Aesthetically, I like it, too. Performance-wise, comfort-wise, and environmentally speaking, it’s a disaster.
And they didn’t need to design it to act like a huge radiator. Premade thermal breaks for cantilevers like that are widely commercially available. Posting it here was a statement about poorly performing buildings, that’s all.
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Ah. My understanding was that sustainability and efficiency were key parts of the design of the structure.
The IR image doesnt tell much except to show that if you point an IR camera up at a skyscraper the windows you get a nice reflection of the cold sky. Or does it show something else besides?
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That was the intent, but it sounds like the structural engineers weren’t in on the energy conversations.
Here’s a nice short article about it, and what they could’ve done differently:
https://www.buildingscience.com/documents/insights/bsi062-thermal-bridges-redux
Oh, and yes, IR does cool things to windows, but it’s also showing the thermal bridging happening. In the article you’ll see another example and it’s still a poor example, but not nearly as extreme as the Aqua tower.
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I’m not exactly what timescale you had in mind by “eventually,” but I think it’s very likely that (assuming we survive long enough) humans will eventually build towers on the order of 100 km tall or more.
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One other thing to note about this 1,396-foot-tall tower is how few units there are inside. From Teh Wiki:
The finalized plans called for 147 apartments in total: 122 luxury condominium units of one to six bedrooms between floors 34 and 96, and 25 studio units on floors 28 and 29.
The studio units (smallest 350SQF) are being sold as quarters for “the help”. I’m willing to bet that some of the Milords and Miladies upstairs charge their live-in servants market-rate rents for the privilege. I can also easily picture some of those studios being filled with bunk beds.
Apart from the residential units (many of which will be occupied for eight weeks or less every year), five floors are reserved for common-space amenities, many of which will go mostly unused.
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I see. I couldnt see the bleeding in the original picture. Got it.
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Quite. I saw that alright and the rack living, which is getting common now in overheated rental cities, reminds me of how the most profitable streets in London at the turn of the last century were not the fashionable addresses such as Mayfair and Pimlico even if they did have sky high rents but rather the absolute worst slums due to the astronomical overcrowding. I can’t remember the commission that finding came from but iirc the book I saw it in was “the worst street in London”.
I was looking at some data about overcrowding in contemporary Dublin and it’s obviously getting like that.
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I’m sure that the libertarian techlords have got this.
Swap out the initial gullible youth saboteurs, dripping in WP, for full-on QAnon crazies, and let’s see what happens…
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Putting on my planner hat for a moment, this is roughly true in most places. Lower income neighborhoods often have higher buying power than wealthy areas. You can do a quick back of envelope in your area by pulling up a census tract (or equivalent in other countries) and multiplying the average wage by the number of people and divide out the area. You’re left with essentially a dollars per square mile. A working class neighborhood will regularly spit out much larger numbers than a ritzy suburb in the same metro. The big exceptions are high density wealth clusters, like parts of Manhattan and areas with substantial economic related population losses, like parts of Detroit and Cleveland.
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Large corporations focused on growth often skate by without good internal controls because bureaucracy gets in the way of growth. One day, the bill becomes due because it turns out that despite the sheer volume of people involved no one was actually checking anything.
The same can be said of the wealthy. Perhaps moreso because their enablers are legion.
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