Post dissertation meeting

Arash, Suruchi, Ankur, Ming-Wei,
 Maryam, DNC, Ranjit, Phil

Early September 2011: The Dissertations are all complete and handed in, and we had a last meeting with the outgoing MArch STB cohort of 2010-2011. (Two are missing from the photo, Sohar and Fahimeh).
  Feedback was good, and we look forward to meeting the next cohort at the end of the month.
  Between them, our students have gathered good prizes, with awards in the Isover competition, trips to Prague, a model displayed in the Royal Academy, and more recently, shortlistings in the annual CTBUH student competition.

Antony Wood visits exhibition

Antony, DNC, Ankur, Phil, Suruchi

19 July 2011: Antony Wood, who was the member of staff here who created the Tall Buildings design studio, visited the University to be awarded his PhD in Architecture. He has earned this through a distinguished record of publication and service to architecture at the CTBUH. He spent part of the morning with us, viewing the exhibition and finding out how we had run the course this year - 12 months ago he visited us to award our course at Nottingham the first official professional accreditation as a center of Tall Building teaching.
   He met two of our current STB students, Ankur and Suruchi Modi (who won the prizes in London March 2011 and Prague May 2011).
   Antony is on a short trip to England with his entire family, and will be returning to Chicago soon. Immediately after this meeting, we had to take down the exhibition (sadly), but we have kept all the drawings and models in case there's another chance for a show of the work. Phil took off for the airport to spend a couple of weeks at the Venice Tall Buildings Summer School.

Graduation 2011

18 July 2011: The School of the Built Environment had its graduation today..... in the Summer, it is only the undergrad and diploma students graduating. Here is DNC with three of our A-grade Tall Building students from the Feb-June 2010 semester - designing buildings for Leamouth Peninsula.

Rain Luo, Aurelia Li, Ben Minton, DNC

Our MArch STB students will be graduating in December, all being well (good luck with dissertations!)

During the same ceremony, we witnessed the PhD graduation of Dr Antony Wood who started the teaching of Tall Buildings in our department.

 

Vertical Farming lecture

16 July 2011: Prof Dickson Despommier is the leading writer on Vertical Farming. He is on his way to Manchester to view a real adaptive re-use project for a Manchester warehouse. So on Saturday afternoon he dropped in first to Nottingham to deliver his lecture in the Plant Sciences building at the Sutton Bonington Campus.
    It was a full house, and it was very well received and he followed with a seminar for those who wanted to take it further. Every year that we have done tall buildings we have had a selection of students studying vertical farming, or hydroponic culture or aquaponics - we had many this year, for sites in London, Abu Dhabi and Singapore.

AJ Footprint covers our exhibition

http://blog.emap.com/footprint/2011/06/21/nottingham-degree-show/
21 June 2011: The Architects' Journal Footprint page (Hattie Hatman's sustainability blog) is focused on the University of Nottingham end of year show. The are not only covering the Tall Buildings (although that was perhaps the original reason for coming up), so Laura who wrote the article and took the photos has done her best to take it all in. With 1,000 students there is so much to see, and the work of the final years, 3rd and 6th, is of course all displayed for the examiners, its all on show, not curated.
   The work of the 1st, 2nd, 5th yrs and Masters are highly selective so they are easier for the visitor to take in. We in the Tall Buildings unit have done our best to provide examples of sustainable design (the only designs in the entire school to be validated by PHPP), and other units focus on sustainable design. But Laura was disappointed that some of this commitment still did not show in the majority of schemes in other units or years.
   As far as I can see you can subscribe to Hattie's blog without having to be an AK subscriber, so please sign up!

Three of our Persian students, Arash, Soha and Fahimeh discussing the exhibits in our exhibition.

Tall Buildings at the Royal Academy

1 June 2011: DNC writes: A few months ago I emailed the students with information about the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition... and Phil and I are delighted to see that one group took up the opportunity!
   The Summer Exhibition is the largest Open exhibition in the world, and includes architectural drawings and models.
    The Manhattan Sky Podium group (the ones who came first in the public vote at Ecobuild) have entered their design and have their model displayed in the architecture room of the Summer Exhibition. This is Shreela Sharan at the private viewing, and the exhibition opens to the public on 7th June.
royalacademy.org.uk/exhibitions/summer-exhibition-2011/

Tall Building Crit

1 June 2011: We had the final crit of the Tall Buildings projects for London, Abu Dhabi and Singapore.
  We had Ivan Jovanovic (BDSP) and Dirk Krolikowski (RSH) as our main guest reviewers and we booked the Performing Arts Studio in the Trent building.
 Dirk and Ivan were very complimentary about the work on show.





It makes it more of an event to have a theatrical space with raked seating and a large display. Each group showed their video, or did the 10 minute talk through their large panel, and we had 10 mins to reply.

Later in the evening, we got together in Beeston for a celebratory dinner, including some of the students from the first semester Tall Building project.

Isover competition in Prague!

22 May 2011: The UK Team of 9 students, DNc and Phil went to Prague for the Isover world final, accompanied by Tom Foster of Isover UK.

We were royally treated in the Crowne Plaza hotel, north of Prague city centre (near the University campus) and saw 56 presentations from 19 countries (3 from each, except Germany who had 2).
All of our teams did excellent verbal presentations, and Green Canyons came second in the world final.

Isover UK organised the process very well, and the exhibition of 8 of the projects at Ecobuild required a much earlier timeline starting in October with a completion by end of January - after which we had stages that took us to the final in Prague. Some of the other countries hadn't started until April 2011.

  We gave the entire Tall Buildings unit an extra week (until 1st June) for their main project to compensate for these days in Prague. It was a great experience for all, although we would prefer to have come first!

May Crit with Ken

12 May 2011: We had our mid May and were honoured to have a visit from Prof Ken Shuttleworth, designer of the Gherkin, and now chief exec of MAKE. I will write more about this visit, with photos, when I get back from Prague.

Summer Tutorials

5 May '11: We had the first tutorials of the summer term, after the long break. Most people have something now, although some people are still shaking the long Easter - Royal-Wedding sleep out of their eyes. A week to go and we have a crit!

High time in New York

7th April 2011: DNC writes: Some of us have been taking part in a field trip in New York. This is a great experience for anybody, but for someone interested in Tall Buildings, it is a seminal moment of connection with the culture of tall - in its most urbanistic manifestation.
Since I last came in 2005, there have been some new towers, notably, the Hearst, the Bank of America, the NY Times, and the almost complete Gehry tower in Spruce St. There are some startlingly innovative new towers in the Chelsea district near the High Line.

Our group includes all grades from First Year to Masters, and all but one come from international locations. Two of our students on this trip are tall building designers - Masoud who was one of the finalists in the Isover competition, and Yang Yang who is designing a Library and residential tower for Abu Dhabi.

Prominent projects by KPF (Shanghai built,
London is under construction)

I shall try to amend this blog item to add more about the visit, but first I will extend special thanks to KPF (Kohn Pedersen Fox) of Bryant Park, NY, one of the world's leading practices who kindly gave us a tour of the office and a very interesting talk on their Sustainability policies and how they are implemented. Many thanks to Denise, Krista, Gara, Sam (and Bill Pedersen himself) for their generous time.

DNC in the Strawberry Field garden, commemorating John Lennon	The whole group visited the AppleCentre in Fifth Avenue - the Apple Cube behind was replaced entirely shortly after by an even better one!
Times Square, so lively!	View of Columbus Circle through the stretched glass screen of the Time Warner Center

Enjoy this set of 360º panoramic tours of Manhattan!
http://www.airpano.ru/files/Manhattan-New-York-Virtual-Tour/2-2

Some Nottingham questions answered

Manhattan Sky Podium, winners of the Public's Choice for
the Isover 2011 award at Ecobuild

29 Mar '11: We recently had a set of questions from the University of Nottingham Press office, who want to write up the story of the success of our students in achieving high places in the Isover 2011 contest. They asked us a number of questions, so that they can extract some quotations.

Here are our answers in full, jointly written by DNC and Phil:


Q. Nottingham had 7 out of 8 finalists and all 3 of the eventual winning teams - what does this say about the quality of the teaching we offer and the standard of students we have?
A. We run the world’s first dedicated Masters course and qualification focused on Sustainable Tall Building Architecture. With the teaching skills and time commitment we feed into this, we would have been surprised if we had not performed well – for our University to win all three prizes is fantastic. We are extra-happy that all of our students were recognised at some level in the competition – either as finalists or highly commended. We always remember that it is our students who do the work when ink has to be applied to paper, and we get a thrill seeing such excellent designs being produced. We are confident that this will be a great lift for them in their future working careers. It is a great honour for a student from overseas to find themselves representing the United Kingdom in an international competition of such high profile.

Q. Are you confident that the students' designs will stand up to the international competition they will face in May?
A. We apply the Olympian ideal that it is a wonderful experience just to be taking part in such distinguished company - if we win a medal or two that will be a great achievement. The Central European teams, with their longstanding knowledge of Passive House concepts have dominated the Isover competition for years. We have done additional work between March and May to strengthen our entries and give the students the best possible chance. The skyscrapers in the Isover competition are an attempt to define a new standard for Passivhaus at high altitude. They have systems enabling them to operate without boiler rooms, or any burning of fossil fuel - entirely heated by passive gain and by stored solar heat, captured in summer and delivered in winter. We hope that our student’s pedigree of knowledge in tall building design, and the expertise we can offer them, will help give us a winning edge in Prague.

Q. With the High Rise Architecture Studio at Nottingham do you think the future of skyscraper design will come out of Nottingham?
A. We have been teaching high-rise architecture at Nottingham for some nine years now, and over this time the Department of Architecture and Built Environment has gained the reputation as a centre of excellence in the subject internationally. Not only is the subject taught at a Masters level within the department, but increasing is being researched by students at a PhD level. Our students are developing new design strategies, architectural philosophies, facades, components, systems and more for the sustainable skyscrapers of the future.
   In the current era of climate change, energy famine and population growth, sustainability has become a primary design driver, and this applies to all aspects of urban habitat. Glassy air-conditioned developer-led blocks are not our game. ‘Sustainable’ is the first word in the title of our Masters course, and this concept predominates in our studio projects. We view the role of our unit as a ‘design research team’, exploring the difficult challenges architects will face in years to come. This should lead to enlightenment of these future professionals and give them the courage to apply these ideas in their country. We teach students to respond to climatic issues, even in very hot, humid or very cold climates; we expect them to understand urban context, seeing their work as part of the ‘bigger picture’ of the urban habitat, transportation, population and economy. In locations like Singapore and Hong Kong, mixed-use tall buildings are a necessity due to land shortage - and high rise is a normal pattern of living. We expect them to understand local culture, the notions of extended family, privacy, community and religious groupings. We trust that our graduates will take this wide ranging idea of sustainability into their future careers as architects all over the globe. Although we still produce designs the like of which have never been built, the visionary approach in our work has to be the future of tall buildings, and we are seeing many of these concepts appearing in modern examples in Asia, Europe and even in the United States.
   All of our work is archived and publicised on the CTBUH website, and plays its part in opinion-forming in the future design of urban centres. For more information, please see the CTBUH website:

See the Nottingham University final Press release about the Isover competition (not forgetting that there is still another stage to go!)

Ipods shared around

28 Mar '11 : We were pleased to hear from Isover that the SSW team with their Manhattan Sky Podium were the winners of the public vote at Ecobuild 201l.
    We felt that back in early March, the judges were strongly focused on the Passivhaus research so they placed this scheme fourth, but the tutors are delighted that the public recognised the excellent urbanistic response of the Manhattan Sky Podium. This was a valiant effort to retain sun and view lines for the distinguished 80 year old skyscraper immediately to the north of the site. The scheme was a skilful exhibition of structural acrobatics, organising the offices and hotel elements to form a giant outdoor room that would be another wonder of Manhattan. Above that, the building provides for a high residential population enjoying carbon neutral living and the classiest address in the city.
  The team members will win an iPod Touch each.
 (Sam Holt, Shreela Sharan, Willie Yogotama)

First Interim Crit 2011

Design idea for the corniche in Abu Dhabi

17 Mar '11: We are moving into the design phase of the 'Culture Context and Climate' project for 2011 and had our first presentations of the design ideas. We had 100% attendance with every group or individual having a design idea and agenda, and we were glad to see that some were surprisingly far advanced.

Idea for Multi use tower at Blackfriars, London

  We have sites in London, Abu Dhabi and Singapore, with widely varying climatic circumstances - as one of our governing principles is Sustainability, the emphasis is on a socially responsible agenda, not on sculptural shapes.
  The above scheme for Abu Dhabi attempts to discover a form that reflects the bioclimatic necessity of a hot dry climate, respecting traditional living patterns in Middle Eastern high density urban precedents - in this case, Shibam in Hadramaut, Yemen.
  The scheme, right, is a multi use tower for London, far more multi use than ones that have been called that, such as the Shard (mostly offices and a tiny proportion of residential). It looks ahead to the times when sea levels may rise intermittently or even permanently, and a new form of architecture needs to rise above the waters. The tragic events in Japan recently have shown how ever a rich and sophisticated society can have a major refugee problem in the face of massive natural disasters. 

EcoBuild - we've done it!

4 Mar '11: We had seven New York skyscraper designs on show, and three of our teams won the UK prize, and now we look forward to the World final shoot-out in Prague in May. The prize giving was on Weds afternoon 2nd March. More photos later...

You can read a long blog report from one of the judges, Hattie Hartman of the Architects Journal, and she has included the webcam stream of the prize giving.
http://blog.emap.com/footprint/2011/03/03/isover-student-competition-finale/
The final winners were Green Canyons, second were Social Tower Experiment, and third were the Green Ramp. Three of the students in these groups are M. Arch STB registered. Well done!
You can see a list of the shortlisted entries, with hi res images at the 2011 Isover Multi Comfort house site.

Gabriel Golumbeau (Isover), Prof Wolfgang Feist (Passivhaus), Guillermo Guzman
and DNC (University of Nottingham), at Ecobuiild 2011

Passive Skyscraper at EcoBuild

27 Feb '11: Above, The layout of EcoBuild 2011. We have our own stand, at the North west corner of the main hall, conveniently next to the Coffee space. This is the MultiComfort House stand, provided by Isover, and we will have seven of our Passive Skyscraper designs on show.
    These will undoubtedly be the highest building designs of the whole show, in all likelihood the highest ever displayed an any EcoBuild.
   All the Nottingham schemes show the Solar Earth Charging technology  adapted for high rise, as has been researched on the Peveril Solar House.

David Leonard visit

David Leonard

10 Feb '11: We had a visit today from David Leonard, a prominent consultant master planner, who gave a lecture on some of his recent work. He has done some remarkable work, including Stratford City in London, and was part of the team for the recent West Ham proposals for the legacy of the London Olympic Stadium.

Matthew, David and Arham at work
in Broadway Malyan, Singapore

After that, the three main city groups gave a series of presentations, Singapore, Abu Dhabi and London. All groups had done more than enough for the week and we were impressed. We tried to think of some things to improve for next week, they have more to add, but have to fit within their hour of presentation.
We are looking forward to how this work completes in one week's time when Jason Pomeroy visits us.
During the Lunch hour, we had a talk from Matthew, David and Arham from last year's tall building group who spent three months in Singapore as interns in the Broadway Malyan office. Their description of Singapore was vivid and interesting.

Isover reveal the finalists!

8 Feb '11: Isover have now published thumbnails and larger images of the finalists in the Isover 2011 competition. (this still has 2 stages to run).
http://www.multicomforthouse.co.uk/student-competition-2011/shortlist/

All of these are using, to varying extents, interseasonal solar storage to supply heat to heat pumps, using a composition of solar thermal panels and PV panels on the south facade, with thermal stores on the north face or in mechanical floors.

Field trip to London 3 Feb'11 for tall building students

Model of London in the Building Centre

5 Feb '11: We took our new unit of students down to London for a day's visit - seeing the:
- Building Centre exhibitions and model of London, then
- got the Tube to Southwark station and walked north, then saw
- the Blackfriars site, where one group of five are studying for their tower design, then the
- Tate Modern (with the Neo Housing behind it and the proposed Herzog and de Meuron extension) then
- Borough Market, where we had lunch, then
- the Shard under construction at London Bridge, which we were able to get close up to, thanks to a high pedestrian footbridge, then
- walked over London Bridge
- the London Square mile, with the Gherkin, Lloyds, Leadenhall (Cheesegrater) and the Pinnacle, then
- the nearly completed Heron tower, and finally,
- The Broadgate tower with the adjacent SOM designed Exchange place, the building which spans 75m.

Model of the extension to Tate Modern, under construction

Piano's Shard, under construction

Members of the unit gathering together for a group photo with the
Gherkin in the background 

The magical quality of the light and reflections
in the mall of the Broadgate tower.

Tall Building students doing well!

2 Feb '11: The skyscraper designs produced by our Tall Building students have all done very well in the Isover competition. We submitted 9 schemes, and 7 were chosen as finalists, and the remaining 2 were highly commended. Only one other scheme from the UK was included in the total of eight finalists.
   We cannot put the schemes up as illustrations yet, because we have a second and third stage to go to, and therefore more details have to be added. We are not ready to release the full details of the designs.
  Needless to say, we set the students the task of designing the upper residential sections with ZERO heating from any form of burning - no gas, oil or direct electricity! We have devised systems for doing this. At the second stage, we will get engineer colleagues to validate the quantities required.
   We shall be showing these schemes on our model of New York - all nine of our designs - at Ecobuild 1-3 March 2011, Excel Centre in east London, on one of the largest stands of the show near the entrance. Please call in!
  The best three from the UK will be invited to Prague for the final  in May, so at least 2 of our groups will have an invite and a prizes.