The latest skyscraper vying for the designation of tallest building in Indonesia looks to give back to mother earth even as it reaches heavenward, harnessing wind through an opening at its peak. Like a blue whale filtering plankton, this SOM-design supertall will generate energy just by keeping wide its massive grill—about 25 percent of the what's needed to power the place, according to the Chicago-based firm. Though the last contender for the tallest man-made structure in the region sought merely to "confuse the wind," that kind of passive-aggressive structural engineering wasn't enough for Pertamina, the state-owned oil and gas company that will call the tower home. Good on them for working on that carbon footprint.
According to SOM, the Pertamina Energy Tower is also "precisely calibrated for Jakarta's proximity to the equator, with a curved facade [to] mitigate solar heat gain throughout the year," and will feature exterior sunshades that should further reduce its energy demands by cutting down on the need for artificial lighting. When it comes to wind generation, hopefully the structure will have an easier go of things than Houston's Hess Tower, which was built with a row of turbines at the top, and was forced to shut them off once they started shedding blades (yikes!) onto the streets below. The tower has a proposed height of approximately 1,740 feet, which, for reference, is about 36 feet shy of One World Trade (with its spire, of course).
The building has a scheduled completion date of 2020, and looks to accommodate up to 20,000 Pertamina employees. By then, the Jakarta skyline will be veritable wild west of extreme verticality, especially if MVRDV's plans for a nutso heap of buildings comes to fruition.
· SOM unveils Indonesian skyscraper that will harness wind power [Dezeen]
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