING BUILDINGS AS THE SUM OF ITS PARTS EG. FAÇADES
4. CASE STUDIES – THREE CITIES
5. CASE STUDIES – THREE BUILDINGS
6. CHALLENGES FOR THE ARCHITECT
The first point I want to make is that engineers and architects have become, I think over the years mere facilitators rather than drafters in the new economy, and that is what I want to show how we can address. Secondly, that sustainability is the only issue that will enable engineers and architects to assume leadership provided that they embrace social, economic and environmental issues at once. Put simply, that research and technology means quality of life. Thirdly, that architects need engineers both to solve sustainability and to preserve design rather than time and cost as foremost elements in the building process. And fifthly, it is the vast opportunity in the new millennium to reunite engineers and architects and to reaffirm our position in the development of the city fabric. I am going to cover quite a range of topics and hope not to bombard you in the short time that I have available. I am going first of all to talk about some of the issues we face together, and I mean all of these things together. An aspect of how to measure sustainability and cut the rhetoric out of it. And thirdly I am going to give an approach that engineers and architects can take to building by seeing it. Although we need to proceed holistically also as the sum of its parts, and just use the parts as an example of one way to engrave a new approach.
I am going to show you three case studies of three very different cities, Hilara, a city in the desert of Australia, Sydney Olympic village which I know has a great importance to Beijing, and the Shanga Shana which I know is terribly relevant because I know there is a FIDIC Conference to come up in the Three Gorges area. Case studies of three buildings and this are just ones that I have worked on. So forgive the ego, but I am going to show a new age of how you change the style from styles of architecture that have been developed in the past to an eco-architecture that expresses ecology and its solutions, and lastly, and quite quickly, what I think of the challenges ahead. As Wayne has pointed out there are many ways to express the concerns that we have regarding the environment and as I said with some latitude these figures may or may not be correct: the worldıs population living in cities has shifted from 10% to a predicted 75% in 2030. The urban population is increasing by a quarter million a day. Cities consume three-quarters of the worldıs energy; they comprise three-quarters of the worldıs pollution and in 1995 there were 35 cities of 5 million+ people of which 22 in the developing world. Now in 2000 there are 57 cities of 5 million+ people but they doubled in the developing world, and you can add 2 billion people for 2030, and things like car-ownership doubling in Europe over the same period of time: Predict the sort of problems that we face rightly of wrongly, or even half that, it doesnıt matter. The challenges that we face with cities: unprecedented change, physically, socially and economically, we canıt keep looking at them the same way as planners and engineers. They are becoming more multicultural and pluralistic in their make-up so conventional patterns become obsolete. There is a constant flow of people, particularly in the developing world, from country to city, the poor growing in number and in poverty. But against that itıs not a universal problem that you can face with universal solutions: every climate, every city is different. Every time we go to a new city, and I assume you all work well outside the realm we are familiar with. Building challenges: buildings produce 40 % of the world CO2, 50 % of the energy derived from fossil fuels is consumed by buildings; 75 % of everyday use energy< from heating and cooling; three billion tons of raw materials are used annually to construct buildings and 25 % of all wood harvest are used for construction. So what ? They are just some of the figures, but we are in a climate where there is enormous opposition against it. We might talk about the rhetoric of being sensitive to the environment but against that we face various issues: commercial expediency, the institutional weakness of governments, political expediency still prevails. There are regulatory impediments to being innovative no matter how much we want to be. We have risk-adverse investment cultures in all cities, developing and developed. There is public apathy and incomprehension about what sustainability means, in fact we donıt have a universal definition ourselves. The richer are getting richer, the poorer poorer, there is a hardening of class systems. Capital cost is still valued above life cycle cost, extraction and consumption above resources and life cycle, and we donıt understand how to compromise between private rights and public responsibilities. The fabric of our cities is still, no matter what we would like to say, relies on urban and suburban sprawl, an unabated reliance on motor vehicles, green field development is still favoured over brown field, cities are congested with the ill-performing buildings already in them. How do we deal with that? Communities are effectively non-existent and technologies are driving city planning, not supporting it.
3 SEEING BUILDINGS AS THE SUM OF ITS PARTS EG. FAÇADES And then I mention: how do we see buildings more simply? An architect at the moment tends to look at environmental issues as an ingredient he or she may be able to use in the design or aesthetics of a building. But if you look at it in another way, and I have just taken SEDA as an example, an architect will always want to look at views and outlook, orientation of the building, its appearance, articulation of its elevation, its energy performance and its relationship to the architectural whole.
External shading and/or glass High performance glass and/or internal blind That is what drives an architect, its pigeonholed kind of stuff. An engineer might say all those issues are not really helping in terms of real sustainability but what I am asking is when we sit down as engineers and architects we genuinely look at each part of the building as if it is a part, it is too confusing to look at it as a whole in many ways at this point in time.
External operable shading / Shading with light shelf You might look at the systems, and there are very many different aesthetics the can come out as you can see from the external shading, reflecting glass is just one, or high performance glass these all mean something. You will all assume that we are trying to tell you how we want the building to look. I think we are in fact trying to work out how itıs going to perform and how the architecture will evolve from that
Internal ventilated cavity / External ventilated cavity The next one down is a ventilated cavity or thermal wall system that I will show you in a moment. So that some of the ways we should look at buildings and then we would move to roofs and then we would move to floors and then we would move to mechanical systems, and I think that is a way we can structure designs, whereas where it stands at the moment as I said if you believe that we know what we are doing itıs because we are trying to develop something that responds in a positive sense to a social structure and to particular issues that are prevailing but we are also trying to serve ourselves, thatıs a honest confession. This has to change.
YULARA AYERS ROCK – AUSTRALIA'S DESERT CITY
This project is a city planning project, and as Wayne said, sustainability is not at the beginning at the moment. This was started in 1984, so some 17 years ago, this was a new city at AYERS ROCK, which I am sure most of you are aware of. They are trying to replace rampant development that had been occurring, and tourism, around Ayers Rock. It houses a number of things: two international hotels, it has its own town centre, initially it was for 50000 people but expanding, it has satellite distance learning centres, and it is aimed at a self-sustained environment but it had no power, no energy, no resources on which to build on that were tied to main systems. It had to draw all its water from artesian bores, its power from solar collectors and we developed systems of sails to cover spaces both internal and external as I will show. Sewage treatment plants remained on site, and it involved indigenous communities within it. And firstly I just express how Australia began to develop to this point when that township was created. The top left is a typical English house that was created in Australia, most unfortunate environmentally. To that at the bottom left we simply added a veranda. Itıs iconically represented by the aborigine boy on the top right wearing its own veranda on top. But we had an attitude, by the middle photo on the right, and I donıt know if you heard the term before, in Australia : "Sheıll be right mate", which means kind of near enough is good enough and that has been unfortunately prevailed over the first 200 years of our existence. We could just get by, we are a lucky country. But Australian architects, as you can see, have really responded very well. That is a typical example of how contemporary architecture is being developed as environmental architecture. When we come to Ilara , it is in this kind of landscape, an extraordinary landscape of flat ground, desert that is not just red, but incredibly producing of a very rich vegetation. And that is the township as it began to emerge.What I am trying to show there, is an architecture where the environmental systems are visible, and I am promoting an architecture, that develops for cities and buildings and in fact shows what its environmental systems are, not just ones that have them. This is what I meant by public comprehension what we are trying to achieve and this is a township that I genuinely believe does reveal exactly the way it works to people, whether it is the sails on the top, or all the collector systems that you see emerging through the roofs. It can produce an aesthetic. This is a picture of the township in its dunal system just emerging over the landscape. Here we have energy towers being developed, and on the right hand side the solar collector forming the architecture together with passive energy systems. The reflection of the great rock and people climbing. As you see on the picture left hand side developed through the architecture itself and the colours of the desert being implicit in the way it expresses itself as part of its environment. The sailsı incredibly dramatic systems, they are meant to encourage tourism, they are meant to be part of the economics of creating a place that works sustainably, and they are also meant to perform environmentally. In this case, as you can see, shading out those spaces, but also on the bottom right the systems that are involved in commercial spaces, a double canvas roof, that allows ventilation layers to occur between them. So just one material covers this entire township even in the outer parts of the township, ventilation systems prevail as parts of the genuine architecture. On the bottom left the involvement of that community that already existed through the artwork is implicit in the way that it is embraced as a performing city. And even the sewage treatment plant on the right is an iconic part of the architecture and implicit in the landscape.
SYDNEY OLYMPIC VILLAGE – THE SUBURB
And now I am sure an area that you are interested in is n area in which my firm worked as part of 15 firms involved in a new Olympic village in Sydney which is a very different situation and itıs working in the suburbs. We might talk about city centres but how do we deal with sprawl in the suburbs? The great thing about the Olympic village is that it was only really tokenistically planned as being the Olympic village, it was always aimed at being a sustainable future suburb. Our involvement, as I said, was part of a team, that went through a workshop process as part of creating a village that hat sustainability implicit in it. We were then able to carry out that through ourselves, and my firm did the indoor superdome, the aquatic centre, the baseball and warm-up stadiums as well. So that was carried through, not just the village, but also development itself. In one aspect, it just looks like a suburb, and that is in its construction at the bottom, you can see, the village being created as a suburb. In the middle of the slide, the main sports facilities for the Olympics and on the top left about 5 years before the Olympics were due, that is the status of the masterplan. It was being prepared well before we won the bid for the games.
That is the master plan as it evolved from that workshop process. The workshop involved the government it involved private industry. There were a number of housing developers brought in as well. So it wasnıt purely engineers, architects and planners. I wonıt go through it but it shows you that break-up into a series of discrete communities. That is the way it looked, although there is a slight bit of computer adjustment on the right hand side that was a construction site at that point but eventually formed the great lake that constitutes the filtration system for the village. But it involves high and low density. The architecture was developed as an implicit part of it. And because things were planned early, the people were able to embrace the quality of that village. It had principles of northerly aspects, zeroed lot line, for those who know what that is, cross ventilation as you can see in the house design typical from the diagram. It is the largest solar village in the world. At present generating a million kwh annually, and the emphasis is upon communities within a community. The top left shows the condition during the Olympics when everything was full of bedrooms, the bottom right shows how those converted to garages and other service areas, so, as you can see, the priority was on the future, not the present. It has a number of fantastic small scale things that happened: waste chip for landscaping, broken bricks used for paving, concrete used for road subgrading. In vegetation it had huge parklands that were created artificially that formed the filtration system. And the sewage is treated off-site and re-used for irrigation and toilet flushing throughout. It has virtually no use of PVC, recycles wool for insulation, it uses non-toxic termite protection, solar hot water systems, and plantation hard woods and soft woods everywhere. Its electricity is generated, by day fed into the cities electricity grid, by night drawn back from that grid. It saves 7000 tons of CO2 by year, 75 % in consumption of a same sized suburb. And when we came into the Olympic sporting area, as you can see, an entirely green attitude. Itıs that kind of prevailing intent that went through the entire Olympic planning. Even the aquatic centre which my firm did shows how that international swimming facility was going to perform for the community in the long run, and that is part of it being converted into a leisure facility post-Olympics. YICHANG CHINA – DEVELOPING CITY And now Yi-Cheng in China, just for a complete difference, and it is interesting: as I said I believe there is a conference to occur in a three gorges region in the future. This is an incredible task in which we won a master planning competition. It is a city that has grown from 100.000 to 4 million in only 10 years, so if we talk about developing countries being prioritised, this is why. The settlement was the result of a three gorges dam and the urgent housing need and the recognition by the Chinese government that tourism was required as the new way of that city for the future. I won't go through the details there but to make a point about it: there was a situation in which the old town was to be demolished and turned into a high rise township. That is what it looked like. YICHANG NEW CITY Nobody saw for us the need to visit it because that is what was going to happen to it. But it had a certain character. It is a place where people were happy living. And then came the dam: it created a completely new scenario. The water that was at the level of the trees is now suddenly down at that level, people are completely in a different orientation to the way they relate to their environment. Whole squares were created in a way typical to western cities: as you can see by the bottom right it is occupied by very few people. So this competition was a change of direction. On the left you can see the area of the Three Gorges, Yi-Chengıs relationship to it. In the competition we had to work out how tourism could relate to it. Water, mountains, tourism, electricity, culture were together seen by us as the Why we need to integrate a sustainable future. This is the old town area that I show you through here, that we developed. But we took an attitude of saying to them: "could we not get something different, but in fact the same density of development on it, they would create by high-rise city replacement?" And we did this by creating box, squares, alleyways and landscape, and in filling a new development. And that shows you, in yellow, where all the new development is, and in blue, the existing. So we recorded and photographed every part of that city, to see what we would maintain. That is the end result of that scheme which won the competition, and that is the way it will look. It is not a small scale city, it is a big one, but it is one that tries to relate conservation and recycling, the same attitude we took to the area that is the prime tourism area. Again, believe it or not, the densities were achieved of around 4 to 1 that they were after.
5 CASE STUDIES – THREE BUILDINGS CAIRNS CONVENTION CENTRE, QUEENSLAND, AUSTRALIA
And now, just quickly, move to some buildings. Cairns convention centre: what I am trying to promote here is an architecture that does express its purpose. In this case, it is a building where all of those ribs extend seven metres out of it, because it is a vaulted plate system of structures that can achieve that sort of distances, from those ribs all the water is collected and brought into that drum and distributed throughout the building and its landscape and it forms the aesthetics of the building, it is the drama that is being created, it is the new age of buildings that express themselves both internally and externally in what they are trying to achieve and the involvement of local cultures in the embracing of that environment.
BRISBANE MAGISTRATES COURTS, BRISBANE, AUSTRALIA
The Brisbane magistrates court that we are currently working on, a new city building that uses a thermal wall approach to it, and is based simply on the way that building connects and links up the fabric of parts of the city, just as you would have achieved in a historic condition. This is the thermal wall system here which is a ventilated system facing north, and I just show you how that system works, and I am sure, many of you are familiar with it but it is one that has not been terribly well introduced into tropical regions of the world before. And those are the diagrams we produced upfront for the competition, so we know how it will perform later. And this is the laser system that was produced, a kind of a low technology. It is a system for allowing light to penetrate into buildings and I know that in Europe you have a distance of about 8 m from core to window. This laser system is simply one of cut panels with a laser cutting of shelves within it that allows you to achieve that.
MUSEUM OF TROPICAL QUEENSLAND, AUSTRALIA This shows you a museum in Townsville. It also embraces tropical systems and this is a great façade that we added, which was outside in order to block sun. That system is in fact a space that was added for environmental reasons and achieved such cost savings that we were able to use that space for functions and other ways of achieving economic return.
6 CHALLENGES FOR THE ARCHITECT COLLABORATION So what I am promoting in total as a final point, is telling just for the architects; instead of what is red, everyone disappearing into different directions—in a century of great specializations meant in fact a century of great division—becomes a new situation where all those are converging. That is the first great challenge. URBAN FORM The second challenge is the compact transport prioritised city. This is again one where architects and engineers can work together to succeed. We cannot do it alone.
GLOBALISATION Thirdly globalization. Global practices: the problem of applicability of guidelines to each different city, and when you go to work to China, Vietnam or many different developing areas the great difference between say here Hu-Dong and the Bund area to Pusay and what is occurring really does identify where the great issues of sustainability are and I think that conference that is going to be held in Shanghai is going to be of absolutely great importance because that city does typify the contrast from an old to a new condition.
BUILDINGS AS CONTAINERS Lastly I just want to quote Sir Richard Rogers: "The viewer is no longer able to read the function of buildings the church, the town hall, the market, palace, factory. Instead, buildings have become flexible containers for use by a dynamic society. It is now the arrangement of buildings in space, the network of cities as a whole that is a dominant reflection of modern urban society." The great problem, I think, that architects face is that buildings, are not buildings that we design for a purpose. They are going to become these kind of incredible flexible places where all sorts of things can happen, where life might be down to five years. How do we create an architecture with something that is utterly flexible? This is where engineers and architects can come together. RATE OF CHANGE / ENERGY And lastly the problem of the rate of change is overtaking us: the rate of urbanisation, the ate of technology change, technology economy coming upon us before we even have it. The engineered society being driven before the evolved society, and cost and quality over time and place. The fact that we are not performing, rhetoric versus reality as Wayne mentioned that the chaotic standard, that is where itıs been going. Things arenıt being achieved at the rate we want them to be achieved.
OUTCOMES And finally, this is what we want to be achieved: the joy of the future of our future generation, not the gloom.
|
