Post Tower Wins CTBUH 10-Year Award

Post Tower, a 163-meter office tower in Bonn, Germany, has received the 10 Year Award from the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat (CTBUH).

The 10 Year Award recognizes proven value and performance in a tall building, across one or more of a wide range of criteria, over a period of 10 years since its completion. This award gives an opportunity to reflect back on buildings that have been completed and operational for at least a decade, and acknowledge those projects which have performed successfully, long after the ribbon-cutting ceremonies have passed.

Completed in 2002, the Post Tower blazed new trails by using technically integrated design to deliver high performance. Its two elliptical volumes, with an atrium between, work together with site and wind orientation, a double-skin, operable façade, and stack ventilation to remove much of the need for mechanical ventilation commonly found in large buildings. This not only allows the building to consume only 75 kilowatt-hours per square meter per year, which is 79 percent less energy than a typical office building of its size; it also makes for pleasant interior sky garden spaces and a more efficient floor plate.

“The Post Tower was an early touchstone for sustainable tower design and has provided a very useful model through its attention to performance,” said Awards Jury Chair Jeanne Gang, founding principal, Studio Gang Architects. “The jury was impressed with the continued monitoring and proof of concept.”

“The Post Tower undoubtedly changes the way we look at sustainable building for the high rise typology,” said Awards juror David Gianotten, managing director, Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA). “The design single-handedly changed the way we look at façade and office design to date. It has become an exemplar sustainable icon in contemporary architecture.”

The other 10 Year Finalists considered for this Award were:

• Taipei 101, Taiwan, China

• Torre Agbar, Barcelona, Spain

• Uptown Munchen, Munich, Germany

• Highlight Towers, Munich, Germany

• Time Warner Center, New York City, United States

• Bloomberg Tower, New York City, United States

• Tower Palace Three, Seoul, South Korea

All award winners, including the 2014 Best Tall Building Winners and Finalists, will be recognized at the CTBUH 13th Annual Awards Symposium, which will take place at the Illinois Institute of Technology, Chicago, on November 6. The symposium will be followed by the Awards Ceremony and Dinner in the iconic Crown Hall, designed by Mies van der Rohe. Click here to see the previously announced 2014 regional Best Tall Building award winners, here to see the 2014 Urban Habitat award winner and finalist, here to see the 2014 Tall Building Innovation Award winner and finalist, and here to see the 2014 Performance Award winner and finalist.

The CTBUH Awards are an independent review of new projects, judged by a panel of industry experts. Projects are recognized for making an extraordinary contribution to the advancement of tall buildings and the urban environment, and for achieving sustainability at the broadest level.

Winners and finalists are featured in the annual CTBUH Awards Book, which is published in conjunction with a major global publisher and distributed internationally each year.

Thanks to a $45 million federal appropriation to the Smithsonian Institution, the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center in Edgewater, Md., has broken ground on what is expected to be one of the most energy-efficient laboratories in the country. The 69,000-sf lab is targeting LEED Gold and is expected to use 37% less energy and emit 37% less carbon dioxide than a similar building.

| May 25, 2011

World’s tallest building now available in smaller size

Emaar Properties teamed up with LEGO to create a miniature version of the Burj Khalifa as part of the LEGO Architecture series. Currently, the LEGO Burj Khalifa is available only in Dubai, but come June 1, 2011, it will be available worldwide.

| May 25, 2011

Developers push Manhattan office construction

Manhattan developers are planning the city's biggest decade of office construction since the 1980s, betting on rising demand for modern space even with tenants unsigned and the availability of financing more limited. More than 25 million sf of projects are under construction or may be built in the next nine years.