Antony Wood: Tall buildings and sustainable vertical urbanism.

Introduction to Antony Wood

0:00Hello. In this episode of the A's for Architecture podcast, Professor Anthony Wood, PhD, tall building expert, professor of sustainable vertical urbanism at the Illinois Institute of Technology, author, architect, and former president and CEO of the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat, now the Council of Vertical Urbanism, discusses, well, very tall buildings. The Council of Vertical Urbanism is, among many other things, the body that oversees the certification of the world's tallest buildings. No small task, to be sure. Tallness, as our cities now attest, is seemingly the predominant solution to almost all urban problems, from sprawl, to banality, to sustainability,

0:35economic growth, progressive urban identity and branding, and even the housing crisis. Nearly 10 times as many supertalls, buildings over 300 metres, have been built since 2000 than were built in the previous 100 years, but outside their appeal as objects, big isn't always beautiful, but it's normally very impressive. What are they for, and how do they work as bits of a city? Antony discusses this, where tall comes from, what it achieves as a typology, how they're made, what sort of places and cities they make, and how they could do it all a lot better.

1:08A is for Architecture, a podcast about architecture, buildings, urban culture, and space.

Background and career path

1:15Hello, and welcome to another episode of the A is for Architecture podcast. I'm talking today to Antony Wood, Professor Antony Wood. Antony, thank you so much for joining me all the way from Chicago. It's a pleasure. We're going to be talking about your work in and around tall buildings, which is the first time that I've approached this subject on this podcast, which tends to be less involved in the conversations around large commercial property. But before we get to discussing all of that,

1:46Antony, would you be so kind as to introduce yourself? Certainly. Well, I am Dr. Antony Wood. I am an architect by background. We need to get over the disappointment that though I am talking to you from Chicago, I have a British accent. I am from Manchester, England. So I, yeah, so I'm an architect by background. I'm now Professor of Architecture at the Illinois Institute of Technology here in Chicago. Very famous as the, you know, the seat of

2:17Mies van der Rohe for several decades. But my real claim to fame, I guess, was I was the CEO and president of the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat for 20 years. And that's why I moved to Chicago in 2006 to take up the leadership of that global non-profit of all those who were involved, you know, in the challenge of building tall and increasingly, you know, more towards vertical

2:47cities and what I call sustainable vertical urbanism. So what did the organization do? Did it advocate for tall buildings? Was it a knowledge bank for people who are approaching the design of tall buildings? How does it operate? Well, it still does, because though I stepped down a year or two ago, it's still in existence. Actually, it changed its name on me after I'd stepped down. It's now the Council on Vertical Urbanism. So it was founded in 1969. So it has a, you know, pretty illustrious history. I did not

3:18found the organization. It was founded by a structural engineering academic called Lynn Beadle at the Lehigh University in 1969. And actually, so what does it do? It's a non-prof. It's basically a kind of like academic body for professionals, if you like. Yeah. So it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a non-profit association of all those, meaning funder, investor, only developers, architects, engineers,

3:48curtain wall guys, landscapers, everyone involved in the act of, of creating tall buildings. And what do we do? We do, you know, things that a typical association does. So, so we, we do research on aspects of tall buildings. We produce publications. We have an annual conference. The thing that, that if the public have heard of us, and amazingly, a lot of the public have, because tall buildings as an architectural typology is quite interesting to the public, maybe more so than any other typology actually.

4:21And, but if the public have heard of us, it's because we set the title of the world's tallest building. We, we have developed over a number of decades, the criteria upon which tall building height is measured. So titles such as the world's tallest building or Canterbury's tallest building with an offset core, you know, any variation of that is our remit. Yeah. So, so, so typical academic type work, but, but for almost exclusively for professionals across those multi-disciplines, conferences, research, publications, database, you know, height criteria and height committee,

4:57that kind of stuff. So it's almost like, not quite like a think tank. Yeah. Yeah, it absolutely is. And, you know, and, and, and if you will allow me to blow my own trumpet for a second, you know, I mean, I was the CEO for 20 years and, and, and the council, let's just call it the council. It was the council on tall buildings and urban habitat. Now it's the council on vertical urbanism. It was a very different entity at the end of those 20 years. When I took over in 2006, it was, you know, first of all, it shrunk down to almost non-existence. We only had one member of

5:31staff at that time. And over the, you know, the, the next 20 years, I built it into, you know, the global entity it is today. We have offices in, in Chicago, in China, in, in Italy, you know, I mean, a massive, massive growth of the organization and doing a lot more than it was doing when I took over. But perhaps more importantly, I shifted the conversation. When I took over in 2006, the council was largely an engineering focused body. And I think it's interesting because for the first 20, 30 years of the council's existence, the tall building was seen

6:04as a, as an engineering challenge, you know, I mean, when the council was founded in the late sixties, it, it was founded on the back of projects like the John Hancock and Sears Tower here in Chicago, which were doing, I describe it as the architectural equivalent of walking on the moon. Yeah. And, and I think it's a pretty good description because man was walking on the moon at that time. And there was this excitement about what could be achieved technically, you know, and, and the, and the research of NASA was kind of, you know, creeping into all aspects of, of, of, of everyday

6:38life, whether that was Velcros or whatever. And then, and there was this excitement about tall buildings and how tall it could go, but it was largely seen as an, as an engineering challenge and the council and a lot of the dialogue around tall buildings was, was, was driven by engineers. And then when I came in as an architect and an urbanist and someone who'd, you know, traveled and worked all around the world, I expanded that. I expanded it in terms of the, the, the people that were involved in the council. I was very proud that, you know, within a decade, our biggest member group had

7:12shifted from engineers to owner developers and the guys that are, you know, kind of, you know, kind of motivating these buildings. We grew, grown massively. So there's still a lot of engineers involved, but, but, but the more interesting aspect of that, you know, I would argue that the typology, the main challenge of the typology today is not engineering. There are still engineering challenges. I think the tall building is far more of a social and cultural challenge than it is a technical challenge. You know, and maybe we'll get into a bit of detail on that during the podcast.

7:47Where did your fascination with tall buildings come from? After studying in the UK, you moved out to the far East, as I understand it. I have no natural background in tall buildings whatsoever. I mean, I grew up in a very working class, Eastern suburb of Manchester. You know, working classes, perhaps being kind. I mean, the first time I left Manchester was to go to the University of Nottingham. Yeah. The first time I

8:19went to London was a rag raid in week one of, you know, University of Nottingham. I mean, my childhood was very, never been on a plane, never been anywhere. So I can't profess that I, as a kid, I travel, as my children do now, traveled all around the world and seen these skyscrapers. But I think there was definitely a fascination with science fiction, cinematography and cities of the future before I even got into architecture. But the real move was I finished my first degree in architecture. I'd done my part one and I got a one-way ticket out to Hong Kong. So, you know,

8:54the year out between part one and part two, you know, the year in practice, I decided that I wanted to use that for much more than just getting experience in architecture. So I bought a one-way ticket out to Hong Kong. Why one way? Because that's all I had enough money for. And everybody thought I was crazy to do this, by the way. 1991 was the depths of a depression in the UK. And I was one of only 36, 36 of us that graduate from architecture school that actually had a job back in

9:24my hometown on the outskirts of Manchester. And they thought I was crazy to pack that in and fly to the other side of the world. And, you know, and it was tough getting a job in Hong Kong, because of course, I was 21 and had no experience and was pretty rough, to be honest, you know, no experience of the world, let alone architecture. But I did get a job. And that's an interesting story, which I won't tell today. But when I got the job, I mean, I had the interview at two o'clock, I started at three o'clock. And the next day, they sent me to Bangkok. And I spent the next two years designing skyscrapers

9:58at the age of 21 in Bangkok, you know, because, because at that time, Southeast Asia was at the start of its big boom of, you know, of developing vertical cities. So I spent the next most of the 90s working in Southeast Asia as a practicing architect, even though I'd not even done my part two at that stage. Yeah. So I worked in I was a few years in Bangkok. I was in Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, but always based in Hong Kong. And, and so that's where I got my professional

10:32background and interest in high rise buildings. You know, I mean, to complete the story at the end of the 90s, I thought, maybe there's more to life than working as a practicing architect. And that's a whole nother avenue that we won't go down. And but then I came back to the UK, things had gone bad economically in Asia, you know, towards the end of the 90s, I came back to the UK. And cut a long story short, I ended up getting moving into academia and getting a job as a lecturer in

11:03architecture at the University of Nottingham. Interestingly, as we've just passed the 25th anniversary of 911, my first day on the job at the University of Nottingham was 911. So even then, even this massive career change still had that link to high rise buildings. You know, 911, the first thing I did was sit with a bunch of students that I didn't know, watch the World Trade Center towers collapse. So, but then it seemed natural for me to focus my teaching and my research at the University

11:34of Nottingham on tall buildings, because that was both my professional background. And by that stage was my passion. And I started and actually, I was under pressure to kind of do a PhD. And I'm like, what am I going to do this PhD on? And 911 had an impact on that, because I ended up doing a PhD on sky bridges. And part of the inspiration was sky bridges, meaning, you know, bridges and connections between tall buildings at height. At that time, there was only really one example, and that was Patronus Towers. And I just come from Malaysia seeing them build the Patronus Towers.

12:05So there were three influences for that PhD. One was seeing them build Patronus Towers. The second was this fascination with science fiction cinematography, because of course, there almost hasn't been a city of the future created in science fiction that wasn't a multi-level city. And the third, though, was this was this event of 9-11 and seeing these people trapped, because all vertical continuity in the building had been, you know, wiped out. Now, 9-11 isn't a great advocate for sky bridges, because the towers collapsed, and they've been connected,

12:38the bridges would have come down as well. But of course, that was an extreme event. The idea of being able to move horizontally at height through building, through cities, I think is, as we densify cities and verticalize cities, I think is a sound notion. And actually, now there are hundreds of buildings that are connected at height, but just finish the career path. So I started this PhD, I wrote a paper, it was called Pavements in the Sky, Use of the Sky Bridge in Tall Buildings. And then I went to a mentor at the university, because I was still relatively young, I think I'd

13:11just turned 30. And I'm like, I've written a paper, what do I do with this paper? And the guy says, where are you going to present it at a conference? And then you get feedback, and then you revise it, and you publish it in a journal. I'm like, okay, great, but what conference? And he said, I don't know, there'll be some organization out there for tall building. So I go online, and I find this organization, Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat, 2003 Kuala Lumpur Conference. So I submit my paper, it gets accepted, I go and present. And then I'm like, this is quite an interesting organization. So 2003, I presented a paper at their annual conference. 2004, they asked

13:47me to review the scientific committee. 2005, they asked me to chair the conference. And 2006, they asked me to become CEO. So that's why I arrived in Chicago, almost 20 years to the day, to take up the leadership of the council.

Defining the tall building

14:01You talked a little bit about the history of tall buildings, because there's a difference between a big building and a tall building. So where do we get this concept of the tall building from? And how has it transformed? Well, it's interesting, you know, I mean, I often get frustrated, you know, so my organization, the organization that I led, as I've said, was responsible for setting the title of the world's tallest building, or any variant of that. But I often got frustrated in the discussions we would have about what constitutes a tall building, what constitutes a skyscraper, and all these things,

14:34you know, during my tenure. So, you know, early on in my tenure, I helped to clarify out some of these definitions, you know, and for example, the definition that we came for a tall building was a tall building is a building that exhibits some element of tallness. Yeah, now, that sounds vague. But when you dig a little deeper than that, we recognize three subcategories. One, it's about height relative to context. Two, it's about slenderness. It's not just about height, it's about, you know, height relative to floor plan, if you like. And the third category is

15:10the kind of technology that are employed once you start to go vertical that you wouldn't use in a low rise building, whether that's structural strategy or vertical transport or, you know, MEP strategies. So really, what that definition is saying is, if a building touches any of those three and you think it's tall, it's tall, you know, it's a subjective thing. It's not for us to say it's X meters or X number of stories. So at the lowest end, a tall, you know, like a 12-story building in Chicago wouldn't be tall, but it would be in Canterbury where you are right now, you know,

15:42so, or a suburban setting. So at the lower end, tall is subjective. But then we have this term super tall, which is 300 meters and above. It's not a building that exhibits an element of super tallness. It's 300 meters and above. But during my tenure, we introduced another term, mega tall, because we started to see 600 meters and above. And there are four buildings in existence today, 600 meters and above. But those discussions always frustrated me because they always revolved around technical criteria. I mean, for example, I, you know, when I arrived in Chicago, I thought

16:18it was a done deal that the world's first tallest building was the home insurance building in, in here in Chicago. And Chicago was the birth of the, of the skyscraper in 1885 with the home insurance building. I quickly realized that, that most people agree that it is not the home insurance building. And, and, and, and, and the reason is because the definition of the first skyscraper, by the way, the home insurance building was not the tallest, tallest building in the world.

16:48Yeah. I mean, there were other buildings, even in Chicago that were taller than at that time. And the pyramids have been taller for several thousand years. It was the first tall building because it was the first building. And this is the bit that wasn't technically true. That was not load bearing construction, you know, so up to that point, our height had been achieved by placing block on block or brick on brick. And it was load bearing construction. And the innovation in the tall building was it was a metal frame and, and the, the floors and the facade was supported off a metal

17:23frame. And I use the word metal because people think it was a steel frame, but the very first skyscrapers were cast iron and raw iron. And after about 10 years, it shifted 10 or 15 years shifted to steel, but the early ones were iron. So, so that was the, the kind of innovation that upon which the first tall building was based. But then when you dug into it, you saw that the home insurance building was metal frame, but actually it was working in symbiosis with, with, with brick piers as construction

17:55before that had, you know, had occurred. So actually it was a composite building. So then there became this big debate. So we got into these debates about what was the first skyscraper. I pulled all the world's experts together into a symposium for it in 2019. I think it was, and thought we'd walk out of there with a decision. And all we walked out of was a, was a quote, which I loved, which was trying to determine the world's first tall building is like trying to determine the first fish. You know, it was, you know, it was an evolution and you can't actually put your moment,

18:26your finger on any moment or any fish or any building and say it was that because there were many things happening at that time. And it was an evolution, but what frustrated me with that and the criteria upon which tall buildings are measured and, and, and, and the titles determined, it was always down to technical criteria. Like at the top of the building, it's about, it's about spires and not antennae and you know, all this kind of stuff, but, but, but, you know, certainly the term skyscraper, this term skyscraper is, it's an evocative term.

19:00And, um, it's really in my view about, about how it impacts humanity, how it impacts, impacts the urban plane, you know, it's, you know, so, so who gives a shit what that's, what the metal frame's doing or, you know, or whether the, the bits at the top of the building have a function and generate revenue or, or whatever. It's about the impact of that building as a form, as an expression, as a mass on the urban plane, you know, and, and, and,

19:32and it frustrated me that the social cultural aspect of those discussions was in my, in my view, never really given the airplay that it needed. It was always still a conversation that was driven by technical and engineering aspects, really.

The problem with modern towers

19:46Yeah. To come to that point, as I put my notes to you, are tall buildings a technology in search of a purpose? And that's a little bit cheeky, and it's obviously meant to be provocative. But I think we see in cities around the world, certainly a lot of tall buildings being built, which don't really look like that sociocultural meaning is being considered in any significant way. They are an instrument of densification, urban densification, which doesn't seem to be serving social or cultural values particularly well. And as I said, they, they accelerate land values. So who are they for?

20:21What are tall buildings for? And how are they kind of framed within the development process itself? Well, that's a big question. There's a number of questions, a number of topics that you just mentioned, but, but let's, let's just go back a little bit because you use the word provocative. So let's pick up on provocative. I mean, I would like your listeners to be under no illusion. I have devoted almost my entire career in and around the typology of tall buildings. However, so what I'm

20:52about to say might come across as a little surprising. I think that 95% of tall buildings that exist in the world today are terrible and should never have been built. So I believe in the typology, the benefits of the typology and the future of the typology. Unfortunately, the typology was hijacked, has been hijacked by two different motivations, if you like, you know, and when I say 95% of tall buildings are

21:24terrible. It's because if you look at that vast majority of tall buildings, their approach to the design and, and, and, and the eventual expression of the building, it, they normally approach one of two ways. The first, this is what I call the shortfall of tall. They're either just massive rectilinear air conditioned boxes. You know, it's the commercial driver, you know, back to the 1950s, when we saw Mies

21:55van der Rohe and SOM and others develop the, you know, the modernist box. Okay, that was the 1950s. Everyone got excited about modernism. By the way, even modernism, you know, even modest modernism was kind of founded on the basis of a universal architecture. Yeah, which I rebel against, because I believe that architecture, and this is this is what underpins my statement that 95% of tall buildings are terrible, because I'm interested in the difference between place. I'm interested in architecture. I believe all architecture should be a

22:26product of its place. And I mean that environmentally, culturally, socially, materially, you know, and, and so the modernist idea of a universal architecture that could sweep the world, I, you know, I rebel against that. I, you know, I don't think that's the way forward for architecture. And, and in a way, tall buildings were, you know, the kind of best example of that, you know, Mies van der Rohe created this, and others created this modernist black rectilinear air condition box. And that was maybe exciting for a

22:59while, but then it was just replicated into, I mean, look at 90% of tall buildings today, they're still that same rectilinear air condition box divorced from all, all, you know, context. And okay, the skin might have got a bit better, and the MEP systems inside might be more efficient, but it's still the same architectural language of just these boxes, because it was such a great commercial container, an efficient core, as an efficient core, you know, as wide a core to, to, to, to wall span as possible,

23:33if we're talking about offices, and then extruded through, pick a number, 40, 60, 80 stories. Now, this, so, so the, so that was the vast majority of tall buildings. But I mentioned two design approaches. The second design approach, which is coming in the last 30 years, is the tall building as icon. Yeah, tall building as icon. And, and so we've seen these sometimes quite bizarre forms for skyscrapers, you know, twisted, tilted, tapered, you know, tortured, you know, one of these forms,

24:07but the relationship, and you know, some of the forms are interesting, but the relationship between those buildings and the city, again, is just a purely visual one. So, so the relationship of the first set is just a commercial one. The relationship of the second one is a purely visual one. It's, the building is designed as a piece of sculpture, like any piece of sculpture. It's not socially sanctioned, by the way, the things that used to pop above our, you know, that the canopies in cities, church spires and town hall clock towers were socially sanctioned. They were deemed important in

24:38society. They weren't sales force or whatever the fuck, you know, it's like, now it's like, who's got the most money to kind of pop the most bizarrely above a canopy. And the problem with the second, the second set, if you like, the icons, the sculptural, there's a number of problems. One, you put all these icons next to each other and they cancel each other out. Number two, then if the relationship is just visual, then you can literally pick it up and put in any city of the world. So it denies the hundreds and sometimes thousands of years of vernacular tradition in architecture. Yeah.

25:13Where architecture differs all around the world because it was a product of its place. And, and so what concerns me with that is that the mod mod, this modern, modern high rise buildings are homogenizing cities around the world, you know, tall buildings are doing for cities, what Starbucks and, and McDonald's is doing for the dining experience. And so you now look at wherever Seattle, Shanghai, Sydney, and it's the same collection of these, these rather banal rectilinear boxes with a few of these

25:48gratuitous icons, you know, 95%. We'll get back to the 5% in a second. And, and that's homogenizing. And we should not make the mistake of thinking because a building becomes synonymous with a place. It doesn't mean it actually belongs there or it relates to its culture, just become synonymous. We can look at a skyline, you know, I can look at any skyline and instantly say that's X because I recognize, you know, this has become synonymous with a place, but it doesn't necessarily mean that it belongs. So, um, but fortunately in my provocative statement that 95% of tall buildings are crap,

26:26there's 5%, and this is 5% of a lot of buildings that I think are incredible, you know, and point the way forward for the typology, but they're incredible because, and I've developed over the last 20 years, this, this, this, what I call 15 design principles for a new high rise vernacular. Um, and you know, which these buildings that I think are incredible is because they embrace one or more of these, uh, you know, kind of design principles and move beyond just the commercial box or just the ridiculous

26:59sculptural icon. And it, and it's things like, you know, they have sky gardens with public access. They, they, um, they, you know, they have green walls, they have sky bridge, they do something different beyond the commercial. They bring something to society because these buildings have a very big impact on society. Yeah. So I believe, for example, every tall building that's built should have public access to a high level sky garden or the roof pub. And when I say public, I mean, I don't mean communal. I don't mean for the benefit of the people who live or work there. I mean public, you

27:33know, because it take, you know, because again, these buildings have a big impact on, on, on the public. And so, you know, so these principles, and there are many, many examples of buildings that demonstrate each principle, you know, I mean, this idea of the tall building is an extruded form. That's really annoys me because, because the city, you know, I think we should consider tall buildings in terms of strata, especially with the extreme heights that we're seeing now. Yeah. We should, we need, because each strata of the building, let's say every 10 or 15 stories, the relationship of the

28:07building to the city changes. The visual relationship, yeah. Viewing corridors, but also the environment changes. I mean, you know, when I, when I learned this, I thought this was mind-blowing. If you take the Burj Khalifa, which is 828 meters tall, it's the tallest building in the world today. There's a building on site in Jeddah, which will be a thousand meters. I sat on a design competition jury a couple of years ago for a building, which I will not name, which is intended to be two kilometers, which is just ridiculous. I don't know why we're building at that height. It's no need to

28:41build up a height. Maybe we come back to that. But if you look at the Burj Khalifa, the external air temperature on any given day at the top of the building, outside the building, yeah, would be six to eight degrees cooler than the bottom of the building. External air temperature and different halfway up. The amount of moisture in the air at the top of the building and halfway up and at the bottom is radically different. The amount of particulate in the air, sand and that stuff, is radically different at the top than in the middle of the bottom. The climate at the top and halfway up

29:15is radically different to the bottom. And so the point I'm making is we're now designing and building buildings that may cut across two or more climate zones. So if we as architects believe that architecture should be a response to climate and in symbiosis with climate, then why the fuck are these buildings the same all the way up? Because now we've got buildings that cut across two or three climate zones. So that's why I think tall buildings should become, need to be considered stratified, you know, both the relationship to urbanity that it sits in, because that's not

29:48the same that justifies an extrusion being the same all the way up. And it's not the same in terms

Vertical urbanism explained

29:53of its climate. You've used this word vertical urbanism, or you've used the word urbanism quite a bit. And I'm fascinated by this notion. I think there is a distinct thing in the two types of buildings, tall buildings that are part of the 95%, the commercial tower block versus the squiggly shaped icon building that does something vaguely goofy along the way. They are a distinct form of architecture, very much architecture as object. But this idea of urbanism suggests that you view

30:24the skyscraper, the high rise building, the tall building, as needing to be integrated into an idea of the city. But it's a distinct idea of the city. It's a new idea of the city, almost the city in three dimensions, if you know what I mean, like the city upwards as well. Like what is vertical urbanism? How is this being conceived? Well, I can give you my view of it. I mean, people have different views of it. But I guess, first of all, all the principles that I've talked about, about how tall buildings need to evolve,

30:55in my view, are a part of it. You know, the green walls and the sky gardens and how they hit the ground and the use of the roof plane and, you know, all these things, you know, not being extruded forms. That is a part of it. But it's more than that. And so, and I have this series of diagrams that looks at, it looks as an existing city, a low or a mid-rise city right now. And let's say a million people live there. And what it does is it picks out in colour, anything that indicates infrastructure, right?

31:29And when I talk about infrastructure, people automatically presume I'm meaning linear infrastructure. You know, metro, road, rail, water, power, sewage, linear infrastructure. And I do mean that. But I also mean social infrastructure. By social infrastructure, I mean park, garden, sidewalk, school, shop, doctor's surgery, yeah? Social infrastructure that we all rely on to exist. Now, in an existing city, this low or mid-rise city of one million people,

32:04all that infrastructure is at the ground floor. The social infrastructure and the linear infrastructure. So, it might be a little bit above the ground or a bit below the ground, but it's all at the ground floor. And so, the ground floor becomes an essential support layer to existence. But in this scenario of a million people, over the next 10 to 20 years, it's going to grow to 10 million people. That's not science fiction. That has happened and happened in many, many places all around the world. So, where do these other 9 million people go? Well, they can't go in the horizontal city because that is unsustainable in terms of the land use

32:38and the energy it takes to create and then operate the horizontal city. So, it has to go vertical. But it cannot go vertical as, in my view, as we've been doing verticality up to date. Because every one of those vertical buildings right now are either office, residential, hotel, or some combination of those three functions in mixed use. I mean, I just described literally 99% of tall buildings. Putting a bookshop in the lobby and a restaurant on the roof does not make a frigging tall building a vertical city.

33:14I'm so fucking sick of hearing that. We've created a vertical city because we've got these three functions and we've got a fucking restaurant on the top. No. A tall building, in my view, should be like a part of that two-dimensional infrastructure-rich ground plane flipped vertically, you know, with the social infrastructure. So, yes, it's an office building or maybe it's a mixed use building, but it's also got these functions, these social functions within it. The shops, the doctor surgeries, the schools, you know, the parks, the gardens, the greenery, all this stuff.

33:49And of course, but whilst that remains as a single building with all these functions in it, it is still limited within its own floor plate. So that's where the idea of the sky bridge comes in. Because the minute that we start to connect these buildings, and by the way, when I talk about sky bridge, people think about circulation. It is so much more than circulation. I'm talking about bringing urban habitat into the sky. And there are now 100 buildings around the world that do that. Think about Marina Bay Sands in Singapore,

34:23which brings the idea of using the roof and the sky bridge together, where you have three hotel towers, and the roofs are linked and extended on all sides to create a massive park. Now, it's a private enclave, but that's another subject. The 50th storey up in the sky. So we've got the idea of the building itself containing multifunctions, but also linked strategically to other buildings within this three-dimensional urbanism.

34:56So, and the other thing that really interests me with this, and I'm passionate about, if we have this three-dimensional urbanism, then no single building would be an icon. Because now the architect's job might be to design levels 25 to 75 of, you know, building X, which also links into building Y, Z, and whatever. You know, it's not about the building as a heroic object, as you described it in an email to me. It's about the city being a heroic freaking city.

35:27It's about taking that harmony that exists in Venice or Siena or some of the Italian towns where it's not about an object. It's not about an icon. It's about harmony, a commonality of approach that makes the city as a whole beautiful and bringing that up into the third dimension. So, so that's what I think we should aim towards in terms of vertical urbanism. And, you know, and against this backdrop of population growth and urbanization,

35:57I think we, we had a better opportunity 20 years ago, you know, I mean, now we see a billion new people on this planet every 12 years. That's, that's been the last 4 billion people have come in in the last 48 years. On average, it's 12 years. So every 12 years we've wasted, you know, what, how to accommodate those billion new people on the planet. Maybe wasted is a bit strong, but, but still we're growing. Still urbanization is a, is a reality. And there's still an opportunity, I think, to, to develop cities along this path that I'm

36:32talking about, rather than the alternatives, which is what's been happening.

Singapore as a model

36:36Are there some examples? I'm assuming we would most likely see examples of this occurring in the Far East and the Middle East, where there is still, I mean, for all of the criticism of the icon building, there still seems to be a sense of adventure and enterprise in thinking about how that typology can be reimagined. Yeah. By the way, I think, you know, the Middle East has had a lot of, had a lot of flack sent its way, you know, especially Saudi, you know, some of these projects, the giga projects

37:07in Saudi, and now everyone's delighting in the lines not going ahead and all this stuff. And, you know, it was stupid idea to begin with. I mean, a lot of these projects maybe had got out of control, but some of the base ideas behind some of these projects were quite interesting, you know, and, and had some validity, not the line. I mean, the biggest problem with the line was it was a line, didn't it? Cities are not lines. But if you actually look at what they were trying to do within the, you know, within the, the faces of these two walls that were in a linear pattern, but it was really quite

37:42interesting. It demonstrates a lot of the principles I'm talking about, about densifying and bringing, you know, society and functions up into the vertical dimension, not just office, residential, hotel. But yes, I mean, the Far East, I think is, has been the place that's seen the, the biggest push towards a lot of the things I'm talking about. And if we had to pick a single city, then I would, without a shadow of a doubt, pick Singapore. I mean, Singapore has been doing now for 20, 30 years, what other cities are still talking about and wish that they could do.

38:14Singapore is, at least in a physical architectural sense, the closest I think we've come to a utopia. Physical architectural, because a lot of people would, even in Singapore would dispute that on, on societal grounds and say they don't live in a, in a utopia because society is too restricted, but to visit Singapore, to live in, you know, to work in Singapore and visit, I think what they've done is incredible to walk around and see the green walls and the sky

38:45gardens and the, you know, the, the, the sky bridges and these planes and all this stuff. It's, it's, it's a glimpse into the, into the future. Having said that, you know, Singapore does not project a population growth and major growth urbanization growth anymore. And, you know, China's kind of slowed down others. So maybe the actual future for some of this to happen is, is, is Africa. I mean, if you look at the next, the final 2 billion people we're going to put on this

39:18planet, there's 8.3 billion people now, and then, and we're projected to, to cap out at 10.3 billion. And that population growth is slowing down. So I think it's 2070 will, will, will, will, um, cap out at 10.3 billion. But if you look at the, where that is happening, more than 50% of that growth is going to happen in just seven countries. And I can't remember all seven, but quite a lot of them in Africa. So I think Africa is potentially the next place that we're going to see the same things that

39:52has happened on almost every other continent, this push towards population growth, the growth of cities, urbanization, and therefore the question of how do we grow these cities?

High rise living in Asia

40:04Yeah. Um, you know, no one's going to knock down New York and build this sustainable vertical urbanism pattern I'm talking about, but I think there are still opportunities to develop along those paths in places around the world. I think it's interesting that the vertical urbanism that you're talking about, this sort of high level interconnection seems to correspond to different ideas of social form as well. Obviously, New York is, has this wonderful kind of coda written into the street pattern, which facilitates an individuated urbanism of tall buildings that shoot up.

40:35And it's to do with identity and individualism. Whereas the Far East, where there seems to be to me, um, in places like Singapore, much more idea of the collective as a stronger guiding force, not just the collective, but the notion of a kind of obligation to the collective playing a bigger role. Actually, the, the, the thing that demonstrates that this is amazing. I think this is an amazing statistic. I mean, 80% of people in Singapore live in government built high rise housing. And as an aside, most of the other 20% live in private built high rise housing.

41:09But you put those five words together in any Western country, government built high rise housing, and it spells fucking disaster across the whole of the U S the whole of the UK, large swathes of Europe. It's spelt disaster, but somehow cities like Singapore and you know, and I've had people react against me with this because Singapore is a relatively small city. It's a city in a country. Okay. Well, it's not just Singapore, but, uh, you know, Seoul, South Korea, Hong Kong, many

41:40other cities in Asia have done a similar thing where they've made this transition to high rise living. And some of those places enjoy a higher quality of life than we do in many Western cities. So somehow they've managed to make this jump to a high rise city and high rise living because they've put recognized and put in the infrastructure that's needed to support that. And, and a lot of our infrastructure is at the ground play, you know, it is about use of that, that first couple of stories, but it's also within the building itself at height.

Environmental performance

42:15One of the major justifications, as I understand it for tall buildings is their environmental performance. You've mentioned already sort of city densification, the compact city, and you've also mentioned the problems of a diffuse or spread urbanism with population growth and urbanization. But when you look at a very tall building, and I was recently stood near the bottom of the Shard in London, Renzo Piano's The Shard in London, it strikes me as being impossible. I hope this isn't a libel, but it strikes me as being impossible that a building like

42:47that could measure up environmentally, even in relation to if one to deconstruct it and reassemble it in a, in a smaller mid-rise or low-rise way across the city. Seems wild that that much steel, that much glass, that much aircon could somehow constitute an environmental solution to a problem. How is it framed? How are we to understand the sustainability? And I'm talking very specifically here about the environmental performance of these buildings as an instrument for sustainable architect or sustainable futures, I suppose.

43:21Well, it's all about the lens that you look through in that scenario, whether it's the Shard or, you know, any other tall building. It depends on the, how wide are you looking, you know? And, and, and part of the reason that we're even having this discussion is because there's so much confusion and, and to be quite frank, bullshit around it, you know, even in the profession, you know, even in the, even amongst the firms that are involved in tall buildings, you know, they've not really ended up doing themselves a service by saying, well, I'm building tall,

43:54so I'm saving the planet. The reality is, the reality is, first lens, that a tall building is going to consume more energy to operate and certainly more carbon to build. Yeah, now let me qualify this before your listeners rebel against me, than an equivalent number of low rise buildings. Yeah. And, and, and it's for obvious reasons. It's for obvious reasons.

44:26It, it, it, you know, you're, you're now putting a building materials at height and they have to perform to a set of environmental conditions that you don't have to with the two, three story building, you know, the, the, the impact of wind and, you know, earthquake and all these things, you know, at height is a magnitude above what it would be at the ground. So therefore the embodied energy per square foot of these buildings, this is indisputable, by the way, this is, it's indisputable, would be higher than low rise buildings.

44:59Yeah. And similarly from an operating viewpoint, you know, you don't have an elevator in a three story house and, you know, and, and, and, and all, all these things. So if you only look at it as a building, yeah, as, as a building, then I don't think that a tall building, um, consumes less energy than the equivalent amount of, uh, of low rise buildings, but, but there is a huge other implication to the equivalent amount of low rise

45:32buildings. Yeah. Or mid rise buildings. And the implication is twofold. It is land use and infrastructure. Yeah. So, so the real benefits of tall buildings are about concentrated land use and concentrated infrastructure. Concentrated land use means the city is contained, does not keep spreading horizontally. So more of that precious land is kept for agriculture, recreation, energy generation, and all the other things that we need.

46:04Yeah. But it's also about that concentrated infrastructure. So now we are not needing to run, um, electricity or water or whatever that linear infrastructure is literally miles and miles and miles outside the city because it's concentrated in the city. So it's really about the lens that you look through. If you are only looking at this as the, uh, the building itself, then I think, but the operating energy and the carbon to create it, um, you know, there's a lot of bullshit around that.

46:34It doesn't necessarily, it's not going to be more sustainable, but if you consider it in terms of density, uh, the concentrated vertical growth against horizontal, horizontal dispersed growth, then I think it changes the equation completely. That's a really good and really tight answer.

Mass timber as a game changer

46:52I appreciate that. I wanted to finish on one last question, which is around your more recent work on wood scrapers, mass timber wood scrapers, new constructions and new construction models. How did these new models and these new technologies answer some of the critiques that are leveled at the rather anonymous and homogenous reputation of tall buildings? And I think this is critical. What barriers stand in the way? And I ask that because in the UK context, for example, timber construction over a certain number of stories is impermissible due to fire regulations.

47:24So what models and how can it be made more likely to occur? Yeah. So I'm, I'm a massive advocate for, for mass timber. I think it's, I think it's possibly the biggest game changer in the building industry in my lifetime. Yeah. I think it completely changes the carbon scenario around buildings, you know, up to now, up to now, I mean, you've heard it a million times. The most sustainable building type is one that doesn't need to be built.

47:54You know, it's like, it's kind of, but carbon changes things. And, and I think it's, it's understood, sorry, mass timber changes things. And I think it's well understood now, you know, but, but the way I describe it to my students and my children is, you know, think about the massive amount of energy that it takes to create steel or concrete or whatever it is, you know, to mine the core materials and then fabricate it into the end product. It's a massive amount of energy intensive, an energy intensive process.

48:24Whilst we're doing that and using all that, and you're creating all that carbon, the tree is quietly growing itself as a building material without any of our help, as long as it's got water and soil and, you know, all the other things it needs. It's, it's, it's, it's creating itself as a potential building material, but it's better than that because whilst it's creating itself as a building material or a 20 year cycle or whatever that might be, it is sequestering the carbon out of the atmosphere. So the, so the carbon's already out there, you know, even if we stop producing carbon

48:58right now, we've still got this problem with the carbon that's out there. So steel and concrete and all these other materials, we're producing more carbon. We've got better at that, more efficient, more sustainable, but it's still there. Whereas the tree is producing itself as a building material and it's actually sequestering that carbon out of the atmosphere. 50% of the tree will be carbon. Where has it got that carbon from? From the atmosphere. So, so that's why the scenario around building has changed because if we started to move wholesale towards mass timber and you asked me about limitation, I'll come back to that in a second.

49:31I'm talking about in cities now, not just buildings. We started to build as much of our cities out of mass timber as possible, out of timber. And I think there's a way forward with infrastructure. There's a new bridge just been built on the High Line in, in, in New York a year or two ago that's a timber bridge. You know, we used to build a lot more out of timber. Then it changes the equation because now the more we build out of timber as part of a strategy around sustainable forestry, it has to be sustainable forestry. That's the key thing. You know, it's not just chopping down all the trees.

50:02It's planting more trees, you know, and also not doing it in a, you know, in a, in a homogenous way. We need to do that in terms of variety. Okay. That's a different topic. We could talk about this all day, but, um, but now it's actually helping the environment. So we, we're farming building products. It's like corn or wheat timber for building products, but that's actually helping the environment. So the more that we build and the more of this timber that we need to harvest, the more we're sequestering carbon out of the atmosphere and it changes, and that's why I talk about

50:33it as a game changer. Okay. But of course, that's somewhat utopian. That's somewhat an academic in his ivory tower, just looking at the big picture. There are challenges. Yeah. Um, I think the future of mass timber is a hybrid future, certainly in, in my field, in tall buildings, you know, the reality is that the cross-sectional area of, of any timber, um, member, whether that's a column in, in, in, in the vertical plane or a beam in a horizontal plane would be much bigger than the equivalent in a steel, especially if we're looking at

51:07office and you want this wide span, it just does not make sense to do it all in timber. Cause then the other thing with timber is you've got a, what's called a sacrificial char layer on the outside. So if there's a fire, it can burn and it doesn't affect the structural integrity. So the cross-sectional area of these, of these members are bigger than they would typically be in steel. Therefore your loss of floor area and all those other things. Yeah. So I think the future is hybrid. I think it will be steel and timber predominantly, maybe timber and concrete and for residential

51:39buildings and others, perhaps working together compositely.

Hybrid structural future

51:42But here's the thing. When people think about tall buildings, they think it's all about the vertical structure. It's not 80% of the weight of a tall building is in the floors. It's not in the vertical, it's not in the columns and the, you know, the, the bracing and the core it's in the floors. So if we only replaced the, the, the, the reinforced concrete slabs with CLT with cross laminated timber, that's a massive win for the environment because we, because that's 80% of the materials in the building, the weight of the building.

52:13And, and as we talk about weight, you know, the great thing about mass timber is it's much lighter. Yeah. So then it has a knock on impact positively on foundation. I mean, there's a, there's a project in, in, in Rotterdam in the Netherlands where they built, I think 12 stories of residential in mass timber on top of a shitty 1960s shopping mall. And I don't think they even had to enhance the structure. I'm not exactly sure about that, but there's this shitty 1960s four story shopping mall

52:46and they've extended it 12 stories vertically above with residential in mass timber because it was relatively light to sit on the existing structure or an enhanced existing structure in the mall, which you could not do with almost any other materials. So, so yes, I'm a big advocate for mass timber. There are challenges. Um, but I think there are challenges that, that are being overcome. We can overcome them. And I, I think the more of our cities we build out of mass timber, the better it's, it is for, you know, our continued existence on this planet from a carbon viewpoint.

Concluding remarks

53:20Fantastic. Starring point to finish on. Thank you ever so much, Anthony. It's been really great to hear you talk. It's been a pleasure.

53:27We never know how high we are till we are called to rise. And then if we are true to plan, our statues touch the skies. No, not Cypress Hill, but Emily Dickinson in her poem, We Never Know How High We Are. Neither did the hill, to be fair. Thanks to Anthony for speaking with me. It was a pleasure indeed. Please see the podcast description for links to Anthony at work and on social media. And thanks for listening. Thank you.