Eco-friendliness used to mean a house with a solar roof. Now skyscrapers are rising to the occasion with stunning innovations. (article link) (podcast link)
"If you can make it here, you can make it anywhere," Carol Willis, director of New York City's Skyscraper Museum, says with a Sinatra-like twinkle in her blue eyes, as she leads a tour of the museum exhibit Green Towers for New York: From Visionary to Vernacular, on view through May, 2006.
Of course, skyscrapers have arisen because of economic necessity, not New York City's desire to be a showplace city. Bragging rights may drive buildings higher, but soaring real estate prices have always served as the primary force pushing buildings up toward the stratosphere -- especially in Manhattan, where the skyscraper was invented.
Viewing the exhibit on 14 towers -- every one of them with significant green, or environmentally friendly, design features -- clearly demonstrates the era of the sustainable skyscraper has begun. All of the buildings are either recently completed or under construction.
"In New York, so much money is at stake building that everything is set up to avoid risk. There's pressure not to innovate," explains Willis, an architectural historian and author of Form Follows Finance: Skyscrapers and Skylines in New York and Chicago. "But that's what's important about where we are today: The price is coming down, making a green strategy an easy decision rather than a virtuous one." (Listen to a podcast conversation with Willis.)
Rather than showpieces thrown up by nonprofits or government, some of New York City's new green towers are honest-to-goodness speculative office buildings. Others function as condominiums, laboratories, and owner-occupied corporate headquarters. All embody the glass-and-steel realization of an emerging environmentalist movement. It's not a back-to-the-land save-the-whales ethos, but rather the acknowledgement that energy efficiency and productive work environments can coincide with environmental sustainability and corporate profitability.
Here's a slideshow tour of New York's new green skyscrapers and some of their antecedents.
