Passive House designers are the Fremen of the architectural world. They look at buildings the same way that Dune’s noble desert tribe thinks about water. For the Fremen, the stillsuit is an essential tool for capturing moisture on a harsh desert world at all costs. For the Passive House designer, designing a building involves sealing it to retain energy and heat at all costs—or rather atlow costs.
So when I asked a Passive House designer for his thoughts about a relatively new and unconventional type of building design, he replied with the kind of concern a water-conscious Fremen might feel looking at a leaky faucet on Arrakis.
Call it the treescraper: It’s a building type that is every bit as fantastical as the giant Shai-Hulud sandworms of Dune. Treescrapers have emerged as a popular typology in speculative architecture, a building scheme that pledges environmental gains and density—but exists mostly on paper. The porosity of these designs upends conventional standards for construction. They look futuristic, maybe so much so that they don’t look like the future of architecture.
One treenscraper project, however—Bosco Verticale, designed for Milan by Stefano Boeri—has just been named the Best Tall Building Worldwide for 2015by the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat. That could be a significant step away from architectural fiction and toward built reality. But it only makes the questions about these projects more urgent: Can they work? Are they green?
[For more of this story, written by Kriston Capps, go to http://www.citylab.com/design/...urban-living/415782/]
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