“I think contemporary work environments are about communication. We tried to make interior space a community, “ said architect Christoph Ingenhoven of 1 Bligh Street, a sustainable office tower completed a little over a year ago in Sydney. Ingenhoven translated his idea of community into a building defined by a spectacular 28-story interior atrium capped by a skylight. With interior walls and elevators of glass, every view is a living, bustling cross-section. The atrium acts as natural cooling system while other green features include vacuum tube solar collectors for power and an onsite wastewater recycling system, adding up to a structure that is off the charts for its energy efficiency and low environmental impact.
Ingenhoven, recognized for his groundbreaking integration of progressive sustainability and modernist design, will deliver the keynote lecture on April 11 at Facades + PERFORMANCE, an upcoming conference on high-performance building enclosures sponsored by The Architect’s Newspaper. At the two-day event including a symposium and workshops, experts in the industry will analyze, discuss, and dispute the development, implementation, and maintenance of facades. Registration information available here.
Ingenhoven opened his own office in Düsseldorf in 1985, and his most high-profile project to date may be the Stuttgart train station, a winning competition entry over fifteen years in the making that moves the station underground. Now under construction, the station will be carbon free and net-zero energy, already garnering the project a Holcim Gold Award for sustainable design.
To Ingenhoven, sustainability is part and parcel of modernism. “Modernism is not a style but, rather, an attitude we commit ourselves to because it makes progressive insight, emancipation, authenticity and many other things possible,“ he said in an interview with the German magazine Der Spiegel. “It allows us to feel like we are part of this world in the here and now—and not like people who are permanently nostalgic.”
Registration for Facades + PERFORMANCE is now open! Click here to see a line-up of speakers and workshops.
