Utopian Sustainable Architecture

Apple Campus

Year: 2012 - 2016

The new Apple Campus will sit on a 176-acre plot in the South Bay city of 60,000. The massive donut of a building is the jewel of the campus - a 4 storey ring with 13,000 engineers and designs under one roof. Foster and Partners architects working on the project summed the building up as "one of the most environmentally sustainable projects on this scale anywhere in the world." The plan is for the facility to run entirely on renewable energy, drawing largely from on-site fuel cell plants and rooftop photovoltaic arrays. Natural ventilation and radiant cooling mean that the spaceship won't need air conditioning for some 70 percent of the year. Despite the mothership's sustainable credentials, though, the greenest part of the development isn't even the building itself — it's everything surrounding it - "an ecologically rich oak savanna reminiscent of the early Santa Clara Valley." Norman Foster says that Jobs wanted the campus to evoke the California of his childhood, one he "still remembered...as the fruit bowl of America."

625 West 57th Street (W57)

BIG started with a rectangular block with a centrally located courtyard that is exactly the same proportions as its inspiration, Central Park. The architectonic slope of the edifice allows for occupants to experience an enclosed garden courtyard area as well as expansive views of the Hudson River and surrounding cityscape. The form has successfully developed a solar envelope form that allows maximum daylight to a majority of apartments. Secondarily, the building's unconventional form also allows for a multitude of readings depending on your location. From West 58th street, the northeast corner reads like a slender tower, while views from the waterfront and West 57th Street reveal a broad pyramid form. The exterior envelope of the building employs two main strategies: a sloped wall on the south and west street front, and a herringbone pattern of bay windows along the north and east facades. The herringbone strategy at the north allows for each unit to have a view to the waterfront which would not be possible with a conventional flush curtain wall.

Amager Barkke (Waste-to-Energy Plant)

Amager Barkke, when completed, will be cleanest waste-to-energy plant in the world. It will be the tallest and biggest building in Copenhagen. Now under construction, it will contribute to Copenhagen's ambitious goal of becoming carbon-neutral by 2025. When finished in 2017, it will produce heat for 160,000 households and electricity for 62,500 residences, fueled entirely by the city's garbage. It will house Denmark's first ski-slope (on the roof of the plant, no less). It will emit its CO2 emissions - not as a continuous stream of smoke, but in sudden, bursting smoke rings (each ring representing a ton of CO2 emitted). As an urban "destination in itself" and a landmark in environmental design, it's one of the most radical representations of architecture as a means of public engagement of our time.

Denmark Pavilion - Shanghai Expo 2010

The pavilion is a big loop on which visitors ride around on one of the 1,500 bikes available at the entrance, a chance to experience the Danish urban way. At the center of the pavilion is a big pool with fresh water from Copenhagen's harbor, in which visitors can swim in, complete with The Little Mermaid statue centerpiece of Denmark.

The pavilion is a monolithic structure in white painted steel which keeps it cool during the Shanghai summer sun due to its heat-reflecting characteristics. The roof is covered with a light blue surfacing texture, known from Danish cycle paths. Inside, the floor is covered with light epoxy and also features the blue cycle path where the bikes pass through the building. The steel of the facade is perforated in a pattern that reflects the actual structural stresses that the pavilion is experiencing making it a 1:1 stress test. "Sustainability is often misunderstood as the neo-protestant notion "that it has to hurt in order to do good". Ingels shows that a sustainable life can be attractive, fun, and desirable, and in fact increase the quality of life.

8 House

8 House is a large mixed-use development built in the shape of a figure 8 on the southern perimeter of the new suburb of Orestad in Copenhagen, Denmark. The bow-shaped building consists of 61,000 square metres of three different types of residential housing and 10,000 square metres of retail premises and offices. Bjarke Ingels explains the design, "that by mixing traditional ingredients, retail, rowhouses and apartments in untraditional ways, you create added value, if not gold." This is achieved by stacking the various ingredients of an urban neighbourhood into layers. They are connected by a promenade and a cycle track which reach up to the 10th floor, allowing businesses and housing to co-exist. The elevated street level provides a new level of social engagement.

Italy Pavilion (Palazzo Italia)

This pavilion was designed and built for the Milan Expo 2015. Palazzo Italia was conceived as a sustainable energy building almost zero thanks to the contribution of photovoltaic glass in coverage and photocatalytic properties of new concrete for the outer casing. It is an "osmotic" building that dialogues and exchanges energy with its surroundings.The full 9,000m2 of the facade of Palazzo Italia is clad in more than 700 active BIODYNAMIC concrete panels with Italcementi's patented TX Active technology. When the material comes into contact with light, it can "capture" pollution in the air, transforming it into inert salts and reducing smog levels.