Few holidays exist with the sole purpose of confronting a global crisis, but Earth Day, created in 1970, has persisted. Founded by Wisconsin Senator Gaylord Nelson, as a day to educate the population about environmental issues, April 22 has since been adopted as a global celebration. And over the past few years, with an uptick in destructive wildfires, floods, and tornadoes, the need to take extra care of our planet has become more poignant than ever. Luckily, some of the world’s most renowned architects are taking action against climate change with stylish designs that boast net-zero emissions.
A net-zero emissions building is extremely energy-efficient, as it produces enough carbon-free renewable energy to be self-sufficient. And these creatives, with their freshly debuted sustainable buildings around the world, are setting a new gold standard when it comes to net-zero emissions architecture. From San Diego to Copenhagen, the environmentally conscious structures making waves across the world stage are the perfect way to ring in Earth Day, this year.
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Photo: Rasmus Hjortshoj/BIGCopenHill (Copenhagen, Denmark)CopenHill, a collaborative effort between some of the biggest names in architecture—including the Bjarke Ingels Group, SLA, AKT, Lüchinger+Meyer, and MOE and Rambøll—is offering the public a reason to spend the day at a power plant: It’s topped with a ski slope, hiking trail, and climbing wall. The team of architects’ goal was to design and transform the 13,4514-square-foot power plant into a waste-to-energy facility that doubled as an urban recreation center.
Opened in 2019, in Amager, Copenhagen, CopenHill is one of the world’s most sustainable waste-burning plants, omitting no carbon dioxide through its smokestack and operating at 110 percent efficiency. It also provides low-carbon electricity for nearly 600,000 people and district heating.
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Photo: Pat Krupa/Hotel Marcel2/6
Hotel Marcel (New Haven, Connecticut)
Though there are a few exceptions, most brutalist buildings are not new. In fact, they’re several decades old. Case in point: Hotel Marcel, a concrete hotel slated to open on May 12, in New Haven, Connecticut. The hotel may be new, but it’s housed in an iconic brutalist masterpiece, originally designed by the father of the design movement himself: Marcel Breuer. When the Hungarian-born Bauhaus student designed it back in 1970, though, it was the Armstrong Rubber Company’s headquarters. After they moved out, the building remained empty for decades. Eventually, a massive chunk of the building was demolished while the rest began to crumble.
In 2020, however, local developer and architect Bruce Redman Becker offered the storied structure a new lease on life. He bought the property and spent the next two years transforming it (alongside Dutch East Design) into the 165-room Hotel Marcel, paying tribute to the building’s original visionary. The hotel is also highly sustainable, with nine historic suites, a full-service American resident restaurant and bar, a library lounge, and 7,000 square feet of meeting space. It’s a Passive House-certified hotel housed in a net-zero energy building with a LEED Platinum certification.
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Photo: Hufton+Crow4/6
BEEAH Group Headquarters (Sharjah, UAE)
Designed by the late Zaha Hadid, BEEAH Group’s nearly 30,000-square-foot recently debuted headquarters in Sharjah, United Arab Emirates, is the firm’s first net-zero building in its massive portfolio. It may be the first of its kind for Zaha Hadid Architects (ZHA), but in terms of its futuristic aesthetics, this new building fits right in with the rest of the firm’s collection of unique projects around the world. The net-zero elements come into play in several phases, starting with the photovoltaic system, which generates enough power to meet the building’s peak summer energy demand. That’s pretty impressive, considering the punishingly high temperatures in the warmer months. The architects also employed minimal energy to actually build the structure by using mostly recycled construction materials.
Sustainability aside, the project, led by Sara Sheikh Akbari, was greatly inspired by its desert surroundings, which explains the building’s gently curved, almost windswept-looking roofs, which were designed to mimic the appearance of the nearby dunes.
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Photo: Rory Gardiner/National University of Singapore5/6
National University of Singapore
One of the National University of Singapore’s newest buildings, the School of Design & Environment 4 (SDE4), is turning heads for its design and for being the country’s first new-build, net-zero-energy structure. The brainchild of Serie Architects and Multiply Architects, SDE4 was designed to become what the architects describe as “a prototype of sustainable design,” showcasing Singapore’s desire to promote both education and sustainability in Southeast Asia. With its nearly 30,000-square-feet of space, spread across six stories, the new building is well on its way to set an example for the country’s journey toward a more sustainably minded future. It’s also a stylish, sleek building, complete with a plaza, open-air public spaces, workshops, research centers, a cafe, and a library, all in the middle of a lush jungle.
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Rendering: Courtesy of SHoP Architects and BVN6/6
Atlassian Headquarters (Sydney, Australia)
The duo behind Australian software company Atlassian enlisted New York–based firm SHoP Architects and local firm BVN, to design their new Sydney headquarters. The building is expected to transform the city’s already iconic skyline when it opens in 2025. The 600-foot-tall structure that spans 40 floors, will not only fulfill the company’s promise to run on 100 percent renewable energy and operate at net-zero emissions, but it is also going to nab the title of “world’s tallest hybrid building made of timber.” It may be niche, but it is notable, and that’s exactly what the executives behind Atlassian are going for.
NOTE – This article was originally published in Architecturaldigest and can be viewed here
I always was concerned in this subject and still am, thanks for posting.