Other British cities, including Manchester, Liverpool and Bristol, have succumbed to the belief that there is something glamorous about this well-worn and old-fashioned building type. An annual survey by the independent organisation New London Architecture has found that in the capital 525 buildings of 20 storeys or more are in the pipeline – either under construction, approved or going through the processes of planning applications. Architecture is not just about things you can see. But this visual buzz goes with a range of sub-optimal physical experiences, which have been made that much less attractive by the spread of a virus that seems to thrive in air-conditioned and enclosed spaces. Skyscraper apartments are sold on the view, with prices rising the higher you go up a building, which can indeed be spectacular. Good design can mitigate at least some of these deficiencies, but good design is weirdly hard to find in new tall buildings. In this respect, it’s a bit of mystery why towers are thought desirable: you typically progress from a windy and inhospitable plaza to a soulless lobby, to a long lift ride, to another lobby, to a flat that has to be fortified and sealed against strong winds, to a balcony (if you’re lucky) with a similarly embattled relationship to nature. There’s another meaning to “environment”, which describes personal rather than global surroundings. The view from a 20th-storey flat in London’s Strata SE1.
It has been deemed acceptable – by the building regulations, by architects, by the professional media – to rip untold tonnes of matter from the earth and to pump similar tonnes of greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere, in order to produce magical architectural devices that might, if all their wizardry were to function as promised, pay back some of their carbon debt some time in the next century. They have got away with it in part because embodied energy hasn’t until recently been paid as much attention as energy in use. Even when they do, they’re fighting to overcome the self-inflicted environmental handicap of being tall buildings in the first place. Strata SE1, the south London tower with three wind turbines at its top was another. The Gherkin, where cooling air was to flow through spiralling internal atria, was an early example. There’s some truth in this, but you can also achieve high levels of density without going above 10 or 12 storeys.Įvery now and again you get a one-off skyscraper design that makes play of its environmental features. Mostly the argument is about density – if you pile a lot of homes or workplaces high on one spot, it is said, then you can use land and public transport more efficiently. And tall buildings are still sold on the basis that they are good for the environment. If all this might seem pretty obvious, it’s good to have calculations to attach to a hunch. What they are not are markers of progress Snelson also mentions “in-use” energy consumption and carbon emissions – what is needed to cool and heat and run lifts, which he says are typically 20% more for tall than medium-height buildings. In London, which is mostly built on clay as opposed to Manhattan’s rock, they require ample foundations. Tall buildings are more structurally demanding than lower ones – it takes a lot of effort, for example, to stop them swaying – and so require more steel and concrete. He is talking about the resources that go into building it, what is called its “embodied” energy. Writing in this month’s issue of the architecture magazine Domus, he points out that a typical skyscraper will have at least double the carbon footprint of a 10-storey building of the same floor area.
I f no one ever built a skyscraper ever again, anywhere, who would truly miss them? I ask, because the engineer Tim Snelson, of the design consultancy Arup, has just blown a hole in any claim they might have had to be environmentally sustainable.