The Tall Bank Building Sustainably Considered

In December 2007, a 255.5 ft architectural spire was added to the new Bank of America building at One Bryant Park, finally giving it its intended height of 1,200 ft. This made it the second tallest building, and the tallest glass‐walled skyscraper in New York City. However, its biggest claim to fame is something that is unfortunately not visible in the architectural renderings, or to the passer‐by on the street: it is being touted as the world’s greenest skyscraper.

The Bank of America Tower is the first skyscraper designed to attain a Platinum LEED certification: the ultimate stamp of approval for sustainable construction. The developers, the Durst Organisation, and the architects Cook+Fox are confident their building will achieve this rating. At One Bryant Park, they claim to have bettered their earlier efforts with the Four Times Square building, creating a compendium of best sustainable practices using the technology that exists today.

Exhibitions for a Living World

“There are many ways of working for the needs of underdeveloped and emergent countries. The simplest, most often employed, and probably shabbiest is for the designer to sit in his New York, London, or Stockholm office and to design things to be made in, say, Tanzania. Souvenir-like objects are then manufactured, using native materials and skills, with the pious hope that they will sell in developed countries.”
DESIGN FOR THE REAL WORLD: HUMAN ECOLOGY AND SOCIAL CHANGE, Victor Papanek, 1971.

I returned to this passage in Victor Papanek’s seminal book today, and with good reason. I recently saw an exhibition that has a name so similar, it set off alarms in my head. “Design for a Living World”, an exhibition by the Nature Conservancy, co-curated by Ellen Lupton and Abbott Miller, and designed by Pentagram, opened at the Smithsonian-Cooper Hewitt National Design Museum on the 14 May, 2009.

When The Nature Conservancy, the world’s largest conservation organisation, approached the show’s curators to create an exhibition on “landscape, conservation and sustainability”, the curators hit upon the idea of basing the exhibition on ‘materials’. This in itself is problematic, and undermines the whole exercise.  Just because a material is natural, or certified as sustainable, it does not automatically ensure that any design that uses it will be sustainable in the true sense of the word.