Description
At the dawn of industrialization, factories were settled on the banks of bodies of water that was necessary to drive the partly mechanized production process. The invention of the steam engine and then the use of electricity as energy source enabled the development of production sites independent of naturally supplied drive propulsion. Industry’s increasing demand for workers and the lack of means of transport led to locating production facilities near existing settlements, which developed explosively through the influx of population. As Benevolo describes the new developments, in what used to be the green spaces at the town centers – the gardens behind the row houses, the parks of the grand villas and the allotment gardens – new houses or factories were built. This development led to chaotic social and infrastructural conditions that in the end paralyzed the further growth of productive strength. The problems of the industrial town could only be solved through a controlled, thorough separation of living and working areas. It was not by chance that it was entrepreneurs who initiated the trend toward functional separation by creating designs and exemplary projects. These efforts, which at first were only isolated initiatives on the part of individuals (Robert Owen, Ebenezer Howard, Tony Garnier), found their final, programmatic basis in the Athens Charter. The Land Use Ordinance in force and the building laws in effect are still based on the theses of Athens of 1933 and 1943.
With the increasing separation of the different types of areas, there was no longer any need to establish production facilities in the smallest possible space, so that the low-rise building came to be established as the industrial building type, a development that was furthered by the introduction of the assembly line. In spite of the prevailing trends, however, multi-storey buildings for industrial purposes were planned and realized from time to time. For a long time, the main reason for erecting multi-storey buildings was to further develop existing locations, which, due to limited space, could only be done by vertically stacked floors. The current renaissance of the multi-storey building for industrial uses is based on considerations being debated publicly at the moment in two fields, and which go well beyond the boundaries of industrial manufacturing, properly speaking.
CHANGES IN THE CONCEPT OF WORK
The increasing mechanization of production has led to a reassessment of work in industry. In modern production processes, strength and mechanics are less important than the capacity to resolve networked problems intellectually, in order to convert complex processes into an electronic sequence of instructions. This mental effort requires highly-qualified workers. The new term “psychosocial health” gains in significance because it is precisely the highly-qualified workers who ascribe particular importance to the quality of their work environment. Frank Ogden (alias Dr. Tomorrow) wrote in Die Zeit (1/1999): “What is hiding behind the term ‘work’ has already changed so much that only rarely does the word pass my lips. For many, work is already a combination of learning, producing and playing. If people have not yet recognized this, then they have a big surprise coming to them.
The ‘poor’ and the ‘rich’ in the industrial age will be replaced tomorrow by ‘those who know’ and ‘those who do not know.’ Some workplaces will be like my own cyber-cubicle, a houseboat in a port, a ski hut or some other strange dwelling, for new lifestyles will take on wild new forms. If the most valuable capital is intellectual capital, one is best off living where one feels best and can be most creative.” An essential characteristic of quality of life is a mixture of different functions, all of them situated close together. Only the interweaving of the functions allows one to work freely, i.e., to effectively determine one’s working hours, one’s leisure hours, one’s time with the family, and to combine all of these without loss of time.
Optimization of Resources
The problem of resources (CO2 emissions, diminishing resources) is so very important to society because here the solutions must be not just national, but global, if we want to avoid crises in future. The density of development as it is achieved by multi-storey buildings is the basic prerequisite for building that conserves resources. By erecting multi-storey buildings, the consumption of resources for HVAC will be optimized, and through densification traffic and the accompanying toxic emissions will be reduced. It was as a result of these considerations that multi-storey buildings have become popular again.
CONSTITUTIVE ELEMENTS FOR SUSTAINABLE MULTI-STOREY BUILDINGS
Three main requirements will influence the design of multi-storey buildings in future: development of the building as an open system, industrial manufacture of the building, and resource-optimized conditioning.
Open Systems
In future, work processes will be included in general living processes more and more, due to increasing independence from locality, so that a building’s ability to react to a variety of quickly changing requirements is an indispensable prerequisite for functional quality. In future, buildings will be evaluated based on the different functional requirements they can fulfil, or how fast they can be converted for different functional requirements. A flexible building is one that offers a great range of usage possibilities while keeping the invariables, i.e., the unchangeable building components (supporting structure, technical facilities) to a minimum.
It is multi-storey buildings that meet the requirement for flexibility and neutrality with respect to use to a high degree: through vertical stratification, floor areas of varying sizes and of varying shapes can be combined with each other so that sophisticated use concepts can be realized. An important basis for such building designs is the development of a structural approach in which a balance between systematizing and differentiation can be attained. The structural independence of the main structural components – the supporting structure, the external skins, the internal skins, and the building services engineering – represents the conceptual prerequisite necessary for flexible building use.
The individual components are separated out according to their functional requirements, individually optimized, hierarchized in accordance with aspects relating to content, and finally integrated to form the building on the basis of a conceptual structure. The procedure of separating and integrating must be organized in such a way that the whole structure functions better after integration than it would if individual structures alone were added. In an open system developed like this, the individual structures have the degree of freedom that is possible without affecting other systems; thus, for example, the internal room partitioning can be changed without changing the façade and the supporting structure. The development of an open system is therefore a basic conceptual component of sustainable and effective multi-storey buildings.
Systems of varying complexity
Industrial Manufacturing
The building industry is the least mechanized of all the industrial sectors. In future, due simply to the global interconnectedness of manufacturing processes, all buildings will be industrially produced to a large extent in individual parts, and merely assembled at the building site. The separating out of the parts of a building, as described above, into components that are mono-functional to the greatest possible extent is the prerequisite for organizing an industrial manufacturing process. If the individual building components are adapted on the basis of a precise system of order so that even the connecting details of the individual building components are standardized, then an exchange of components is possible and they can be re-used elsewhere (Fig. 2).
Fritz Haller, MAXI steel construction system. Resource-conserving production and sustainable uses of the system components by prefabrication.
Resource-Optimized Conditioning
The starting point for optimizing energy consumption for building HVAC has to be its reduction by passive means. The building’s orientation, thermal insulation, thermal storage volume, compactness, proportion of glass and natural ventilation capability are the parameters that are determined by structural measures. The remaining energy needs for building HVAC should be covered, as far as possible, by regenerative energy in combination with energy-efficient installation engineering. Because of their compactness alone (ratio of the skin area to the conditioned net surface), multi-storey buildings offer the optimum basic prerequisites to be able to develop a resource-saving building design. Moreover, because of the building height and in combination with façade-related measures, multi-storey buildings offer numerous possibilities to achieve natural ventilation. At the same time, due to the building depth (usually reduced), they offer natural lighting possibilities in combination with the external views that are physiologically important. Properly constructed and developed multi-storey buildings can therefore be equipped with energy-efficient HVAC systems.
Shape
New materials will open up new possibilities for the design of multi-storey buildings of the type described above. Thus textile skins, for example, can be implemented as weather protection in such a way that under them, secondary structures that can be minimized because they no longer need to be waterproof can be erected and easily exchanged. Changeable types of glass offer possibilities for different skin definitions with regard to their transparency and their energy permeability, so that the exchange of structural elements with change of use becomes superfluous. Vacuum insulation boards permit optimum thermal insulation with minimum thickness. New HVAC technologies and unlimited interconnectedness of all electric components enable a flexible reaction to different HVAC and user needs. Regenerative energy sources can be used without difficulty by implementing new materials (foils) and also stored (chemical storage). Because of the fact that the skin is no longer a supporting structure in functionally differentiated design concepts, it can be developed into a dynamic façade through the implementation of new materials. However, in spite of new materials, the structural development and thereby the intellectual content that is inherent in a design concept will fundamentally determine the form of the sustainable building, just as it did before.
Summary
Production processes in the industrialized nations will change radically in future. Development, research, and the manufacturing of prototypes will be taken over by highly-qualified workers who will have the most demanding expectations as far as their workplaces and their work environment are concerned. For this reason, inner city production facilities reflecting the corporate image and integrated into interwoven uses will increasingly gain in significance. Not least, the corporate image that buildings seek to present will no longer be superficial, but instead, will relate to content – defined as low consumption of resources and a high degree of flexibility – all of which a building’s external appearance is supposed to bring to expression. New materials will allow the development of new skin designs that by changing dynamically enable optimum internal flexibility with a low number of structural changes. The global interconnectedness of the production process calls for the development of designs for buildings whose structural development allows them to be industrially manufactured, so that easy exchangeability and thus reusability of the components is possible. As the components can be implemented anywhere in the world due to their easy transportability, adapting to regional particularities by a corresponding selection and combination of components must be feasible. An intelligent open system will also be able to do justice to this requirement.
The multi-storey building can do justice to the aims and objectives described above if it carefully conceived, abstaining from all fashionable superficiality. The building developed on this basis is then an intelligent building and therefore a humane one.
Originally published in: Jürgen Adam, Katharina Hausmann, Frank Jüttner, Industrial Buildings: A Design Manual, Birkhäuser, 2004.