High-profile buildings to stress harmony with environment

James Shepherd, Director of Research and Advisory for East and Southwest China at Colliers International

In seven short years, Shanghai has turned green. Several of the city's highest profile projects, including China's tallest building and a new downtown, are now incorporating technology and design that emphasize the efficient use of resources and reduce the impact on health and the environment. From a single green building in China in 2001, the country's enthusiasm for sustainable construction has grown astronomically.

"Today, there are almost 450 green buildings in China and the number is still growing very, very rapidly," says Michelle Bai, China Marketing Director for Johnson Control's Global Energy Solutions division.

There is no doubt that sustainable construction is on the upswing in Shanghai. "The progress in the development of green buildings is really quite amazing," concurs Nellie Cheng. Cheng is the Director of China Operations for the US Green Building Council, an American non-profit organization committed to sustainable design and construction. In 1998, the USGBC introduced LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) to the world, a green building certification system that measures criteria such as water efficiency and indoor environmental quality.

"Awareness in China has increased dramatically," says Cheng. "Many of the developers I work with went from inquiring about green standards to constructing green buildings so quickly. It's been a quantum jump."

According to data from the USGBC, in 2004 Shanghai didn't have a single square meter registered with LEED. This year alone, there are 46 newly registered LEED projects in Shanghai, covering 2.63 million square meters. The city is now home to a total of 201 LEED-registered or certified projects, totaling 9.3 million square meters, and the number continues to grow as local developers embrace eco-friendly development.

Shui On Land was one of the first. Sustainability has been key to the property developer since its flagship Xintiandi project repositioned a shikumen neighborhood into a walkable world-class shopping and leisure destination. The company went on to win China's first LEED Platinum certification, the highest possible, for Hangzhou's Xihu Tiandi, and currently has about 2 million square meters of commercial space under development that has registered for, or received, LEED certification. It's this sustainable strategy that Shui On is carrying into its next major project, The Hub. The development will anchor the emerging Hongqiao Central Business District, and cover a total construction floor area of nearly 400,000 square meters adjacent to the Hongqiao Transportation Hub. It's currently scheduled to be completed in 2013.

"What's unusual about this project is that we're aiming for a dual certificate," explains Bryan Chan, The Hub's Project Director. "Certain parts will get LEED Gold certification, certain parts will get LEED Silver, but we're also applying for China's Three Star certification."
Vertical city

The Ministry of Construction's Green Building Evaluation Standard, similar to LEED but incorporating local factors, is often called the Three Star system for the 1, 2, and 3-star ratings it assigns.

According to Chan, about half of the project will achieve a 3-star rating, with the remainder qualifying for a 2-star rating, making it the biggest project in China to apply for Three Star certification. "It's a pretty aggressive target," says Chan.

One of the tenets of building green is the ability to adapt to the environment. In an urban project like The Hub, that means more than wind turbines and solar panels.

"This is very much a downtown development, and so we're doing different things," says Chan. "We have a rainwater recycling system, we have green roofs to reduce the 'heat island' effect. But people can't see carbon emissions, so part of our goal is to make the integration of these standards practical. We want to be able to achieve a certain energy savings, a certain air quality. It's easy to do things that just achieve a certain certification, but it's important to make them useful."

That holistic sentiment is echoed by Jun Xia. Xia is architectural firm Gensler's Design Principal for the Shanghai Tower, the 632-meter skyscraper that will complete Lujiazui's supertall trio in 2014. "If you laid Shanghai Tower on the ground, it would cover five city blocks," he says. "So you have to think about how the city will work. There's a neighborhood center, a community center, traffic flow, public amenities, a coffee shop on the corner. That's the origin of making the building sustainable, not just applying LEED standards to see how many points we can achieve."

When skyscrapers were first built in the West, they were a celebration of man's triumph over gravity. Now, Xia says, in an age where engineers are comfortable with the mechanical aspects of supertall buildings, the challenge is creating communities in what he calls "a vertical city."

"Shanghai Tower has nine sections, wrapped in the building's outer fa?ade, and each section becomes a virtual community, with 'sky garden' atriums, and amenities for banking, leisure, and food," he explains.

"The design is what moves this from a philosophical approach to the reality of reducing consumption," Xia continues. The building's striking appearance, a transparent "second skin" that wraps around the building, is more than good looks. "The spiral design reduces wind impact by 24 percent," he explains. "That feature alone saved about 32 percent of costly materials we would have needed for a more conventional building."

The double-skin also helps to insulate the building, trapping air between the inner and outer facades, the same idea behind the Thermos flask. Though not a new architectural concept, given the scale of the 121-story building, its inclusion will have a significant impact on the skyscraper's energy savings.

The building's sustainable credentials are, quite literally, its foundation. Driven deep into the ground, PVC tubing for geothermal energy piles is incorporated into Shanghai Tower's structural piles. Interlocked with the structural foundation, the geothermal system uses ground source heat pump technology to regulate the building's temperature by drawing heat from the earth in winter, and transferring heat to the ground in summer.

The full impact of Shanghai Tower's design, which will be the world's second-tallest building upon completion, is impossible to assess just yet, but as Xia points out, a project like this isn't done just for the building's sake. "It will have an impact not just on the neighborhood or the district, or even just Pudong, but on Shanghai and beyond."

Building green
Harbour One is concerned with the air at ground level. The 30-story tower, located on the North Bund, is Shanghai's first office building to receive LEED Gold pre-certification. Kenny Ko, chairman of Shanghai Eastern Harbour, who developed Harbour One, says indoor air quality has been linked to potential productivity and health gains in workplaces. "If we frame the benefits of sustainable buildings in terms of air quality, comfort, and economy, and not in technical terms," he says, "we're more likely to convince our customers that green technologies have a direct impact on their health, happiness, and quality of life."

Of course, money plays a large part as well. Says Nellie Cheng, of the USGBC: "Ten years ago, people thought building green would dramatically increase the cost. In the last five years, green technology has developed quite a bit. Today, the cost of building green is reasonable." Though Ko says the cost of designing and constructing a green building is still higher than of a standard building, the energy savings alone offset the increased investment.

"The combination of the benefits and savings mark the true value of sustainable construction," says Ko. "Lower utility bills and fresher indoor air make a lot of sense."

To that end, commercial buildings like Harbour One and L'Avenue, a new office and retail building in Hongqiao that has also achieved LEED Gold pre-certification, have begun to incorporate green technology. Energy-efficient lighting, low-emissivity glass, and even charging stations for electric powered vehicles, as at Harbour One, are becoming more and more common in China's commercial buildings. Says Ko, "As global energy costs soar, the risk of simply building conventional buildings is increasing. So is the risk of going obsolete. The ideas and concepts of green building have entered the mainstream China market."

According to Nellie Cheng, a surge in demand for green office space from Chinese companies has been a primary motivator for Chinese developers to embrace sustainable development. "The developers are telling me that when they first considered building green, they had multinationals in mind. But Chinese banks and financial companies have grown tremendously, and in the last two to three years, they've begun looking at green buildings as well."

Chris Cuff, the Asia Pacific Executive Director for Corporate Solutions at real estate services firm Colliers International, is seeing the same trend. "More and more of our corporate clients, both domestic and multinational, are including accreditation as a must-have requirement when looking for office space," he says.

Michelle Bai is seeing the effects from the developers side in her work with Johnson Controls. "Before 2008, about 70% of our projects were for multinationals," she says. "In 2008, there was a big change. This year, about 70% our clients will be local developers."

The shift bodes well for China's future sustainable development. "For the developers, the market has now expanded to include domestic companies. Meanwhile, the professional level of designers has risen to the point that when they approach developers, they can say 'I can design something beautiful, but at the same time design something green,'" says Cheng, "That's a very strong message."