Empire State Building in New York, USA
As the focus in urban planning shifts from tall construction to sustainable building, combating the architectural greenwashing of wolves in sheep’s clothing (and wedding cakes) is a fight we cannot afford to ignore.
O Home Insurance Buildingthe world’s first skyscraper, and , still the tallest building in the world, both owe their origins to the city of Chicago.
Built in 1884, and standing an impressive ten stories tall, the Home Insurance Building was the first of its kind to use a “skeleton structure” cast iron as structural support.
Despite this architectural featcompared to skyscrapers built just 20 years later, the Home Insurance Building did not resemble to a skyscraper — at least, by today’s standards.
Ironicamente, o Home Insurance Building had a short lifeand was demolished in 1931, never having witnessed the impact of your legacy in urban profiles around the world. It could be argued that its demolition was symbolic of the movement to modernize skyscraper technology.
Successful completion of Home Insurance Building kicks off race to build, says Eva Kellneran environmental scientist at McGill University, in a post on the university’s website.
As skyscrapers symbolized modernity, at the turn of the century, architects and engineers dedicated themselves to discovering the more effective way to increase the number of floors in a skyscraper.
Furthermore, with more and more people moving to cities, planners and municipal governments have had to find a practical way to accommodate the influx of population in a limited horizontal space. Your solution: grow vertically.
Stop the climb
With the unprecedented popularity of skyscrapers in the early 20th century, they quickly dominated urban profiles all over America. In New York, however, a major question arose at the forefront of this architectural movement.
With the lack of planning regulations, architects could draw up designs for skyscrapers as as tall as they wantedwhich represented a problem for the city’s inhabitants, as the lack of light and air reaching the sidewalks quickly became noticeable.
Ultimately, the last straw was the Equitable Building of New York, a 40-story H-shaped office building opened in 1915.
New Yorkers were furious at the projected shadow by the building, and real estate developers were concerned about how buildings like the Equitable Building would harm property values.
In response to the public anguish caused by this issue, the so-called Ordinance Resolution was passed in New York in 1916, which was not only the first of its kind in the city, but was also the first city-wide ordinance code in the USA.
wedding cake building
In response to the Planning Resolution, the skyscrapers with setbacks have become increasingly popular, says Kellner.
In New York, the planning law established that, depending on the district where it was intended to be built, the height of the building could not exceed a certain proportion in relation to the width of the street.
However, there was an exception. A building could gain additional height if it was set back from the street. Additionally, in all districts, 25% of the building lot There was no height limitas long as it met the setback requirements.
Due to this regulation, buildings often occupied the entire width of the lot at street level and then they became narrower as they rose.
This style of construction is known as “wedding cake building” due to its similarity to the delicious celebratory candy. The Chrysler Building and the Empire State Building in Manhattan are the best-known examples of this recessed style, the latter being the tallest of its kind.
Due to the success of these two buildings, the style ended up spreading throughout the United States and the world.
New paradigms
Cities are responsible for more than 60% of global CO₂ emissions from fossil fuels. Many of these emissions are due to the use of cars and buildings (insulation, energy consumption, construction, etc.).
This statistic has placed cities at the forefront of discussions about climate change mitigation.
When the question circulating in modernization plans used to be “How can we make buildings taller?”, the question now is “How do we design our cities and buildings in a more sustainable way?”
With the increasing emergence of eye-catching and literally “green” buildings, such as the Vertical Forest of Milan, the growing issue of architectural greenwashing also arises.
A architectural green washing can be understood as the way in which buildings are presented as being more environmentally friendly than they really are.
Buildings that incorporate vegetation on their facades seem to do so just to follow a trend. Vegetation is often planted carelessly just for the “image” or to fulfill a requirement.
The human geographer Michaela Pixová describes this problem precisely, arguing that “it is also common to use it as a sustainability solution, i.e. surface solutions that give the appearance to address environmental problems without questioning unsustainable systems underlying assets, while also increasing the value of the property.”
Often, these “green buildings” have a carbon glued substantial due to the maintenance of vegetation, because the technology through which they are executed nis not sufficiently studied.
In fact, in some cases, it has been reported that some buildings have been decorated in such a way that it appears that “natural” and “raw” materials were used, when in reality it’s just concrete in disguise — a wolf in sheep’s clothing.
Although cities are innovation centers and critical leverage points in combating climate change, there is still a lot of work to do to ensure that genuine and real progress is made.
Greenwashing is exceptionally dangerous in this fight. In the same way that the revolutionary 1916 Ordinance was passed in New York, a movement to pressure developers to implement sustainable practices in their buildings is also possible, Kellner concludes.
