Stack Effect Guidelines for Tall, Mega Tall and Super Tall Buildings

Simmonds, Peter,Zhu, Rui Council on Tall Building and Urban Habitat Korea 2013 International journal of high-rise buildings Vol.2 No.4

The ASHRAE Technical Committee for Tall Buildings, TC 9.12, has defined a tall building as one whose height is greater than 300 feet (91m). Since the publication of the HVAC Design Guide for Tall Commercial Buildings in 2004, there were only about 300 buildings taller than 200 meters; this number has risen to 600 in 2010 and the prediction 765 buildings taller than 200 meters in 2012. There has also been an introduction of two new classes of tall buildings: ${\bullet}$ Mega tall, which are buildings taller than 300 m, and ${\bullet}$ Super tall, which are buildings taller than 600 m. The effect of ambient air temperature over the height of buildings, especially Mega tall and Super tall buildings. The ambient climatic conditions vary with altitude and these changes in ambient conditions can seriously affect load calculations and performance of super and mega tall buildings. This paper presents revised calculations for stack effect for Tall, Mega Tall and Super tall Buildings.

Tall Buildings as Urban Habitats: A Quantitative Approach for Measuring Positive Social Impacts of Tall Buildings' Lower Public Space

Zhou, Xihui,Ye, Yu,Wang, Zhendong Council on Tall Building and Urban Habitat Korea 2019 International journal of high-rise buildings Vol.8 No.1

After decades of high-speed development, designing tall buildings as critical components of urban habitat, rather than simply standing aloof from their environments, has become an important concern in many Asian cities. Nevertheless, the lack of quantitative understanding cannot support efficient architectural design or urban renewal that targets better place-making. This study attempts to fill the gap by providing a typological approach for measuring the social impact of tall buildings' ground conditions: that is, public space, podiums, and interfaces. The central business districts (CBD) of three Asian cities, Shanghai, Hong Kong, and Singapore, were selected as cases. Typical patterns and categories of lower-level public spaces among the three CBDs were abstracted via typological analyses and field study. The following evaluation is achieved through the analytic hierarchy process (AHP). This quantified approach helps to provide a visualization of high or low positive social impacts of tall buildings' lower-level public spaces among the three cases. This study also helps to suggest a design code for tall buildings aimed at a more human-oriented urban habitat.

Diagrid Systems for Structural Design of Complex-Shaped Tall Buildings

Moon, Kyoung Sun Council on Tall Building and Urban Habitat Korea 2016 International journal of high-rise buildings Vol.5 No.4

Today's architectural design trend based on the recognition of pluralism has led to multiple design directions for all building types including tall buildings. This contemporary design trend has produced many complex-shaped tall buildings, such as twisted, tilted, tapered and freeform towers. Among many different structural systems developed for tall buildings, the diagrid system, with its powerful structural rationale and distinguished aesthetic potential, is one of the most widely used systems for today's tall buildings. This paper studies structural performance of diagrid systems employed for complex-shaped tall buildings. Twisted, tilted, tapered and freeform tall buildings are designed with diagrid structures, and their structural performances are investigated. For the twisted diagrid study, the buildings are twisted up to 3 degrees per floor. In the tilted diagrid study, the angles of tilting range from 0 to 13 degrees. The impact of eccentricity is investigated for gravity as well as lateral loads in tilted towers. In the study of tapered diagrid structures, the angles of tapering range from 0 to 3 degrees. In the study of freeform diagrid structures, lateral stiffness of freeform diagrids is evaluated depending on the degree of fluctuation of free form. The freeform floor plans fluctuate from plus/minus 1.5 meter to plus/minus 4.5 meter boundaries of the original square floor plan. Parametric structural models are generated using appropriate computer programs and the models are exported to structural engineering software for design, analyses and comparative studies.

Conjoined Towers for Livable and Sustainable Vertical Urbanism

Moon, Kyoung Sun,de Oliveira Miranda, Miguel Darcy Council on Tall Building and Urban Habitat Korea 2020 International journal of high-rise buildings Vol.9 No.4

While tall buildings are an essential building type to accommodate an ever-growing urban population, as buildings become taller and taller, many design challenges arise. As floor spaces are repeated vertically, the occupants' natural horizontal circulation-based social interactions are limited. As buildings become ever taller, safe evacuation to the ground level becomes more challenging in emergencies. With respect to safety as well as serviceability, one of the most fundamental design challenges of exceedingly tall buildings is their structural systems that make the physical existence of tall buildings possible. While many different design solutions can be sought to resolve these issues as well as other design challenges of extremely tall buildings, this paper investigates the potential of conjoined towers to create more livable and sustainable vertical environments. Emphasis is placed on the social and structural capabilities of conjoined towers in providing enhanced social interactions and more efficient ultra-tall structures. The related brief history of conjoined towers is presented. To understand their current status, contemporary design practices of conjoined towers are discussed. Lastly, a new concept of superframed conjoined towers developed for exceedingly tall building complexes is introduced through design studies. Though envisioning future tall buildings is challenging, conjoined towers can be among the strong candidates toward more livable and sustainable vertical urbanism.

Complex Power: An Analytical Approach to Measuring the Degree of Urbanity of Urban Building Complexes

Xu, Shuchen,Ye, Yu,Xu, Leiqing Council on Tall Building and Urban Habitat Korea 2017 International journal of high-rise buildings Vol.6 No.2

The importance of designing urban building complexes so that they obtain 'urban' power, rather than become isolated from the surrounding urban context, has been well recognized by both researchers and practitioners. Nevertheless, most current discussions are made from architects' personal experiences and intuition, and lack a quantitative understanding, to which obstacles include an in-depth exploration of the 'urban' power between building complexes and the urban environment. This paper attempts to measure this feature of 'urban', i.e., 'urbanity,' through a new analytical approach derived from the opendata environment. Three measurements that can be easily collected though the Google Maps API and Open Street Map are applied herein to evaluate high or low values of urbanity. Specifically, these are 'metric depth', i.e., the scale of extended public space, 'development density', i.e., density and distribution of point of interests (POIs), and 'type diversity', i.e., diversity of different commercial types. Six cases located in Japan, China and Hong Kong respectively are ranked based on this analytical approach and compared with each other. It shows that Japanese cases, i.e., Osaka Station City and Namba Parks, Osaka, obtained clearly higher values than cases in Shanghai and Hong Kong. On one hand, the insight generated from measuring and explaining 'urban' power would help to assist better implementation of this feature in the design of urban building complexes. On the other hand, this analytical approach can be easily extended to achieve a large-scale measurement and comparison among different urban building complexes, which is also helpful for design practitioners.

Why Tall Buildings? The Potential of Sustainable Technologies in Tall Buildings

Elbakheit, Abdel Rahman Council on Tall Building and Urban Habitat Korea 2012 International journal of high-rise buildings Vol.1 No.2

This paper discusses major strengths of tall buildings that distinguish them as sustainable solutions for the built environment. It sheds light on some of the key attributes of tall buildings as well as materials and technologies that could boost their performance environmentally, economically and technically as well as the natural habitats containing them. Tall buildings are portrait as major successful options for accommodating the ever increasing urban world population, with little negative impact on ecologies and environmental habitats worldwide. The role of tall buildings as 'vertical garden sub-cities' mitigating modern city problems of 'urban heat islands' and sprawling cities is explored. A few building examples as well as city developments are presented which represent the new generation of sustainable tall buildings that are setting trends for future projects incorporating innovations in materials and building systems and designs.

The Core Urban Design Strategies of Tall Building - Low Carbon Community

Liu, Enfang,Fan, Wenli,Pan, Jianing,Li, Jianqiang Council on Tall Building and Urban Habitat Korea 2013 International journal of high-rise buildings Vol.2 No.2

Tall building has some controversial aspects with low carbon city, but it is still a sensible choice for the metropolitan city. This paper aims to develop holistic urban design strategies to minimize impacts on the environment, increase energy efficiency and improve the quality of living in tall building communities by utilizing tall building characteristics. It puts forward the concept of integrated tall building-low carbon community design from the perspective of urban design, and summarizes five core strategies: Temporal state based on energy use, Complementary energy use state based on functions, Spatial state based on regional environment features, Transportation state based on low-carbon lifestyle and Waste utilization state based on tall building characteristics. It also applies the strategies to a practical project. The results show that the proposed urban design strategies are available approaches to mitigate the side effects of tall building on low carbon city.

Foundation Design Practice for Highrise Buildings in Korea

Kim, Sungho,Hong, Seunghyeun,Choi, Yongkyu Council on Tall Building and Urban Habitat Korea 2015 International journal of high-rise buildings Vol.4 No.4

It is common for tall buildings in Korea to have a ground response that is highly sensitive to the behavior of the structure. Therefore, the geology of the ground needs to be carefully assessed and considered in the design process to accurately predict the performance of the foundation system. This paper sets out a systematic design approach and ground investigation methodology for the soil conditions frequently encountered in Korea. Various foundation design methods are introduced along with several case studies conducted in Korea.

The Use of Bracing Systems with MR Dampers in Super Tall Buildings

Aly, Aly Mousaad Council on Tall Building and Urban Habitat Korea 2016 International journal of high-rise buildings Vol.5 No.1

High-rise buildings are increasingly viewed as having both technical and economic advantages, especially in areas of high population density. Increasingly taller buildings are being built worldwide. Increased heights entail increasing flexibility, which can result in serviceability problems associated with significant displacements and accelerations at higher floors. The purpose of this paper is to present the concept of a versatile vibration control technology (MR dampers with bracings) that can be used in super tall buildings. The proposed technology is shown to be effective, from a serviceability point of view, as well as resulting in dramatically reduced design wind loads, thus creating more resilient and sustainable buildings.

A Review and Analysis of the Thermal Exposure in Large Compartment Fire Experiments

Gupta, Vinny,Hidalgo, Juan P.,Lange, David,Cowlard, Adam,Abecassis-Empis, Cecilia,Torero, Jose L. Council on Tall Building and Urban Habitat Korea 2021 International journal of high-rise buildings Vol.10 No.4

Developments in the understanding of fire behaviour for large open-plan spaces typical of tall buildings have been greatly outpaced by the rate at which these buildings are being constructed and their characteristics changed. Numerous high-profile fire-induced failures have highlighted the inadequacy of existing tools and standards for fire engineering when applied to highly-optimised modern tall buildings. With the continued increase in height and complexity of tall buildings, the risk to the occupants from fire-induced structural collapse increases, thus understanding the performance of complex structural systems under fire exposure is imperative. Therefore, an accurate representation of the design fire for open-plan compartments is required for the purposes of design. This will allow for knowledge-driven, quantifiable factors of safety to be used in the design of highly optimised modern tall buildings. In this paper, we review the state-of-the-art experimental research on large open-plan compartment fires from the past three decades. We have assimilated results collected from 37 large-scale compartment fire experiments of the open-plan type conducted from 1993 to 2019, covering a range of compartment and fuel characteristics. Spatial and temporal distributions of the heat fluxes imposed on compartment ceilings are estimated from the data. The complexity of the compartment fire dynamics is highlighted by the large differences in the data collected, which currently complicates the development of engineering tools based on physical models. Despite the large variability, this analysis shows that the orders of magnitude of the thermal exposure are defined by the ratio of flame spread and burnout front velocities (V_S / V_BO), which enables the grouping of open-plan compartment fires into three distinct modes of fire spread. Each mode is found to exhibit a characteristic order of magnitude and temporal distribution of thermal exposure. The results show that the magnitude of the thermal exposure for each mode are not consistent with existing performance-based design models, nevertheless, our analysis offers a new pathway for defining thermal exposure from realistic fire scenarios in large open-plan compartments.