Rem Koolhaas’ Seattle Central Library

The media capital of the world has always loved a little one-upmanship amongst publishers.

In 1890, Joseph Pulitzer built the 26-story New York World Building — said to be the tallest office tower at the time — so he could really look down his nose at his publishing rivals. New York being New York, the building’s number of true floors was the subject of exaggeration, envy and editorials. Not too many years passed before rival William Randolph Hearst planned a taller Xanadu for his Journal newspaper, but the Great Depression hit before the building could soar beyond a very luxurious six stories.

More than a century later, Hearst Corp. and other publishing titans are again building Manhattan skyscrapers to flex their corporate muscle. The prize is no longer bragging rights about whose skyscraper is the tallest but rather whose building has the greenest features and the hottest architect.

In 1999 — before “green” was in vogue, it should be noted — Condé Nast Publications Inc. built on the edge of Times Square what many consider New York’s first green skyscraper. The publisher of The New Yorker, Vanity Fair and other glossies picked hometown heroes FXFOWLE Architects to design a glass, granite and steel curtain that looks different from every angle. The 48-story tower features efficient gas-fired absorption chillers and an air delivery system touted to provide 50 percent more fresh air than industry codes.

With the city’s greenest skyscraper looming over The New York Times Co. from across Times Square, the venerable newspaper publisher is building a 53-story building that features the world’s first and only dimmable lighting system and light-catching exterior ceramic tubes that help heat and cool the building throughout the day. The company commissioned Fox & Fowle in addition to Pritzker Architecture Prize winner Renzo Piano to design the project, set for completion in 2007.

Fifteen blocks north, past fellow media giants Reuters and Time Warner, construction crews in April finished Hearst Tower. The building, expected to be the city’s first office tower to earn a Gold rating under the U.S. Green Building Council’s Leadership in Energy & Environmental Design (LEED) Core and Shell system, features a rainwater-collecting roof that will reduce the amount of runoff dumped into the city’s sewer system by 25 percent.

The harvested water flows throughout the lobby’s three-story “Icefall” sculpture and irrigates exterior landscaping. Hearst, publisher of Esquire and Cosmopolitan, hired Norman Foster, a fellow Pritzker winner and English lord, no less, to design the building.

Foster kept Hearst’s six-story Art Deco base and capped it with 40 soaring stories of diagonal steel beams and glass. Foster’s choice of a diagonal structural grid, or “diagrid,” needed 20 percent less steel than a comparable building using conventional framing methods, Hearst officials say. What’s more, the old-meets-new design made even The New York Times’ architecture critic Nicolai Ouroussoff gush.

“This 46-story tower may be the most muscular symbol of corporate self-confidence to rise in New York since the 1960s, when Modernism was in full bloom, and most Americans embraced technological daring as a sure route to social progress,” Ouroussoff wrote in a review of the building.

William McDonough: does his star shine brightly enough to light green building's way ahead?

This wasn’t the case only a few years ago. In 2001, respected architecture critic Christopher Hawthorne made a case for the “green aesthetic” on the pages of Metropolis magazine. His point was that green building was in need of star architects and buildings that made heads and pages turn. Industrial architect William McDonough’s star wasn’t bright enough, Hawthorne reasoned, and name-brand architects such as Peter Eisenman had zero interest in building green.

“To talk to me about sustainability is like talking to me about giving birth,” Eisenman was quoted as saying in the article. “Am I against giving birth? No. But would I like to spend my time doing it? Not really.”

Such dismissals and the rise of architecture’s “star system” could not have been a more distressing trend for the green architecture movement, explained Hawthorne, co-author of “The Green House: New Directions in Sustainable Architecture.”

“To put it plainly, celebrity architects are not green architects,” he added. “And with more and more pages of glossy design magazines given over to breathless coverage of the field’s handful of stars, green design is increasingly forced to fight its battles from the cultural margins.”

Times Square isn’t exactly on the cultural margins, and architecture has changed dramatically in just a few years, says Harrison Fraker, dean of the University of California Berkeley’s College of Design.

Save for The Netherlands’ Rem Koolhaas, England’s Foster and a few others, the world’s most famous architects had been historically reluctant to integrate green design practices into their projects or even promote such practices when they do, Fraker says. The reason was that they perceived that a building’s green attributes overshadowed good design.

Fraker still counts Pritzker winners Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron among the green building detractors. The Dominus Estate winery in California’s Napa Valley is perhaps the Swiss starchitecture team’s best-known project in the United States. Completed in 1998, the linear building is 330 feet long, 82 feet wide and 30 feet high.

In front of the walls, the architects placed gabions, which are wire containers filled with stones, commonly used in river engineering. The basalt rocks, which were quarried from a nearby canyon, act as a thermal barrier that regulates temperatures in the building’s wine cellar, storeroom and fermentation room. The building blends easily into the Mediterranean landscape, but Herzog and de Meuron don’t promote it as “sustainable.”

“They think it’s a tainted term,” Fraker says. “They think that sustainability is part of being a good architect, and they want to be known for designing a good building more than anything.” 

Officials from the Basel, Switzerland-based architecture firm did not respond to an interview request.

Green building’s negative stigma appears to be eroding as part of a “cultural shift,” where the environmental and economic consequences of designing an energy-inefficient building are more widely considered by developers, tenants and architects, Fraker contends.

The exponential growth of the number of projects certified by the U.S. Green Building Council since it launched its LEED (Leadership in Energy & Environmental Design) program in 2002 bears that out; 512 buildings are certified, and another 3,581 are registered under LEED today, up from 38 certified and 634 registered buildings in 2002, according to the Washington, D.C.-based organization. Scores of corporate office towers, museums, libraries and residential buildings have been certified under LEED and comparable green building systems elsewhere in North America, Europe and Asia. When one considers the rising economic and environmental costs of fossil fuels, and the fact that buildings account for 39 percent of total annual energy consumption in the United States, the motivation to build with efficiency becomes clearer.

“The consequences of global warming are real,” Fraker contends. “If we don’t change the way we build over the next 20 to 50 years, we will have a very different world.”

The effect economics is having on the burgeoning green building/starchitect movement cannot be understated, says David Scott, chairman of the Chicago-based Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat.

China's Pearl River Tower, designed by SOM

The past few years have seen a global boom in high-rise building construction. In populous Asian tigers such as China and India, home of a rapidly growing middle class, developers are racing to build up, not out. Tall buildings offer the advantage of urban densification, Scott says, but the concentration of people also presents the opportunity for onsite water recycling and energy conservation through unconventional design.

A growing body of research shows that such efficient construction elements can save building owners and occupants money over time. But Scott says a green design from a starchitect can also pay off in the short term. That is, people are proving willing to pay more to live and work in such buildings.

“You can achieve some premiums with a building’s design that adds value to what people want,” adds Scott, who is also a principal and engineer with Arup, a global design consulting firm headquartered in London. “People want something different in terms of what their buildings look like.”

As technological innovation and imagination challenge the conventional limitations of skyscraper design — and manipulate light and space as never before — Scott says designers, developers and builders must find a consistent way to measure energy use in tall buildings. The Chicago-based council plans to focus on the issue this fall at an international conference, titled “Thinking Outside the Box: Tapered, Tilted, Twisted Towers.”

In perhaps another sign that the green starchitecture movement is hitting its stride, the conference is scheduled to feature architect Ken Yeang, who is widely regarded as the world’s foremost expert on “bioclimatic” skyscrapers.

“The commitment to green used to be among a closed circle of ideological pioneers, but now it’s widely held among the industry,” observes Carole Willis, curator of The Skyscraper Museum, which is hosting a Manhattan exhibit on green skyscrapers through August. “It’s a trend that’s really gripped peoples’ attention.”

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