The Shadowless Skyscraper

Sustainable buildings bring great advantages especially to those who want to save from energy, gas, lessen carbon emission and more earth saving concerns. More and more people are now aiming for self-sustainable infrastructures just like the architects Herzog and de Meuron who have presented their design for a triangular building in the Porte de Versailles area of Paris, France. The purpose of the triangular design is to prevent structure from casting shadows on adjacent buildings and will eventually allow generating an optimum solar and winding power. This building is not simply just a modern building, but it will help neighbouring structures to have enough space for air and light as the building continues to get higher.

For the city of Paris, the skyscraper question is a question of community quality, but also of cultural identity. The city has long had a skyscraper ban, a building limit of 37 meters, and an officially sanctioned aim of retaining an historic low-rise or "human-scale" built environment. This was, in part, to privilege historic structures, like the Left Bank's Eiffel Tower and the Notre Dame cathedral on Ile de la Cité, to ensure the resonance of these structures is not overshadowed in figurative terms by block-like modern behemoths. Aside from its central design feature, that of casting no shadow, or more precisely, of preserving the daylight-rights of the neighbors, the Paris Triangle will also be optimized for solar-voltaic and wind-power harvesting, making it a potential watershed moment in French green building design. If implemented with not merely current, but 2012-current —the date the building is slated to open for business— state of the art renewable energy technologies, the building could be self-powering and could help to generate clean energy for the Paris energy market, a further reinvention of the role of skyscrapers in a city wary of their social side-effects.

Lots more info about the project on: http://www.igreenspot.com/le-projet-triangle-sustainable-triangular-building-by-herzog-and-de-meuron/