An Interview with Ulf Meyer, Ingenhoven
By Brian Libby for NEEA's BetterBricks. An excerpt of this interview originally appeared in Sustainable Industries.
Ulf Meyer is an accomplished architectural critic and author who has been published in major newspapers and architectural magazines both in Germany and abroad. He is the editor of ARCH+ journal and serves as the German correspondent for World Architecture. NEEA's BetterBricks caught up with Ulf during a recent visit to Portland to discuss the next wave of green design.
What is your overall approach to designing buildings in the 21st century?
We at Ingenhoven believe form should follow performance. You've probably heard that form follows function, but we feel it's important to go beyond that.
I also believe that nature is the great role model. While human engineering is amazing - nuclear submarines and iPhones - if you think about the wonderful ways your hands and eyes work, for example, it's really amazing. Nature has very efficient forms and great beauty and aesthetics that go hand-in-hand. That's something we aim for.
Your firm has designed numerous buildings around the world with double-skin facades, like RWE Essen in Essen, 1 Blight Street in Sidney, and the Breeze Tower in Osaka. Is this the wave of the future?
I don't know if there's any other firm in the world that has had to deal with all the different sustainability rating systems: Australia and New Zealand, the United States, Japan. We have buildings in all these system rated at the top.
The space between facades acts as a thermal buffer in winter and summer. The first skin is airtight and the second is not. It's similar to how clothes help us adjust to seasons. A shirt will keep us warm in winter and shade us in the summer. It's not just the fabric itself; it creates a layer of air between the clothing and the body.
The other major advantage of double skin is it allows you to have stack ventilation, a chimney effect. It works without any mechanical means. You can get an airflow that will pull the exhaust air and make it disappear into the sky.
Along with double-skin facades, another key to Ingenhoven achieving non-air conditioned buildings seems to be creating intensive stack ventilation effects.
For 1 Blight Street, the building was raised by three floors at the bottom. The raising on stilts allows the public realm to find its way back onto the site. Operable glass louvers will serve as air intake. The air will moves up and pulls the exhausted air from the offices with it.
But in the case of other projects, like the Stuttgart Main Station, you couldn't employ that same stack ventilation strategy because the building is underground. Is it true that the trains themselves help ventilate the space?
The station itself also has an intriguing form where it reaches the surface. Was that a case of bio-mimicry?
The unique shape came about through the famous German engineer Frei Otto. It's a high performance concrete. They use nets and fabrics to weight the concrete and see how they want it to behave. It's shapes that find their own way, just like nature does, a kind of bio-mimicry.
Europe has more stringent rules about offices and daylight. How much does that help efficiency?
One of the contradictory demands of sustainable design is you want light to penetrate your whole room but not summer sun. Having a double skin façade protects the inner façade from these elements.
In Europe, no desk may be further than about seven meters from the façade. In America they use these deep floor plates which are good for real estate investors but not for sustainable design and the occupants access to daylight.
In your lectures, you often suggest there may not even be such a thing as sustainable design. What do you mean?
The more I study this, the more I believe designing buildings in an energy efficient manner is great but it's not enough. If we all saved 20 percent of our energy consumption tomorrow, we'd still be causing a lot of trouble for the planet. I think looking at building performance is not enough. We should look at how our cities are designed. Both booming cities and shrinking cities are inherently unsustainable. This is a bigger issue than what architects deal with.
Even shrinking cities are exploding two-dimensionally. Sprawl has even accelerated in some areas. If we allow this kind of dramatic loss of urban fabric replaced by big boxes and parking lots-we create problems as architects we'll never be able to fix.
In the last 60 years, the U.S. population has doubled, and the urbanized population has tripled. Yet urban density went down dramatically.
If architecture can help to save some of the mess we're in, I think it involves reinventing urban design. All through the 20th century it was done using color markers on paper-residential here, industrial here. Frankly, that no longer works. We have to think in 3D. Urban design is a dead profession. We have planning, but planners are not designers.
You may think this is not a problem in Portland with your Urban Growth Boundary. But living in the Midwest [in Kansas and Nebraska], I can tell you that it is a creeping problem. Portland is the laboratory nationwide but it still has to deal with the same problems.
What can be done to green urban design?
There are a lot of things you could do. You could disallow above-ground parking garages. Why not prohibit one-story buildings altogether? We have restrictions to prohibit the height of tall buildings, but I think prohibiting low buildings should happen instead. Make Portland car free and build more rail lines. Don't slow it down.
I'm sure you familiar with the 2030 Challenge. How would you characterize the best approach or strategies to get to net-zero carbon buildings? What do you think our greatest challenges are to getting there?
Ultimately, I think the rating systems are great but they have their limitations. They're voluntary. Why should sustainable design be a rich man's toy? Why isn't it a prerequisite for everything we do? Why can't we make LEED platinum our code? We have rules for our car performance. Why not for our buildings?
What role does the Integrated Design process play in achieving buildings with high levels of efficiency (+50%)?
The team process and the collaboration is one in the same. Then there's the content of the design, the actual design activities: the goal setting, the give and take. If the opposite of that is designing a building and last minute consulting with the engineer, that's silly. But frankly, I also think that the influence of engineers sometimes is too strong. I have a feeling that architects let design slip into the hands of others.
What is happening in Europe with Deep Energy Renovation? How is Europe addressing the opportunities for energy savings in the existing building stock?
Ultimately there are things that make a building more or less sustainable that are hard to measure. For example nondescript floor plans. Why are lofts attractive? They have load bearing walls, open structure and an open floor plan. It can be something else tomorrow. In Germany we overdesigned our floor plans in the '70s and '80s. The bed can only be here because there's a power outlet there? That's silly. It's unsustainable. We should design less determined floor plates.
What are some projects around the world that represent to you the best in energy efficient and sustainable design?
It's from a competitor. There's a building, the federal environmental agency in Dessau, Germany by sourbroof and hutton. They did everything possible. That could be a big mess. But as you walk into that building, you go, "Ahh. This is nice. Cool, vegetation, wood, color, diffused light." Physically it affects you. It talks to your body.
What about the role of tenants/ building occupants? What needs to change there to make sure buildings that are designed (or undergone deep renovation) maintain savings over time?
In a way you want to change people, but you don't want to be God. A building should be intuitive and work without too much of an explanation. Architecture has a tendency to be authoritarian. Ultimately that's off-putting.
What do you think needs to change in the U.S. to ensure a more sustainable future?
Here's a broad statement. This country needs to develop a better understanding that the abundance of space is what makes this country beautiful and rich. People look around and say, 'We still have Oregon. Portland could be 10 times larger.' But people come here to look at the nothingness. There's beauty and value in both the farmed areas and the unspoiled areas. We don't come here to look at strip malls. If you spoil your abundance, you're screwed economically and socially. The abundance of land is what makes this country great.
What has inspired you in both your career path and your commitment to sustainable design?
Critiquing a building as a journalist is very similar to critiquing a student's works. You want to see qualities and weaknesses. The transition [to designing buildings] wasn't hard. What I like about architecture is it talks about so many aspects outside itself. It talks about ecology, law, climate, politics. Architecture is a political art. Fine art you can avoid. You don't go to the museum. But you are surrounded almost 24/7 by architecture.
What do you see as future energy trends in the sustainable building market? What about future business opportunities?
I hope there is a trend to think of sustainable design more on the urban scale than the object scale. Even if buildings are great performers, if the city fabric doesn't support it, it's still no good. Generally people think growth is good and shrinkage is bad. Why isn't it the other way around? What cities are great? It's New York and San Francisco. They have confinement, a natural topographic confinement. This city doesn't have that, so it needs to have an artificial one. The Berlin wall was awful, but urbanistically it was great.
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