June 27, 2011

Proposed vertical city to include living walls

It's fascinating to watch the evolution of modern commercial buildings, as environmental concerns have been pushed into the forefront during the last decade or so.

Green roofs. Living walls. Stormwater collection. Daylighting. Renewable energy. All these things and more, are a welcome and necessary change from the days when an office building was simply a lifeless rectangular box standing on end.

A Montreal firm is growing produce commercially in greenhouses atop a lowrise building in a city industrial area.

And there are proposals for tall vertical farms of 25 or 30 storeys in American cities, so at least some produce can be locally grown in what amounts to stacked greenhouses, instead of being trucked or flown to customers a continent away.

And now CK Designworks, an Australian design firm, is planning to build a vertical street in Melbourne, Australia. News of the idea has been circulating among environmentalists and people interested in innovation for several weeks now. One day soon, it may be discovered by the mass media.

The vertical street will be 35 storeys tall, with shops and offices occupying the first four floors, and 154 apartment and five community gardens — one every six storeys — taking up the rest of the space.

Rooftop gardens are often done these days, and vertical gardens or living walls are becoming common.

But, these gardens will be different.

They will be 120 square metres each and the growing medium will be deep enough to support the growth of trees up to 10 metres tall. They will be located partly on balconies and partly indoors, and they will face north, south, east and west, so that no matter where the building is viewed from, there will be at least one garden in sight.

The building will have more than 8,000 square metres of exterior walls and they will be used to catch rainwater.

CK Designworks lead architect Robert Caulfield said triangular balconies will help create a jagged facade to reduce the lateral movement of the wind.

The purpose is to prevent rain from simply being blown off the building. Instead it will be caught and used to water the gardens and for flushing toilets.

Heating and cooling systems also involve the gardens. Instead of a single large system with lots of piping or many individual systems, there will be a cooling system installed in each garden to pump water to only six floors—three above and three below. The short pipe means less heating or cooling loss, Caulfield said.

Heat-reflective glass will be used in the cladding to minimize solar heat gain while providing adequate daylighting. Solar panels on the roof and in some of the vertical walls will provide lighting.

With crystalline cladding, an irregular facade surface and the gardens sprouting from corner locations, the building will present a striking appearance. Caulfield’s hope is that it will appear to be a sparkling crystal draped in greenery. That’s why the project has been dubbed Crystal Gardens.

It will have a tiny footprint — just 360 square metres on a corner lot in downtown Melbourne — so it will be a slender building, which will accentuate its height.

It’s an interesting experiment that will gain worldwide attention when completed.

Perhaps, I should say if completed. Cost estimates have not yet been made public and there is no word on who’s going to pay for it. Still, Caulfield said it will be completed in 2014.

There are other proposals for vertical streets, but so far none is under construction. But suddenly, it seems, using building form to achieve environmental objectives while producing liveable space is occupying a lot of people’s attention.

Caulfield, in the meantime, is already working on his next job: vertical factories in Nanjing, China.

Korky Koroluk is a regular freelance contributor to the Journal of Commerce. Send comments or questions to editor@journalofcommerce.com.

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