.Tall buildings represent a way of the future which is perceived as necessary despite being environmentally unfriendly .This book demonstrates methods to make these energy-consuming buildings as efficient as possible until a time when the world finds economically viable alternatives Ken Yeang remains one of the world's foremost experts on sustainability and the modern skyscraper. Acknowledging that the skyscraper is possibly one of the most ecologically unfriendly of all building types, he states that until an economically viable alternative is identified, it is necessary to make them as humane and as sustainable as possible. Each project is presented together with data on its climatic location, the local vegetation, plot ratio, net and gross areas."

This publication is the follow-up to the highly acclaimed book eVolo Skyscrapers. 150 new skyscrapers submitted to the eVolo Skyscraper Competition are categorized and examined. These super-tall structures take into consideration the advances in technology, the exploration of sustainable systems, and the establishment of new urban and architectural methods to solve economic, social, and cultural problems of the contemporary city; including the scarcity of natural resources and infrastructure and the exponential increase of inhabitants, pollution, economic division, and unplanned urban sprawl.

This book presents Ken Yeang's work on the design of ecologically responsive skyscrapers, and includes his essay on applying green-design principles to the skyscraper typology, as well as a preface by Steve Featherstone, an introduction by David Scott (Chairman of The Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat) and a critique by Professor Ivor Richards.

Eco-Towers introduces readers to groundbreaking designs, most progressive projects, and innovative ways of thinking about a new generation of green skyscrapers that could provide solutions to crises the world faces today including climate change, depleting resources, deteriorating ecology, population increase, decreasing food supply, urban heat island effect, pollution, deforestation, and more. The book suggests that the eco-tower culminates the cultural and technological evolutions of the 21st century by building and improving on the experiences of earlier designs of skyscrapers and philosophies particularly green, sustainable, and ecological. It argues that the true green skyscraper is the one that engages successfully with its larger urban context by establishing symbiotic relationships with the social, economic, and environmental aspects. Since tall buildings are becoming larger and taller, serving greater number of people, and exerting higher demand on the environment and existing infrastructure, any improvements in their design and construction will significantly enhance urban conditions. The book elucidates how green skyscrapers better serve tenants, mitigate environmental impacts, and improve integration with the city infrastructure. It explains how skyscrapers’ long life cycle offers the greatest justifications for recycling precious resources, and makes it a worthwhile to employ green features in constructing new skyscrapers and retrofitting existing ones. Subsequently, the book explores new designs that are employing cutting-edge green technologies at a grand scale including water-saving technologies, solar panels, helical wind turbines, sunlight-sensing LED lights, rainwater catchment systems, graywater and blackwater recycling systems, seawater-powered air conditioning, and the like. In the future, new building materials and smart technologies will continue to offer innovative design approaches to sustainable tall buildings with new aesthetics, referred to as “eco-iconic” skyscrapers.

More than a century after its inception, the skyscraper has finally come of age. Though it has long been lampooned as a venal and inhospitable guzzler of resources, a revolutionary new school of skyscraper design has refashioned the idiom with buildings that are sensitive to their environments, benevolent to their occupants, and economically viable to build and maintain. Designed by some of the best-known architects in the world, these towers are as daring aesthetically as they are innovative environmentally. Big and Green is the first book to examine the sustainable skyscraper, its history, the technologies that make it possible, and its role in the future of urban development. The book examines more than 40 of the most important recent sustainable skyscrapers-including Fox & Fowle's Reuters Buildings in New York, Norman Foster's Commerzbank in Frankfurt, and MVRDV's spectacular Dutch Pavilion from Expo 2000 in Hanover-with project descriptions, photographs, and detailed drawings. Interviews with such leaders in the field as Sir Richard Rogers, William McDonough, and Kenneth Yeang are also included.

Dissects the construction ecology, material geographies, and world-systems of a most modern of modern architectures: the Seagram Building.0In doing so, it aims to describe how humans and nature interact with the thin crust of the planet through architecture. In particular, the immense material, energy and labor involved in building require a fresh interpretation that better situates the ecological and social potential of design.00The enhancement of a particular building should be inextricable from the enhancement of its world-system and construction ecology. A ?beautiful? building engendered through the vulgarity of uneven exchanges and processes of underdevelopment is no longer a tenable conceit in such a framework.00Unless architects begin to describe buildings as terrestrial events and artifacts, architects will?to our collective and professional peril?continue to operate outside the key environmental dynamics and key political processes of this century.

A tour of some of the world's greenest structures.