Week 3 - Am I doing it right?

After last weeks' blog entries, I started to think about how am I doing in responding to the sustainability?

Written about the "deceptive" greenery on green buildings, it reminds me about a project I did in my architectural design studio in university last semester. Kind of like a self critic, I am starting to review how am I doing on the specific project.

The project located in George Street in Sydney CBD, adjacent to Wynyard Station. The brief is to design a mixed-used middle rise building on the site, including offices and other programs.

Of course start with site analysis. It is found that generally the site is lack of green spaces, therefore the idea firstly generated in my mind was - green building!

Subsequently the design strategies are developed - design a building with sufficient greenery, in order to improve working efficiency inside the building, provide relax space to tenants, as well as giving back the opportunity to enjoy greenery to public domain.

Image courtesy of my design.

The strategies including set up different scales of sky gardens, mid rise public garden and rooftop garden bars. Tenants also have smaller scale external sky gardens to relax during work. As well as, green façades to provide natural shading and thermal comfort to the tenants, and providing visual attraction to the city itself.

I actually quite like the design concept, until I came to the technical part of the design. To actually make the building work, there are a lot of aspects to consider, including how to make the sky gardens prolonging, how to make the green façade work, also the most important parts, how to provide maintenance and services to the green elements, not only on the sky gardens but also on the façade.

One of the details for sky garden in my design.

Figuring out the details are already some very painful works. I had to make sure it works, can survive from the wind and weather, as well as how it responses to solar. Choice of vegetation is important as well, to make sure the leave do not gone in the winters. I had to understand how much water these plants need as well.

To a more technical part, the irrigation and maintainence. This part was even more painful as it contains how to collect rain water, distribution after collection, energy consumption of the systems, etc. I had to also ensure that the media which the plants are planted on is suitable for the selected plants.

All these matters, all the technical issues are making the project extremely difficult. It kind of making me start to think about, how efficient is building "green" buildings in order to green the city? How much does it cost to create this kind of green buildings? Not only the upfront cost, but also the ongoing cost in order to make it prolonging.

Thinking about that, I admire those green buildings that are built, for example, central park in Sydney. I admire the architects and engineers to figure out such complicated systems to build the building. At the same time, I doubt that how much are they paying, to maintain the greenery on the buildings?

I still like my idea for this project, just that I will think more critically in similar projects in the future. Sometimes be realistic is more than be nice and idealistic.