40 TOITURES PLATES | PAYSAGISTES | REVUE TECHNIQUE LUXEMBOURGEOISE 1 | <strong>2013</strong> Major cities in Australia are expanding while rural populations keep shrinking. Conservatively estimated, Sydney’s number of inhabitants will grow from 4.6 million today to as much as 7 million by 2056; Melbourne’s from 4.1 to 6.8 million, Brisbane’s from 2 to 4 million and Perth’s from 1.7 to 3.4 million. In short, it appears as if each of these cities might have to find a home for up to one million people within the next 20 years. This number corresponds to more than 4000 people per month. Australia’s natural resources, arable land, economic outlook and political stability make such a population increase possible and likely. Ateliers Jean SYDNEY – ONE CENTRAL PARK_ Ateliers Jean Nouvel © Ateliers Jean Nouvel One Central Park near Central Station is one of the developments in Sydney where massive urban growth is already materializing. In addition to addressing the quantitative problems of scale, mass and performance, Ateliers Jean Nouvel’s design for this project also contends that plant life and redirected sunshine can be used in new ways to improve the quality of high rise living. Indeed, with the help of two rather unusual technologies -hydroponics and heliostats- vegetation and daylight can be extended to normally inaccessible places of the building. Hydroponic irrigation systems, for one, make it possible to grow a soil-less vertical veil of vegetation in planters and on walls all the way up to the tower tops. The resulting green facades trap carbon dioxide, emit oxygen, provide energysaving shade and signal the adjacent park at a distance. The heliostats in turn track sunlight and redirect it deep down into the mass of the building or onto overshadowed parklands; they bring solar energy to places that the sun can’t reach. To achieve this, hundreds of glittering reflectors cantilever 42m off the tower top, refining and adapting the technology of remote solar power plants for this inner city neighborhood. One Central Park Towers is a part of Frasers Properties’ redevelopment of the Carlton & United Brewery site in Sydney. From the outset, Foster and Partners from London, UK, have been directing the overall master planning under the widely accepted assumption that Sydney’s population will keep growing and that high rise urban living is a more viable lifestyle than suburban sprawl, because it wastes less energy, less farmland, and less money for infrastructure and transportation. For this reasoning to be consistent, the usually poor energy performance of residential high rises must be optimized and engineered to meet a rating of at least five under the Australian Green Star standards. Equally important is lifting building mass off the ground and concentrating it along Broadway in order to make room for a new public park where there was none before. The Master Plan is based on the conviction that any significant new increase in urban density must also produce a new public space, that such open areas are indispensable decompression chambers, and that their presence and quality is a central concern of every responsible city plan. With these principles as a starting point, two challenges have to be addressed in the design of the One Central Park towers. The primary design challenge is to bring the newly created public green space to existence at an urban scale. Although it is relatively small and hidden, this park is essential for the overall quality and the public acceptance of the development. Because One Central Park is a high rise, it is possible to bring the park up into the sky along its facades and make it visible in the city at a distance. On the South side, the park rises in a sequence of planted plateaus that are scattered like puzzle pieces in randomized patterns across the facades, so that each apartment has not only a balcony, but also its own piece of the park. At the individual scale, this creates pleasant private gardens and at a collective scale, a green urban sculpture. In more than a symbolic way, the building offers a flower to each resident and a bouquet to the city. On the North, East and West sides, the green takes a more continuous veil-like appearance with green walls, continuous planter bands and climbing plants on cables spanning vertically over several floors. The vegetation not only presents a visual message of sustainability, but also delivers on it, because the plants’ shade reduces energy
© Ateliers Jean Nouvel