Building Vertical Cities: Daniel Winey at TEDxConnecticutCollege
you know when I was uh flying out here last week from China actually from Shanghai I kept thinking to myself why the heck am I flying halfway across the world but I have to say this is like the coolest thing that I have ever been to it's really I'm really really excited to be here and I'm sort of the nomadic architect as my daughter Madison knows I've traveled around Asia for 20 years I've been through Japan and Korea China southeast Asia Malaysia uh India and I've done work in all those markets so what I wanted to share with you today is some of my sort of practical experiences and maybe think about designing cities in a different way so let's start with China uh you guys know a little bit about China but the changes in China are profound from 2000 to 2010 250 million people move from Farm areas to urban areas in China and in China today there is 700 million Chinese citizens living in urban areas but I think what's even more profound think about this in the next 18 years or so next two decades another three 300 million people move into urban areas in China that's the equivalent to the entire population of the United States greater than that China by 2025 is going to build enough skyscrapers to fill 10 New York size cities by 2025 what does that really mean that's almost 21 billion square feet 21 billion Square F feet sounds like a lot of space huh that's equivalent to almost 8,300 8,300 empire state buildings every single year this is a shot of Hong Kong so how do vertical cities impact sustainable design so I'm going to use two examples one is Houston Houston is a lowrise low density city that has an average population density of about 3,500 people per square mile Hong Kong on the other hand has the population density of almost 93,000 people per square mile Houston uses 34 times the amount of land area and natural resources that Hong Kong does and Hong Kong is 27 times more dense and the Reliance on the car in Houston and the CO2 emissions and the pollution that goes along with it is very different than Hong Kong where mass transportation and walking is really the way the people get around but I don't necessarily believe that just simply becoming more dense and going higher is necessarily a sustainable model nor does it necessarily actually result in a great City let's look at some examples this is Beijing and you look at Beijing then Beijing was a lowrise highdensity city look at it now essentially it's high-rise monolithic buildings that are really dictated by planning codes that require the buildings to be pulled part because Shadow studies so it really has changed the whole nature of the city or look at look at Guan Joe look at the difference here look at the left-and side in the density of the old village uo where you know one could work and play and live probably navigate the City by bike or walking versus now you know you can't get around guano you can't get around Beijing without getting in a taxi or getting in a car so I call this the birth of the mega suburb it's really interesting I was flying in uh over Washington DC and I saw all of the suburban area very typical of the rest of the United States and I kept thinking these are single family monolithic homes that require you to get in a car to go somewhere this is exactly what's happening in China right now right now only on a greater scale just take those single buildings and extract them and pull them up into high-rise buildings and I call this the birth of the Mega suburb and this is happening all over not just China but in Asia in general this is a shot of Beijing this is one of the typical ring roads in Beijing this is an 18 Lane Highway how would you guys like to try to cross this you know I've seen I think there are actually two people or three people on the left hand side there thinking about trying to navigate it but the only way to get across this is you got to go through an overpass or an underpass you know Beijing in actually in China in 2009 surpassed the US in car sales in 2010 Beijing added one year Alone 1 million cars to the road 1 million cars and right now there are 5 million register cars in Beijing so something's got to change something's definitely got to change so I don't think it's the Houston model it's not the US Suburban model that doesn't work and it's certainly not what's happening throughout Asia today I think we need to look at a new par Paradigm imagine breaking the boundaries between buildings and cities breaking the boundaries between cities and buildings what makes a great City great places to live great places to shop and to dine viable businesses preferably close to where you live culture and entertainment and of course parks in open space so what if you look at this horizontal City in a completely different way and you sort of extract it of course Transportation Systems can't leave that out so if you take a city take all the great elements of a city the texture the fabric of a city you sort of extract it and you think about pulling it into the vertical plane start thinking of cities three dimension Al and this is I hate to call this a building but this is a structure that I'm currently involved in the Chief Architect and this essentially is a vertical City it's a structure that has housing it's got hotels it's got office space it's got entertainment venues it's got cultural venues but even more importantly it's got seven major Parks vertical parks that are actually part of this uh part of this structure this this structure will house 35,000 people on any given day 35,000 people I think that's equivalent to 20% of the population of New London and 10 times the population of Mystic so how do you navigate a building of this type well like roads and like sidewalks there's a vertical transportation system this structure happens to be tied into all the major Subways all the major bus routes which allow you to come from all parts of the city to the structure there are 106 elevators in this structure 37 escalators and more stairways than I can count it will become it is in fact the most sustainable structure of this type in this in the world it's belt with the center core the center Corp actually handles a vertical transportation uh there are super columns The Columns for this are 8 ft by 21 ft each and there are eight them that hold on that hold the structure up and then it's surrounded by floor plates and where you see those light lines each one of those light lines essentially is a vertical Park there's an inner skin inner skin and then there's an outer skin the inner skin is is cylindrical the outer skin is triangular and a Twist and the distance between the inner skin and the outer skin forms 17 story Atrium spaces 17 story Atrium spaces each one of which is a vertical Park which has all the amenities of the city it's got museums it's got you know food amenities virtually everything the building was designed uh with wind lows in mind when you get to it this building actually is is 1,800 feet tall so wind is a critical factor and if you can reduce the wind loads you can reduce the structural steel and the concrete required to actually put this building together and that's a huge deal this is about 30% less than a conventional office building in terms of structural steel the building is going to generate its own power not all of its own power but a lot got wind turbines in the top of the building it's got co-generation facilities in the base of the building we actually looked at geothermal but we really couldn't do geothermal here because the pad of the building to hold this is 21 ft thick to hold the building of the scale and because of the pilings we're not even down to River bad we're down actually it's just a landfill area so we couldn't do any G geothermal it's got a complete we water harvesting system we're going to take all the water that falls on the building and actually a lot of the wall water that falls on the side of the building it's completely recycled every single drop of water that comes off of the site is recycled over and over and over again until it's used this is a video that gives you an idea of the scale as I said it's about 125 stories tall uh which makes it about 2 or 300 feet taller than say Sears Tower so it's one of the tallest structures in the world there are two other buildings adjacent to it this is a wind turbines at the top of the building and these are the sky lobbies and Sky parks and and these things are going to be completely landscaped it's really an extraordinary structure this gives you an idea of the scale of it the buildings around it are 65 stories tall 50 to 65 stories tall so the scale of this particular building is immense so vertical equals dense vertical equals lower land use more efficient use of resources better use of energy and actually vertical more compact cities are worth more land values are high higher which is a great thing but I'm not advocating I'm not advocating doing a city of Shanghai Towers I'm not what I'm advocating is that we think about design rather City Planning and design rather than being a horizontal effort it's more of a vertical effort and taking all these elements in creating a city where we have many many many buildings that are tied together many many buildings that share different kinds of functions that are connected at multiple levels buildings that in fact are focused on people not Vehicles so what I'm really advocating is really sort of breaking The Stereotype and breaking the boundaries of City Planning and really looking at City Planning as more of architecture thank you w