International News
LATEST RESEARCH SHOWS
BUILDING HEIGHT CRITICAL TO MEET EFFICIENCY TARGETS
Skyscrapers use and lose more energy than low-rise buildings , research shows . Can smarter design and technology change that ?
It may seem obvious that cities filled with big buildings use energy more efficiently than dispersed suburban landscapes , and that newer , taller buildings are more energy-efficient than older , squatter structures .
People widely assume that cities , for example , ranks well on energy use per person , where residential housing tends toward the vertical , one boiler room can serve many units , and heat rises into the units above , rather than being lost to the sky .
But now some climate-minded architects and engineers are questioning that orthodoxy . It ’ s starting to look like there might even be a sweet spot for building height : the four-storey courtyard .
That was the unexpected conclusion reached by researchers from Adrian Smith + Gordon Gill Architecture . They modelled housing units in nine different configurations , from a 215-story building with 2 000 residential units at one extreme and 2 000 dispersed suburban homes at the other .
The question the study asked was how efficient are ultra-tall versus low-rise residential buildings . According to their analysis , the four-storey courtyard used the least energy per household .
The question matters , because buildings are directly or indirectly responsible for nearly 40 % of all greenhouse gas emissions , according to the International Energy Agency .
That AS + GG asked these questions at all is somewhat surprising , given that the firm develops ultra-high-rise buildings , including the first kilometre-high building in the world , the Jeddah Tower , now under construction in Saudi Arabia .
“ We wanted to look at 2000 units and whether they are sustainable in as unbiased a way as possible ,” said Christopher Drew , the firm ’ s director of sustainability . The architects published their research in a paper in the International Journal of High-Rise Buildings , and later in the book Residensity , which expanded on the paper to account for land use and underground utilities .
Other research teams also hint that an unexamined preference for tall buildings may be misplaced . Daniel Godoy-
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High-rise buildings are particularly susceptible to the HVAC systems having to work that much harder in either winter or summer months due to all of the areas of the building where either heat or cooling is simply lost .
RACA Journal I January 2021 www . hvacronline . co . za