THE DRAMATISATION OF ‘ECO-TECHNOLOGIES’ IN RECENT HIGH RISE TOWERS
- Publication Type:
- Article
- Issue Date:
- 2007-10-05
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Architects select, specify, organize, integrate and innovate specific technologies. In doing so,
architecture also plays a dramatizing role in concealing or revealing the effects and operations
of selected technologies. This paper addresses the ways in which the architecture of recent
high-rise towers gives theatrical presence to so-called ‘eco-technologies’, as well as the
ambitions and consequences of this dramatization. High-rise towers have become, as Russell
argues ‘the lab benches for sustainable technology innovation’ (1 of 5). Major banks and
corporations such as Commerzbank, Bank of America and even the Guangdong Tobacco
Company, are choosing to invest in high-rise projects using a variety of emergent technologies
to reduce their environmental impact and energy needs. The capital investment made by
corporations in sustainable technologies in high-rise building is, at this stage, not financially
recouped in reduced running costs and is made with other ambitions that necessitate making
those technologies visible in the broader marketplace. This paper will examine the ways in ecotechnologies
are given a dramatic presence in the high-rise tower independently of
requirements for installation and operation and then put to market advantage through strategic
media campaigns. In doing, so the paper more broadly examines the transfer of technology
from ‘thing’ to architectural form to discursive carrier in the marketplace.
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